Sure, Mad Men was bonkers, but did anybody catch Twitter last night? Because while “The Crash” made about as much sense as the useless previews we’re given at the end of every episode, one eye on the television and another on Tweetdeck revealed that the episode had people confused, angry, excited, calling the race card, saying the show had jumped the shark, and I noted more than a few people saying versions of, “I can’t wait to see what the Monday […]
A Girl on Mad Men: That’s Everyone’s Question (“The Crash,” Season 6, Episode 8)
Lately I have been wondering why I like to watch Mad Men. This show infuriates me sometimes, even thrills me occasionally. But the worst is when it bores me. I sometimes don’t go for “the bargain,” as Don calls it during a speed-induced (yup) rave. I don’t go along with all the seduction, all the hip swiveling, all that comic relief. I can think of plenty of mistresses I’ve been unmoved by, I don’t always feel endeared to whatever wacky […]
A Girl on Mad Men: It’s Time to Go Home (S6/E7 “A Man with a Plan”)
You know how, when you’re watching Law and Order: Special Victims Unit (like you do), you can usually tell when the credits are rolling who did it? It’s always the D-list celebrity making a cameo that week. Or, if the guest didn’t do it, she’s the victim, tearfully remembering a gruesome trauma. Either way, for a viewer this sort of tell is a letdown. Once you know what’s coming, how fun it is to watch is never as satisfying as […]
A Guy On Mad Men: Reunited And It Feels So Good? (S6/E6, “For Immediate Release”)
Week after week I find myself wondering who exactly is the worst person on a show full of horrible people. Don is the easy answer, Pete almost equally so. Harry’s insufferable, but not the worst. I don’t know Megan’s mother well enough, but I assume she takes baths in the blood of virgins. Yet somehow I still I don’t think she’s the worst.
A Girl on Mad Men: You Never Fail to Overheat, Do You? (“For Immediate Release,” Season 6, Episode 6)
This was one of those Mad Men episodes where so much happened that I got angry when the stream I was watching cut out. Which is saying, well, something for an episode that comes after the one where MLK dies. The only history we are really dealing with this week is the history of these characters letting business get personal. We begin with a plan thwarted by the impulses and emotions of hypocritical men; prime Mad Men material, in other […]
A Guy Watching Mad Men: You Maniacs, You Blew It Up (S6/E5, “The Flood”)
When Mad Men covers big history, it’s a dual-edged sword: while often touching to see how they face elections, assassinations, and the culture of the day, it can also play as a reenactment at Plymouth Plantation. After forty-two minutes and change about the week of Martin Luther King, Jr’s assassination, I wished I was filling in for recaps on one of the nights in which this show is about issues of bed-and-barroom deceit and betrayal, those of sex, liquor, and […]
A Girl on Mad Men: Tonight We’re Just a Couple of Young Secretaries (S6/E4 “To Have and to Hold”)
When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble.
A Guy Watching Mad Men: Young Hearts Be Free Tonight (S6/E4 “To Have and to Hold”)
For what it’s worth, the lives of the women on Mad Men tend to be more nuanced and interesting than the men on the show, and that’s especially noticeable when the powers that be do things like dedicate more time in each episode to them. We know Don is messed up in the head, we know Pete is a worm, and we know Roger has a lot of being honest with himself he has to do. Joan and Peggy are the two […]