Mad Men

[Dharma]

I kept on thinking that Don was going to pull a gun out of his briefcase and not a wad of cash.

[strawberrylover]

Totally. Me too. I was holding my breath when he was asking his brother all those questions about family, and then saying: "Oh, so you're all alone."

I thought he was going to kill his brother.

[Deleted]

I hate you non-relying-on-torrents people

[Daisy Pusher]

Me three on the "Oh No! He's going to shoot his brother?!?" speculation. I thought that was going to happen and I was pleasantly surprised that they did not resort to that cliche. I am really curious about the reason for the new identity.

I am still thinking the real Don Draper was killed in the war, maybe by Don/Dick, so he faked his own death instead. This has the potential to be so very Tom Ripley.

[cherryvalance]

mrpancake said:

I can't decide how I feel about this show. I feel like it might go the way Heroes did for me, where I was into it at first but lost interest until I just stopped watching. Time will tell, I guess.

But I really want to like it, and I think it has interesting characters and solid acting.

I finally got to watch this show for the first time last night, and I already feel this way. I really want to love it; it's different, it's fresh, it was beautiful to look at, the characters and acting are great, and yet... for whatever reason, I don't know that I'm going to want to come back, which is disappointing as I was so intrigued by it before it hit the air. I so want it to be appointment television for me!

I do plan to watch again, however, and to catch up with what I've missed, but I worry that I'll lose interest in the whole thing, which I think would be unfortunate.

[Deleted]

cherry valance, welcome! Take what I say with a grain of salt because I'm grumpy and hopped on pain meds, but I think this episode was the weakest so far. So definitely check out the earlier ones.

That being said, my enthusiasm for MM is dwindling a bit too.

Love the Draper/Dick Whitman mystery, and seeing Joan in action. Love watching Pete put on his big boy pants and try to affect the speech and mannerisms of adulthood when it obviously doesn't come naturally to him yet. Love Adam Whitman.

But Midge.. "I like being your medicine". Really? I can see how that scene adds to the feeling that Draper's life is becoming too fragmented, but.. ugh.

The episode overall.. yes, white men were in charge, and they were cheating dogs who lied, and women either aided and abetted or sat clueless in the suburbs. I get it. Can we dig a little deeper now? Or just move on?

And where the hell is Sal?

/hopped up and grumpy

[cherryvalance]

Thanks for the welcome, saltpeanut! And it figures-- I finally get to see this show, and it's the weakest episode . Now I definitely have to catch up with the others!

From what I had read/heard about the show so far, I was expecting to see something that did more than scratch the surface of the idea of, again, saltpeanut as you said, "white men were in charge, and they were cheating dogs who lied, and women either aided and abetted or sat clueless in the suburbs." Not that I want a lesson from a TV show. I mean, if I settled in to watch a program that portrayed this kind of American life, in this timeframe, and then beat me over the head with how wrong and unenlightened the time was, I'd puke. But I was expecting something... I don't know, beyond? I'm interested in the fallout of the action and how the characters move in the world, not just that the atmosphere... is. I know it is. Does that make sense?

[Deleted]

Yup, makes sense to me! In some ways, I compare MM to Big Love, because both shows choose to explore anachronistic and overtly patriarchal cultures instead of merely condemning them from a 21st century "enlightened" perspective. I think it's an interesting concept and they do it well, but Big Love does a better job of creating a three-dimensional world instead of only the window dressing.

I don't think MM is shallow by any means, I just think it's so ambitious (tackling the look, and the value system, and the advertising world, and trying to present overt bigotry without either encouraging it or condemning it, and telling good stories on top of it all!), that it might be spreading itself too thin at times. And the stories, in particular, are suffering a little for it.

[strawberrylover]

saltpeanut and cherry valance, I had the same feeling after I saw the first episode. I thought: Is this show trying to be too much? What angle are they trying to approach this story from?

But actually, the charm of the show, I've found, is that it's not focusing as much on 1960 as an era as I thought it would. It's actually becoming quite a bit of a character drama, and I've found I care about the characters not just in the context of the social and cultural environment of that era -- if that makes any sense.

I do wonder about how many seasons AMC is going to shoot for. Because once it gets into season 4, and the Beatles take the British invasion into the US, the 1950s era is officially RIP.

[coley]

I thought I read somewhere that the seasons will move 5 years ahead, so season 2 will be 1965, season 3 will be 1970. If it makes it past season 1...