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Television is different. In TV you don't have to have growth. In TV you can go to the planet of the week, jump through the time gate, have Kirk fall in love with Joan Collins, watch Joan Collins get hit by a bus and leave. Famously on Seinfeld the mantra was "no growth, no hugs," which seems about right. Even on a show like Modern Family which ends each episode with a one minute voice over detailing what the characters "learned" over the previous 22 minutes, essentially they're fibbing because the reset button is pushed and everyone is exactly the same for the very next episode.
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This is why Mad Men is so comforting. In five seasons no one has really changed at all. Don is still moody, introspective and a horn dog. Pete remains a spoiled, ungrateful little shit. Peggy is smart, sassy and insecure. Roger constantly cracks wise to cover his deep misery, angst and depression. We want these characters to stay like this. Its what we're used to and we like it. S5 E1 has been criticised in some quarters for its lack of action and the fact that everyone seems the same. To me this is not a pertinent critique and is applying the standards of one medium, film, to another, television. In fact the opening episode was pretty good. The plot such as it was, was about the surprise party Megan threw for Don's 40th birthday. She scandalised a couple of people by doing a little song and dance number. Don was upset not by the song and dance but by the fact that all sensible people on planet Earth hate parties and only the completely insane enjoy surprise parties or having a party at one's own house.
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I liked the lightness of touch of S5E1 (Harry has become a great comedic staple, seeing Pete's gun again etc.), the gags (Roger's quips and Pete's evil practical joke about the Staten Island Ferry terminal) and the grown up resolution to some of the storylines (the guy with the wallet wasn't a complete asshole). For me the best part of the episode wasn't Megan and Don attempting to ruin the white carpet but the lovely scene between Joan and Lane Pryce the two most human characters at SCDP. Both of them were feeling vulnerable and sad and both had the emotional capacity to comfort one another. Nice.
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A great start to S5. A-.
37 comments:
TV has always been happiest with characters that don't change. It's been a creative assembly line since the beginning. I think people do change, but not necessarily all people or to a degree that's dramatically interesting. And when it comes films or literature, it's hard to think of a decent film or book that doesn't include a major character trying to change. One example: Godfather 1 and 2 has the tremendous character arc of Michael going from decent to devil. That arc is the supporting structure for the two films. Without it the films become hollow.
Cary
Agreed, but when the character is forced to arc just for the sake of it, its utterly pointless and phoney.
In Godfather 1 I wonder if Michael does change very much. He went from a man who killed people in the war to someone who kills his families enemies. I suppose the most evil thing he did was killing Fredo in part II but few of us would complain about the killing of Carlo in part I.
Well, there's that line about a man at twenty who isn't a socialist has no heart and a man at fifty who isn't a conservative has no brain, but that's a pretty long arc for a TV show. And if we want characters that we like and that change then they'd probably have to start off as characters we don't like and very few execs would green light that.
This is why the ending to "The Sopranos" was so good and even though people will scream I bet "Mad Men" goes out in a similar way.
John
Yeah although I think the transition from young conservative to middle aged socialist is more interesting.
I liked that bit in Adaptation where one of the Kaufman twins asks Robert McKee if its possible to write a story about someone who doesnt change but just is and McKee (Brian Cox) goes mental and gives him an earfull.
I don't know. I found my attention drifting a bit on this first episode.
I think I did change as I've watched the show go on though, from someone who didn't like the show to someone who did like it a bi, and now to someone who doesn't again. I do agree about the Lane and Joan scene, and their separate scenes as well.
Whether or not you like parties, Don was a jerk, as he usually is, and I know we're supposed to find his ability to get away with being a jerk interesting, but I don't. I have never found him or his backstory all that fascinating.
The guy who plays Roger seems to be quite a gifted physical actor, as, does the woman who plays Megan, now I think about it. Roger is the kind of villain you can sympathize with, but Don is not.
Seana
I've read a few reviews where people have said that the show was too slow to hold their attention through the long ad breaks. I was fortunate to watch it without ads on a free server so I didnt have this problem, this would also the case on iTunes.
I've never really been convinced by Don either or Jon Hamm. I've always thought his appeal was a womans thing. I do like the supporting cast though. I wish they'd bring back the condescending guy with the beard and Sal.
I have never found Don that appealing physically, so I don't really buy the way women fall into heaps of unresisting mush for him, which may be part of the problem.
I think it was just the parts where they were talking about the actual business of the company that I found myself wandering.
Yeah, bring back Sal. Sal would make the show.
Yes, I watched it with iTunes and I think ad breaks would have been a big problem. As ot was, I thought it was very good.
Don's backstory was great the first couple of season's, the whole idea of the attractive, sophisticated but fake front went so well with advertising. It is getting a little long in the tooth, though.
But I still like the show. Watching a few episodes of Pan Am really drove it home.
Oh, I'm still going to watch it. But then, I watched all of Downton Abbey too.
Oh, and I do like the way SCDP are going to get into Civil Rights through no good intentions of their own.
John, that was good, but what was it with the weird dramatic music at the end?
I thought the "And they call US savages," at the beginning was a bit unlikely. Which has been my general complaint about the shwo all along. Sometimes they just don't get the tone of the era right.
"They call US savages," was pretty much right from Malcolm X, wasn't it? It was certainly heavy-handed in the moment and didn't work and the scene didn't need it.
I have no idea what that weird music was.
And was there any way to tell exactly when the episode was taking place? Someone mentioned riots, so was it 1967 or 68?
I almost feel the show should have stayed in the early 60s.
I don't think Michael changes very much through I and II. He just uses the same skillset in the tri-state area that he used to win the Navy Cross in the Pacific theatre. I don't think Kay is horrified to see her man change from good to bad but really to see him revealed as the man he always was, a stone cold killer.
Michael changes much more from II to III. But the less said of III, the better. Interesting story, lousy execution (no pun intended)
This is the problem with it, though, John. It's very much as though the writers have read a whole lot about the period, but didn't live it. This isn't the kind of comment these very polite, you might even say church-going sort of African-Americans would have said aloud in a swanky address like SCDP. Not that they wouldn't have thought it.
I am not sure what year it is supposed to be either.
In re: Werner Herzog
In a moment of inspired casting, Werner Herzog is playing the villain in One Shot.
Now, the casting of Tom Cruise as 6'5", 250 pound Jack Reacher is a different story ....
Brian O
John, Seana
I think its supposed to be 1966.
Lane is going to be very excited when England win the World Cup.
The savages line was flat, and sometimes Pete's lines are pretty unbelievable but I thought the emotional tone of the episode was just about right.
Brian
Its going to be tricky for me. I normally never miss a Werner Herzog film but I've never managed to watch a Tom Cruise film all the way through.
They get so many details of the era right in terms of style and music, etc., but there have always been these weird anachronisms when it comes to what people would actually say.
The show has to be less than nine months after the last one in time, as Joan's baby is so new, even though Don and Megan seemed to have proceeded very quickly in that case.
Herzog will at least have the funds for his next film from this one.
Oh yeah, the baby... So what riots is he talking about?
This article about the language in the show is interesting:
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/03/the-foreign-language-of-mad-men/254668/
Thanks, John. That confirms my sense of things. I think the difference between getting it wrong on Downton Abbey and Mad Men is that there are still people around who would have heard how it sounded in that era.
The other thing I liked was the aside "it can be hard to be enveloped in a world so deliberately off-putting".
Not that that seems to stop anyone but me.
Okay, I'm not sure about this, what do you think - moving into the later 60s is a problem because that's when these characters, and the advertising industry, does have to face up to the idea of changing.
In the 50s and early 60s the advertising industry's mandate was simeple - sell the American Dream (TM), a very suburban, white, male-dominated lifestyle. The show nailed that perfectly.
By the mid to late 60s the dominant mood of the time becomes a questioning of the lack of inclusiveness in this dream - some people who have a dream can't get in on the one the advertising industry is selling.
So, a lack of change in the characters is going to start to stand out quite a bit and the small nods to the world outside their bubble will now seem too deliberate and, frankly, too little. While it was possible (and even fun) to see these characters and simply living out their destiny in the early 60s, by later in the decade they have to work pretty hard to ignore the outside world.
So, I guess what I mean is they are now going to be way too enveloped in a world that is way too deliberately off-putting.
Maybe their self-awareness will save them, but that would be a very different show.
I don't know enough about the behind the scenes thought of the show to know if they had an endpoint in mind from the beginning or not.
I think part of the appeal of the show is that it makes the fifties look cool in a way it never seemed to the children of those people, meaning people like me. It's a reevaluation of that era. Although it is its own tiny upscale microcosm, a lot of people with white collar jobs lived some lesser version of this life, with the drinking, the parties, the three martini lunches.My parents did, though it was the California version of it.
Don's attractiveness (to some) has to do with the fact that he looks good in a suit and with short hair. How he would weather the change to late sixties fashion is a little scary to think about.
Yeah, I read an artucle that said the main appeal of the show to people our age was it gave us a chance to forgive our parents. At least it gave us a chance to see our parents as part of their time (in my case it was my uncle who lived like that with the suits and the drinking and the white collar job and the divorce - I always find it odd when people tell my cousin she would love the show because it's so much like her life. She never watches it because it's so much like her life)
Don is also a little attractive because he's not really one of them, with his whole secret identity and all that. That's going to be the tricky part going forward.
I doubt there was much of an end in mind, very few people expected the show to be this successful, but I'm sure someone is thinking about it now.
Just watched the 1968 film, Petulia. I wanted a happy ending but was just as happy I didn't get one. No one really got what they wanted but got on with it anyway. And what a trip to see Big Brother/Holding Co at a black tie hospital benefit. Also a brief glimpse of the Grateful Dead complete with psychedelic light show.
John, Seana
For some reason last night I got sucked into a mini Twilight Zone addiction last night on youtube.
There's a great one called A Stop At Willoughby about an advertising exec at a white shoe firm, taking the train to Westchester, with a shrewish wife and how much he hates everything and is filled with angst. He finally kills himself at the end. Its pretty good.
I dont know what bearing it has but Rod Serling really knew about suffering having seen horrible things in the Phillipines campaign in WW2.
Anon
Its fascinating to watch Blow Up from the same period. Low and behold there's Jimmy Page and the Yardbirds at a local club.
And Woody Allen's "What's Up Tiger Lilly" has John Sebastien and the Lovin' Spoonful.
Here's another, "Mad Men as literature" article:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/9135045/Mad-Men-the-most-literary-show-on-TV.html
A Stop at Willoughby is pretty good. It would be nice to someone on Mad Men mention it.
John
From that Telegraph article I think its smart that their two touchstones are John Cheever and Richard Yates. I think I blogged once before about that Cheever story of the abused secretary on the train which has a very Mad Men vibe. And arent most of the Yates stories set in either Yonkers or Greenwich Connecticut?
Well, I have to say that given the opening credits, I always assumed that the end of Mad Men would be the end of Don Draper,in the same kind of way that A Stop at Willoughby ends. What I wonder is whether the show's success makes that impossible now.
That was a good article, John, but I think it points to the problem with the show. If television is not film, it definitely is not literature. There's a "too clever by half", self-conscious feel to the show that grates on me.
Yeah, there was another article I saw on the weekend about Mad Men and how TV is the new literature replacing books and, of course, TV have maybe five shows that always get used in that argument. Imagine if there had on,y been five really good books in the last ten years?
Anyway, HBO is taking on Mad Men by turning The Corrections into a series, so books aren't dead yet.
John
The humour in The Corrections seems a little broad for HBO.
Don't get me wrong, I love TV. But I don't know that it has to pretend to be something it isn't to be at it's best.
I, uh, happen to know that Franzen has been involved in writing the script for The Corrections. But I don't know if this will be a plus or a minus. Sometimes you need a step back for this kind of thing.
Seana
And speaking of HBO Game of Thrones starts this weekend, which isnt to everyone's taste I know, but I thought it was great. This one will follow book 2 but thats a book I read 15 years ago or so so I remember virtually nothing about it.
I haven't made the commitment to Game of Thrones in any form yet, but that's just lack of time, not a statement.
I actually was really pleased when one of my artist friends wandered in today and was all jazzed to start reading Pillars of the Earth because she'd happened upon it at her parents. I don't recall that she'd even been in buying books before. My kind of customer.
NIce r/v...I watched it late last night and did have the feeling for a few minutes of hang on, what year is this? Then I noticed a sign in the window of the lovely chaps throwing water bombs 'Goldwater 1968'...then how long was Joan up the duff for?
Ok it IS tv I figured so they can get away with some time jumps and radical character changes...just.
Then again the the show did end mid 60's....it will be interesting to see Don don bell bottoms if Se05 spans a long enough time period...
Anyway I ramble...I agree..all in all I liked it and felt it tied together some of the characters in a believable way.
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