Mad Men on AMC • Fifth Season Thread

also there is really this sense with successful people (admen, doctors, lawyers, etc.) that moving to the 'burbs is somehow something that just _has_ to happen, esp. once you have a child. so many folks i know insisted that they would stay in the city and then, sure enough, moved to winnetka or whatever as soon as they started having (or planning) children. there must be some very real pressure to do this (spoken or most likely unspoken). it adds a ton of hassle in terms of commute and having the mortgage hanging over your head means you can't take a step off of the treadmill.

really missing betty in this episode - she's the character with the most psychological depth. she's a vital hinge in the show and amazingly well acted by january jones. a lot of the characters are too "one note": i don't believe pete and i think the actor is particularly bad but it's probably not his fault that he's as bad as he is. i'm kinda surprised that they let it pass, though.

someone who loves betty and hates pete is watching a different show from me

I haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaate Betty

oh you can hate her but you can believe her. pete is just some thin pastiche and badly acted to boot.

rong
rong
rong

Pete is my new favorite character.

― *tera, Tuesday, March 27, 2012 10:11 PM (Yesterday)

Pretty much. I loved the scenes of him and his commuting buddies.

And yes, he's an excellent actor. Particularly in the last season (and this one too by the looks of things)

pete is the best.

i kinda feel like i totally understand pete. he's slimy and gross, but he's slimy and gross in a way that is incredibly relatable to me

betty is a cipher tbh

there is nothing badly acted about Pete

i think there's a fair bit of bad acting in the show though, it's not just pete.

i still like it.

there must be some very real pressure to do this (spoken or most likely unspoken).

Tbf, a lot of people do it b/c of a belief (real or imagined) in the superiority of the suburban schools. Although I suppose if you're well-off, you might also have the option of sending your kids to private school.

i kind of love betty, kind of hate her. i liked the character a great deal in the fist couple seasons, but after her break w don, i got the feeling that matthew weiner was working through some issues wr2 the way the character was written. she came to seem worse and worse as a person, which would be okay in general, but something in the way it was handled made me feel sympathetic towards what i viewed as "the real betty", as though we were only seeing her through the scrim of weiner's weird hostility.

She's well drawn but heart always sinks a bit when she comes on screen cos I know something depressing is likely to happen soon.

i would not be disappointed if january jones was never in another episode of mad men. i'm sure she'll be back next week tho :/

dunno if we'll see much at all of Betty this season what with January Jones having a kid and the character having little or no function in the show anymore

She was not very good at all in that X-Men flick.

Though I dunno if I blame Jones for that as it's really not her milieu

yeah, but she was horrible in that x-men flick

but she's awesome in mad man.

don't like Pete as a person, looooove Pete as a character and Kartheiser is a virtuoso at playing a huge range of delicate variances on his weaseliness and entitlement

can very happily see no more of Betty than that porch light all year

Betty is the poop in the punchbowl

she was good in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada but that role basically was Betty Draper by any other name

i think there's a problem of register in the show where some of the people are acting natural and others are acting like in the old movies.

the (older) secretary (the one who took the $50 off cooper to buy a hat) was awesome.

jed otm. both about register dissonance and the (older) secretary. while pete is an interesting character and i don't think of kartheiser as a bad actor, necessarily, i'm never convinced that i'm watching/listening to a real human being. i always see the uncomfortable attempt so seem, to deliver. this is certainly in keeping with the character, but not in a way that seems genuine.

this is probably true of the cast in general, though. they all seem like "tv people", with the exception of a few minor characters. naturalism clearly isn't the point. even in that context, though, pete's unnaturalism stands out.

everybody is always putting on an act, everybody is don draper

can you elaborate? perhaps to 450 pages?

http://images.contentreserve.com/ImageType-100/0128-1/%7BA3410374-80FD-457C-888C-568D598C88A7%7DImg100.jpg

you're all crazy. Pete has the natural unease and daily panic of a man who has invested all his energy into pretending he's in control. It's all in his eyes and reactions, he's SO good. And not that I'm biased but Kartheiser was practically a kid when he was in Angel and he nailed the hell out of that too.

I dislike Betty Draper's character which means it's well written enough for me to have a reaction, and I can't stand irl January Jones so it all becomes a convergence of dislike when she's on screen.
She is v pretty, she wears nice sundresses, and she sometimes looks nice when she actually smiles. That is as far as I will go :)

i think jones is kind of crappy actress.

she always seems to play the obvious emotion, and there's rarely a suggestion of conflicted feelings emanating from her body language or countenance. it's all produced by the context.

karthesier may not create a "naturalistic" character (though pete as a construct is plenty plausible) but he is impossibly entertaining and interesting and that's what counts IMO

Footnotes of Mad Men is back in action again: http://madmenunbuttoned.com/

karthesier may not create a "naturalistic" character (though pete as a construct is plenty plausible) but he is impossibly entertaining and interesting and that's what counts IMO

yeah, that i agree with. i don't always enjoy pete's presence as much as you and VG seem to, but kartheiser certainly gives him more layers than jones does betty draper.

Yeah, there's something disheveled or unstable about Pete. But he seems to be doing good, and he's a hard worker. Feels like every time something good happens to him I have to feel happy for him cos things may crumble to pieces at any time.

^^This. On the same tip, loved the whole wtf?-ness of this incident:

http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m1hljuavC31qzoaqio1_500.gif

http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m1hljuavC31qzoaqio1_500.gif

I was hoping he'd have a big swollen nose/bandage for the rest of the episode at least, or some kleenex shoved up his nose.

ya - i'll *start* liking him in a weird way, but then he'll run off and molest an au pair and i'm right back to loathing him more than ever before.

^ the more you watch that, the worse it gets

actually, it's pretty bad to begin with, but it still gets progressively worse despite

That trip and hit nose thing is very Dick Van Dyke gone wrong....

Pete's giraffe secretary!!! I kept asking T. what's wrong with that girl, why don't I like looking at her??

omg

she is pretty

whatever weird crap they pull or do not pull with megan, working with and living with same person is a time bomb. especially when other people are between you in the chain of command. you could already see strong hints of this.

pete's secretary may be an alien, but i have no problem with her plans for the human race