Mad Men on AMC • Fifth Season Thread

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

goole: This is true...

I'm not sure I'd diagnose Don as a low-level sociopath. I certainly wouldn't call him emotionless. Being a 'whorechild' and growing up in the circumstances he did, he'll always feel like a fraud to some degree. I'm not sure if it's as much about "being found out" as much as it is revealing who he is, even if he doesn't quite know that. The early seasons really played up that "American Dream" business in that here's a guy who came from nothing and then he saw an opportunity and just took it, but the consequences for him, psychologically, have never really gone away. He has an innate ability to tap into something that people respond to, and he knows how to work a room and play 'the game', but all that bullshit artifice strains him. His character through the whole series has been this push-pull between what he believes is expected and 'should' be (that very particular American dream-lifestyle) and how he feels he is. He gets unnecessarily shitty when he feels somebody is out-of-line with the lifestyle as he thinks it should be, even if he doesn't quite belief it. He's built up a lot of defences, which is why it was really awkward and horrible to see him fall off the deep end with the drinking last season, or see him walking into work hand-in-hand with his new wife in this episode. It was especially horrible when he was confronted with having work people in his home, something that Megan didn't understand at all.

I also think he has a deep understanding and love for Peggy, and he's probably shitty to her in a boss-way because either a.) he thinks its good for her or b.) he hates that he lets his guard down with someone and overcompensates.

I'm really interested to see how the Megan relationship will work. At the end of last season, I wasn't the only going "oh god Don" when he chose the young, beautiful secretary over the (slightly) more age-appropriate marketing psychologist who seemed to have a really good understanding of him as a person (but she also clashed with his ideals of what a mother should be, thereby bumping up against his view on what 'family' life should be). He seems to be trying though, and being honest with her about Dick Whitman and all that could lead to some interesting places. He's making an effort to be more open, but is also not entirely comfortable with it. I think she could be good for him in a way. She's very naive though. Pare is great at it though. She gets that balance of naive youth and self-assured right. So far, at least. We'll see where the character goes.

I have more to say on Pete, but maybe later. I will just say that I thought Kartheiser was terrible on Angel, and not very good in the woeful Crime and Punishment in Suburbia, but he's very good here.

it's funny how don is really the villain in this show, but all the blame for his villainy is heaped, both by the writers and the fans, on those around him, especially betty. it's good to be (or look like) the king.

no between season shenanigans

Dunno, sort of think between-season shenanigans are kinda of essential now they've made Sally a main character and they need the plot to advance at more or less the same pace as the actress is ageing. Otherwise you get the problem they had with Walt in Lost. And it stretches credibility that Don would keep the Dick Whitman thing quiet after doing that ruined his first marriage. Really most of this double-header was about showing us what's happened to the characters and how they've changed in the intervening year or so.

I think Megan is meant to be a lot more intelligent and self-assured than people give her credit for, and she's just seen as the airhead secretary that married the boss. There's a moment early on in S4 when we've barely seen Megan, and people are talking about Peggy's new writer friends and Megan just goes "she's kind of pretentious", when casually calling people out on their pretensions is something that just never happens in Mad Men.

I love with Pete, how he's the conscientious worker who's really good and probably keeping the company afloat AND he's a liberal and at the same time he's clearly an arsehole and a slimeball.

The best Pete moment is when his father in law calls him an asshole after being screwed over by him, and Pete just grins, gives a shrug and carries on making cocktails.

I've liked Pete for ages, yes he's a dick, but he tries so hard to be better at life. Think him and trudy's dance at roger's wedding was all time classic. They do have the best marriage in the show too, fwiw in this show.

isnt it more pete trying so hard to be better at work moreso than life though - likewise his supposed liberalism is one part greater generational awareness than his peers and nine parts his figuring our which are the newer and better marketing demographics the company needs to be aiming at. unless i'm forgetting something everything "good" about pete is still filtered through the prism of his professional vanity and desire for oneupmanship rather than any real empathy

also his and trudy's marriage is pitiful!

Poor Pete is always trying to live up to somebody. Usually somebody rich and waspy.

The only reason Pete and Trudy have the best marriage in the show is because Pete hasn't been caught out about the two or three other women he's fucked.

And y'know that thing with the secret lovechild conceived a few days before his wedding.