Mad Men on AMC • Fifth Season Thread

I'm more willing to accept "melodrama", though I really don't think Mad Men has the heightened quality I associate with it.

But the main focus in the UK, just as in the US, is on families and relationships, right?

heightened quality?

Yeah, the focus tends to be on family units in a community. Heightened quality = sweeping emotions and heart-string tugging.

Heightened quality = sweeping emotions and heart-string tugging

And you don't see this in Mad Men? Not with Betty? Not with Pete and his "surburban adventures"? Not with the Don and Megan drama?

So much of Mad Men just screams out to me, "think of me as scenes from a Douglas Sirk film!"

Absolutely not. Melodrama is as much about presentation than it is about plots.

See, I think the exact opposite re: Sirk films.

I'm referring to the presentation and the plot!

At the very least, I don't see how Mad Men does it any differently than other dramas.

Yeah. we'll disagree then, because it doesn't strike me as melodramatic at all.

I don't see what was melodramatic at all about Pete and Rory's encounter tbh.

He was smitten, sure, but only in that "Pete sure is pathetic" way. I don't think the show went to any lengths to raise the stakes about some greater emotional depth to what was happening between them.

Other dramas, such as ...Doctor Who? Battlestar Galactica? The Wire?

It trades in a degree of melodrama. Doctor Who has a lot more of it than the other two, though its certainly there in BSG and, to a much much lesser extent, The Wire.

I don't see what was melodramatic at all about Pete and Rory's encounter tbh.

The way they framed the longing looks in the car window, with the omg, her drawing a heart? Those lingering shots on him looking disatisfied? Classic melodramatic subject matter and presentation!

I guess I'm just reading it wrong though.

Except there were so many levels of ambiguity going on there.

It certainly seems like we're reading it differently.

For Pete, it's all real. For Rory (nope, not gonna learn her character's name), it's something different. Melodrama, for me, has everything at the surface.

Not to say that melodrama can't have depth - Sirk used the tropes of the genre to dig deeper (Wyman and Hudson's break-up at the cottage is presented with the same gravity as the kids buying her the television set), but they are tropes that I don't think Mad Men use all that often (though it does on occasion).

honestly it would help if somebody made a list of say, five or six traits that they identify with soap operas. i'll try:

dramaturgy:
1) intensive seriality. individual shows tend not to have a strong sense of structure unto themselves. there is little strongly marked sense of closure or patterning at the level of the single show.
2) each scene builds to an emotional climax, usually ending on a note of suspension or revelation. this is the basic principle by which i think many people identify "soap operas," and yet to some extent it's how all commercial television works. so distinguishing the soap-opera version of this narrative principle is harder than it looks. but i'd argue that any given 45 minutes of a soap opera contain more "situations" (in the dramaturgical sense) or climaxes than other genres of television drama.
3) like melodramas of yore, soap operas place a heavy emphasis on coincidence and fate; by classical standards, an awful lot is--not UNmotivated, but rather unDERmotivated. (you rarely get something entirely unmotivated, although the appearance of barnabus collins in dark shadows would seem to come kind of close.)
4) duration! soap operas are distinguished for being on the air--or at least, designed to be on the air--for a very long time, with some plot arcs covering an incredible span of real and fictional time. the same might be said of TV shows like cheers or friends but by contrast individual episodes of those shows are much more, albeit contingently, discrete. not as "serial." (although by its last few seasons "friends" was getting more serial in this sense.)

visual style:
soap operas are/were famously shot quasi-live (on tape) with very simple blocking, enormous numbers of repeated setups, uniformly high-key lighting, in sets with somewhat spartan or generic decor. of course, once you get prime-time soaps like dallas this isn't necessarily true. of course the fact that we distinguish those series by calling them "prime time soaps" instead of simply "soaps" (and that this calls more to mind than just a time slot) suggests that the production values and visual style of "soaps" is pretty identifiable.

sensibility:
- in keeping with its heritage in melodrama, soap operas promise a heightened emotionality--all the "situations" serve to provide innumerable opportunities for actors to display intense emotions, or simply for the pathos of the drama to be recognized by the audience. lots of screaming--accusations, revelations--in soap opera.
- also, i'd characterize soap opera as intensely logocentric. each scene is essentially a scene of _talking_--hence the simple, repetitive blocking and framing.

not all of these things are always true of every soap, nor should we expect them to be. and surely mad men resembles the stuff described above, but not everything, certainly not everything at once.

if we work from a family resemblance approach and say that something like 'all my children' is an uncontested soap opera, with (i think) all of the qualities i listed above, we can gauge another show's "soap-ness" by seeing how closely it resembles 'all my children'.....

arrrgh there's the old "sirk really gave melodrama depth" meme. zzzzzzzzz. melodrama is a longstanding, if not always proud tradition in the arts that has furnished a gazillion wonderful works, before and after sirk. just to stick w/ american movies, watch waterloo bridge (taylor/leigh version is best) or back street or the crowd etc. etc.

xpost

that's not to deny sirk his place as a stylist etc., but the whole "the melodrama was waiting for sirk to elevate it" story needs to be taken out back and shot.

anyway mad men.

i only mentioned sirk because he's held up as an "auteur" of the genre, and Weiner has auteurish aspirations.

yeah but i actually disagree with the affirmative statement you are making and what it implies, but anyway. mad men.

And I think it's a bit problematic to compare Mad Men to All My Children, simply because of how they are presented and to whom they are being sold. Mad Men doesn't have internal commercial breaks. The structure of All My Children is designed around internal commercial breaks. The audiences are also different.

my affirmative statement is that that "story" exists and is believed by some people!

i think one argument against mad men being a soap opera is how elliptical it can be -- deliberately avoiding, rather than lingering over, what in a soap-operatic context would be scènes à faire--scenes that the audience would DEMAND to be shown. a couple's divorce, marriage, death, etc.

And I think it's a bit problematic to compare Mad Men to All My Children, simply because of how they are presented and to whom they are being sold. Mad Men doesn't have internal commercial breaks. The structure of All My Children is designed around internal commercial breaks. The audiences are also different.

― sarahell, Thursday, May 24, 2012 2:44 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

huh??? you just compared them! and you found them to be different in certain essential respects! i think you made some points that indicate MM's distance from the traditional soap.

sarahell the comment that irked me was "Sirk used the tropes of the genre to dig deeper" which implies that melodrama typically lacks "depth" in some sense that sirk's films do not, which is a crazy problematic overgeneralization. but anyway, mad men.

my post was in response to this thing you said:

we can gauge another show's "soap-ness" by seeing how closely it resembles 'all my children'.....

xpost

imagine this

me: "is mad men a satirical cartoon? well, let's posit 'the simpsons' as something that everyone would agree is a satirical cartoon and see how mad men compares."
you: "but you can't compare the two! one is satirical and a cartoon, and one is not!"
me: exactly!

i mean if we can't even posit a single show that everybody agrees is a "soap opera" then we may as well stop having this conversation, no?

soap operas are/were famously shot quasi-live (on tape) with very simple blocking, enormous numbers of repeated setups, uniformly high-key lighting, in sets with somewhat spartan or generic decor. of course

a lot of this was related to the fact that they were on 5 days a week.

It's more fair to compare it to a prime time soap in that it's a scripted, taped one-camera, but narratively it's much more interesting that those shows. Those shows didn't really offer much beyond plot points.

a "prime time soap" is already, by most reckonings, a hybrid format.

i still think mad men's ellipticality (sp?) is something that sets it apart from an orthodox soap _and_ most things i would think of as "prime time soaps."

i wonder how matt weiner would answer this question btw

It's more fair to compare it to a prime time soap in that it's a scripted, taped one-camera,

Yes. Add to that: aired once a week, does not have a continuous production schedule (in the off-season there'd be re-runs).

but narratively it's much more interesting that those shows. Those shows didn't really offer much beyond plot points.

interesting to whom? offer much to whom? does the target audience affect the genre?

amateurist: Sirk is the go-to example. This isn't a conversation about Sirk. I agree with you, but don't take the general shorthand that has developed as some sort of all-encompassing statement that elevates his work as differentiated.

This show is also incredibly episodic.

How so?

interesting to whom? offer much to whom?

interesting to me. offer much to anyone who wants more than just plot. Mad Men has ideas ... sometimes they're kind of poorly formed but clearly the writers are trying to say something about relationships, power, office politics, etc. that didn't really happen on Dynasty or Dallas or whatever. Those shows offered archetypes and absolutes, but Mad Men's characterization is more varied.

but does that make it a different genre than Dynasty or Dallas, or just a better show?

I think it does but obviously it's up for debate. Mad Men has more in common with Thirtysomething or Hill Street Blues than with Dynasty imo

the difference between the soap opera and melodrama in formal terms is the difference between the sitcom and comedy in general. both the soap opera and the situation comedy are fixed in place. in these genres, things may happen, minor characters may come and go, events may appear "LIFE CHANGING" from moment to moment, but nothing ever really changes. the box is set and inviolable.

taxi must revolve around that garage, and regardless of whatever large scale life-arcs the various characters might see themselves as enmeshed in, so long as they're on the show, they can't move outside the garage. same is true of mad men. the characters go through all sorts of gyrations, but when the day is done, there they are at SCDP. don is dark and conflicted, peggy is ambitious but frustrated, joan is voluptuous yet lovelorn, roger is drunk and feckless, pete is a fucking dink, and so on.

if this were a real melodrama, don could abandon his family and set sail for brazil. peggy could find a second career as a novelist before settling into a loveless marriage in ohio, before chasing an old flame to san francisco. lane could return to england and oversee the slow dwindling of his once noble family while his children make reckless choices. place, cast and moment could be in constant turmoil. but it's not. mad men is a soap opera, a tiny stage on which the melodrama endlessly recycles itself, rinse and repeat.

the characters go through all sorts of gyrations, but when the day is done, there they are at SCDP.

They didn't start at SCDP!

don is dark and conflicted, peggy is ambitious but frustrated, joan is voluptuous yet lovelorn, roger is drunk and feckless, pete is a fucking dink, and so on.

Don is also charming and confident, peggy is wacky and friendly, joan is more than a body type, etc. etc. You're selling these characters short.

SCDP is Sterling Cooper 2: the Sterlinging