Mad Men on AMC • Fifth Season Thread

Maybe now when I tell ppl i hate birthdays they will just think i'm sexy.

i think he is fundamentally a good person, but struggling under the weight of some severe identity problems and mental problems, which the show has only scratched the surface of.

agree that he's not violent by nature, but this doesn't mean that he lacks the capacity. i do think that don's fundamental identity is very much in question, though. he's shown signs of decency and concern for his fellow man, but also of a kind of creepily adaptable moral vacancy. agree, too, that this isn't terribly unusual, that if don really is a "low level sociopath", then an awful lot of people share the affliction.

it's interesting how more "low-brow" shows will actually make these shifts more baldly ("yeah, we got rid of that character because audiences hated her"/"we decided to make john more likable this season") because they are under less (internal and external) pressure to provide high-minded justifications for their artistic choices.

― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Tuesday, March 27, 2012 3:26 PM (4 minutes ago)

for ex, the distinct nicening of steve carell's michael scott after the first season of the american version of the office. no explanation needed or given.

wrt Don/Peggy, I don't think it really humanized Peggy to him overall

yeah I think this is debatable. what that episode really did was humanize Don for PEGGY. Don spends most of the episode treating her like shit/being a complete asshole, then breaks down, cries, passes out in her lap. Wakes up, tells her to go home, then gets back to work like nothing happened.

actually I had horrible flashbacks to highschool with Don's I Hate Birthdays steez -- I called my friend to wish her a happy birthday and she hung up on me, and wouldn't answer the phone when I tried to call back. I got mad at her the next day, and she was all HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO TELL YOU PEOPLE THAT I HATE BIRTHDAYS FOR YOU TO STOP MAKING A BIG DEAL OUT OF MY BIRTHDAY
and I felt really terrible.

didn't lead to any dom-sexytimes resolution though :/

people who regularly make a super big deal out of HATING STUFF, entirely refusing to engage on any positive level w the HATED THING, and making sure that other people are at all time 100% fully aware of the INTENSE HATE are just the worst

i hate them

At first I was like, yes but we like you and we like that you were born! don't u see?
she didn't see.

The signs were there for Megan to see, though. His children bought him a nice, low-key present and said happy birthday and he was fine with that and not at all insistent on any kind of celebration (beyong going out for cheesecake in lieu of birthday cake), and Peggy warned Megan that he wouldn't like the party. It was her own fault.

Roger ruining the surprise was awes

just have his little line about "pranks" or whatever to acknowledge that it had happened

Nah – when Pete had his giraffe secretary put the fake meeting down I was shouting “c’mon make it believable, Roger’s not THAT dumb” – if they hadn’t shown Roger getting up, then the “prank” line would have read like him smacking Pete for so clumsily trying to pwn him, not him wryly acknowledging “ok Campbell you win this one, quality pwning lil homie”

Also I very much liked that it showed that the harsh punishment consisted of making Roger get up at the same time one day that Pete has to every day, to commute in from his hated suburban lovenest.

I remember him being pretty unpleasantly physical to Bobbie Barrett that time in the restaurant. Like, he didn't just put his hand where it didn't belong, he hurt her. I could see him doing major damage to someone if he had to.

No way, Bobbie was mega into it, not in pain.

I assumed Roger just wouldn't bother cos it was at 6am

“c’mon make it believable, Roger’s not THAT dumb”

i dunno. he obviously once had hella game, but his brain's been pickling for years.

last year i was living in NYC and commuting to Greenwich, CT every day for work. i drove, which was bad enough (~hour commute if traffic was heavy), but ten or twenty times i had to take the train, and even with 2012 trains + scheduling (lulz, this is public transportation we're talking about - trains - probably the same exact technology as in the 60s tbh) it could be a grueling 2+ hour trip door to door.

i think the fact that pete obviously pines to be living in the city again makes him much more sympathetic

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