Mad Men on AMC • Fifth Season Thread

oops. scratch "in the summary."

This show is the best it's ever been imho

Holy shit @ so much of that episode but Ginsburg in particular, goddamn that was good. "Are there others like you?"

Also can I just say it find it weird how much of this thread is dedicated to these super moralizing posts about how awful character [x] is

solitary posts etc

eh my loathing of Megan is more an aesthetic judgment than a moral one fwiw. those teeth! ugh

i totally fell for Megan when she made the comment about her teeth last season

looks-wise, mind. I've liked her character this season though.

I'm not even

anyone know if the two-part premiere counted as two of the 13 episodes, btw?

yes

Lolled at the line that was like "it's always smooth sailing with LSD!

cool. cheers.

http://blogs.indiewire.com/pressplay/video-how-to-make-those-next-on-mad-men-preview-clips-less-useless

you guys are savages

interesting jewish-theme triptych w/ peggy's boyfriend making the 'bracha' crack, jane sterling speaking yiddish while under influence of LSD and ginsburg telling peggy about the holocaust. weiner kinda much much better writing at more secular jewish figures than ppl like ginsburg and his father.

This show is the best it's ever been imho

― A Little Princess btw (s1ocki), Tuesday, April 24, 2012 3:52 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

sometimes i think so, other times i wish it would be more about, you know, advertising. am i wrong in imagining that the first season devoted more "A" plotlines to actual stuff related to the business?

Isn't it a foregone conclusion that Joan's husband is going to die in Vietnam? (obv not a major character, but still)
--Waterloo? Oh, we've sunsetted that. (Tarfumes The Escape Goat)

Why would anyone care if he did?

obv not anymore

interesting jewish-theme triptych w/ peggy's boyfriend making the 'bracha' crack, jane sterling speaking yiddish while under influence of LSD and ginsburg telling peggy about the holocaust. weiner kinda much much better writing at more secular jewish figures than ppl like ginsburg and his father.

― Mordy, Tuesday, April 24, 2012 8:50 PM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

on that note, i saw three movies from three different countries/decades this weekend in which a character using the word "meshuggah" was the tip-off that they were jewish.

xp ya, he can die in vietnam all he wants, no one on the show is going to mention it.

xp part of it makes me wonder if the writers are trying to indicate that being jewish in NY was becoming easier. unlike first season where you have to be a wealthy department store heiress to be overtly jewish. a kind of 'they've been here all along' type of reveal. i haven't been following it so closely but friends who close-read the show for jewishness tell me that they've suspected that jane was assimilated for a long time (i guess her maiden name was a giveaway) but only got confirmation tnite. i do agree that the 'bracha' line was basically as superficial as such a thing could be. speaking yiddish under LSD was interesting to me bc jane is part of whole generation of american jews whose parents spoke yiddish but who only got bits and pieces of it. i don't know if she speaks fluent yiddish and has just totally repressed it in her new community, but i suspect she only knows idiomatic yiddish and maybe has some dormant unconscious memories of hearing her father speak. ginsburg thing is - like shakey mentioned - possibly true (being born in concentration camps possible but exceedingly rare - by contrast i know at least ppl who were born in DP camps). kinda hamfisted and weirdly overly dramatic, just like when his father blessed him. the whole character feels so tone deaf in some ways and then really great in others (like when he's working).

line breaks dude!

also i don't think there was any major shift in terms of "how easy is it to be jewish in NYC" in the mid 1960s.

ginsburg seems like a particularly jew-y jew.

Maybe it's less about NYC and more that very specific Madison Ave world. In the first season they mentioned that they have "one of them" or were bringing in Jewish sandwich boys or whatever into meetings. Which seems pretty strange because of the whole Edward Bernays thing, but whatdoiknow.

but ginsburg isn't anything like a jew-y jew! he's kinda like how you might make up a jew-y jew if you didn't have any exposure to one

?

he has a strong NYC jew accent, his dad even more so and uses lots of yiddish, etc.

they should have hired a consultant who had met a jew i guess

um, the show runner is jewish y'all

my nutty theory: that the 3 characters represent 3 different ways that jewish community is interacting with upper crust wasp community. jane has totally assimilated into wasp community. her jewishness only comes out under influence of LSD. you could barely know she was jewish. peggy's boyfriend lies entirely outside this community. peggy kinda goes out to him. he comes to parties but makes no efforts to belong. and then ginsburg, despite in some ways being the jewy jew, is kinda this meeting place where he is trying to fit the two together.

re ginsburg, i just wish there was more insight into his character i guess? he has a lot of noise going on - yiddish idiom, accents, blessings, holocaust - but doesn't really seem to be a very fleshed out character. esp compared to jane who summons an entire world + history for me.

we're only just now kind of learning about Ginsberg, and it feels like he's gonna have a larger role to play.

yeah, i'm curious to see what they do. what a totally weird thing tho to have him born in a camp.

you could barely know she was jewish.

i didn't know this at all before this ep. (but like i said above my recall is shit)

i think that was intentional. you'd have to be paying really close attention. (which indicates how assimilated she is.) i'm told there was something re her cousin that was kind of a hint but idr it.

to be fair we barely see anything of jane

Didn't Weiner basically say explicitly that she and her cousin were jewish and meant to be read as very assimilated?

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/matthew-weiner-closes-the-books-on-season-4-of-mad-men/

Maybe it's less about NYC and more that very specific Madison Ave world. In the first season they mentioned that they have "one of them" or were bringing in Jewish sandwich boys or whatever into meetings. Which seems pretty strange because of the whole Edward Bernays thing, but whatdoiknow.

Pretty weird that they've never mentioned Bill Bernbach.

well they've mentioned his work

given that Ginsberg was cheerfully claiming to be from Mars in this episode I don't know how much diegetic credence to lend to the idea that he was born in a concentration camp, but who knows, the dude is mysterious.

Mordy would you have been less o_O at Ginsberg Sr.'s blessing if it had been the shehechyanu and not the child's blessing?

if he had said shehechyanu and not put his hands on his head, yeah, i'd be much less o_O. i say shehechyanu sometimes.

Was surprised (not surprised at all) that they mentioned Braniff Airlines a few weeks back but didn't mention Mary Wells. x-posts

wait how were you surprised and yet not surprised at all

Because there's no reason that the show shouldn't have brought her up some context before seeing as she was a huge deal, but I wasn't surprised because Mad Men has a terrible track record with admitting that there were a fair number of incredibly successful female copywriters/executives at the time and that Peggy isn't unique or even slightly a trailblazer?

lol i know i was kidding wit u

Also I might start my own thread on this or something because I know it's annoying to everyone and I really don't want a repeat of the previous Mad Men thread's clusterfuck, but the entire way they've treated Dawn's storyline has been so downright bizarre that I'm not sure what they're even going for. A black secretary at a company like SCDP wouldn't have been that unusual in 1960 much less 1966. I'm not sure what the point is, since she doesn't even have her own story (and apparently never will because she doesn't want to be a copywriter), she's just a character to watch Roger/Peggy/etc. be racist towards. And it wouldn't be anachronistic to do a black copywriter at this point, so Weiner's hands aren't tied or anything in terms of finally offering up a character of color with a single moment of development on the show. Why did they even bother with this given that she's apparently not going to be a character whose perspective we ever see? It just seems like some cheap "times are changing" window dressing to me (on the same level as Mad Men's usual thing with using black people as props at parties to signify a level of progressiveness) and I find it gross. I mean, I could be wrong and she could suddenly become a fleshed out character, but so far the show definitely is working far harder to develop Ginsberg than Dawn.

i agree with what you say. i wonder whether the lack of a substantive black character is part of weiner's seeming compulsion to not follow predictable TV-series tropes (in this case, introducing a minority character late in a series)--obviously it's misguided if the case.

although having a major black character would in some sense make the show "about race" in a way that one can argue it is not at this point, in any great measure anyway. maybe you just have a bunch of white writers too scared to introduce a major black character and "get it wrong." which would be telling in its own way.

A black secretary at a company like SCDP wouldn't have been that unusual in 1960 much less 1966.

this is absolutely true. a LOT of (black) friends' parents and grandparents were secretaries in white-owned and largely white-operated firms. it was actually a major way black families could become upwardly mobile in the middle of the century.

i don't know if this pattern holds all over the country, but it's certainly true in major northern cities.

that would be a fun thread xposts

i don't mind having that discussion here. got to do _something_ in between sundays.