Mad Men on AMC • Fifth Season Thread

ugh why am I not asleep, fuck me

is that why you used taxi as an example?

A tv show is bound to its sets.

this isn't necessarily true. tv shows are bound to certain formulas, but i think this has less to do with physical and economic constraints than what people (presumbably?) want of a story that is open-ended vs one with a clear beginning and end. stories on TV tend to exploit a single fixed situation, life as the reliable continuance of the here-and-now. no matter where you tune in, you're guaranteed of seeing the same face in the same places doing more or less the same thing. therefore, sitcoms and soap operas. TV values consistency.

since there's less demand that cinematic narratives be continuous, they can veer off in any direction they choose.

no one's a cop, a ghost, a midwife, an ESL teacher, or anything other than what they've always been.

Kinsey is an unemployed Hare Krishna fyi

also Joan left the office for like a year

pretty sure Pete is a ghost

good posts from amateurist

and Harry would make a hilariously awkward ESL teacher

don't really know what i think of all the spur-of-the-moment sex happening in this season, now that i think of it

― goole, Thursday, May 10, 2012 4:37 PM (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

srsly is this happening more often now or am i nuts

harry just got ass off a vengeful hippie cultist, this would have been unthinkable in previous seasons

spur-of-the-moment sex has happened a few times in past seasons (esp with Don, but also Sterling/Joan in the street, Joan gettin raped, etc.) but yeah this seems to be happening more for some reason. In the case of Don it's kind of obvious why, he's trying to keep the passion in his marriage going.

This show is also incredibly episodic.

― Fas Ro Duh (Gukbe), Thursday, May 24, 2012 7:57 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

How so?

― sarahell, Thursday, May 24, 2012 7:59 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark

Every episode has a lot of very self-contained elements, even as you'd need to see the series as a whole to understand the characters and their motivations as well as some of the larger arcs. Last week, Paul tries to get in contact with Harry, Harry sees him, goes to Hare Krishna, has sex with Paul's girlfriend, then gives Paul money to move away to LA and start his life over. Lane's money troubles are pushed to the front, and even that has a little arc. There's also obviously a thematic connection (most, if not all, episodes tend to have a larger theme).

As for tying things in w current events, anyone think there's a chance Joan ex-husband may show up later as a protesting veteran peacenik?

I hope Joan's ex-husband shows up later in a pine box

YES I SAID IT :)

both of those seem pretty unlikely

i mean, if this were real.

Dr. Rapey gettin killed in 'Nam seems sort of obvious so I doubt they'll go there. maybe he'll come back missing a leg or something.

he's a surgeon and an officer, there's a better chance of him coming home with the clap or a heroin addiction. or a kid. or being just fine. jesus, you people.

nm I was trying to be funny

*sigh*

Dr. Rapey comin home as a junkie would be pretty funny

guys, it's a romcom

Kinsey is an unemployed Hare Krishna fyi

...also Joan left the office for like a year

― Roger Barfing (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, May 24, 2012 9:00 AM (1 hour ago)

kinsey was always a minor character, and i doubt we'll see much more of him. joan's life never really developed outside the office, was limited to her apartment and her interactions with two minor characters. she left for a while, and now she's back.

constant, melodramatic churning in place is one of the defining characteristics of most soap operas. there's lots of interpersonal drama, secrets and schemes, the sense that some major upheaval or revelation is around the corner, but very little real change from episode to episode. that's what keeps people tuning back in: familiar characters and situations, always simmering suspensefully.

I am confused by your association of a change in locale with "real change"

like I can throw out a whole bunch of ways characters have changed but I suspect you'll just dismiss them because they're all bound to the central location of an advertising office

familiar characters and situations, always simmering suspensefully.

this sounds like most people's lives tbh

isn't the mark of these highbrow dramas that have emerged after The Sopranos (or however far back you wanna go) distinguished by a more, say, linear sense of time/plot? even in some cases having a set amount of seasons, a larger arc or story to tell over an entire series, etc.

like somewhere between a serial novel and an episodic tv show.

a sense of history is important, sure. you don't want to hit the reset button at the end of every episode.

none of these shows started with a planned multi-season story arc. TV doesn't work that way.

feel like that's exactly what's at issue here, though. and what's "different" (if anything) about these shows, whether premeditated or not.

mad men did start with a planned single season story arc though, start to finish.

I said multi-season

Sopranos started with a single season story arc too

the essential problem with planning multi-season story arcs for TV is that no one knows whether they're going to get cancelled or not

ie no studio is going to promise, upfront, to bankroll a TV show for multiple seasons; it's a requirement of the economic environment that series' function in single season increments

my small and only point is that there's now a sense or expectation of a contained narrative (ie, it has a pre-determined end, loosely understood). I think also there's an expectation of thematic coherence. we expect all of Mad Men to amount to something more than the individual episodes or even seasons. the fact that these shows straddle a line between episodic and a more classically "novelistic" style is precisely why they are hard to categorize.

that's true, but I think the expectation is just unfair. Sopranos has been the only show to really deliver on that score, and it was not planned out more than a season or two in advance.

yeah agreed. but again perhaps that's one thing that's especially interesting about these shows. (i say "these shows" loosely to avoid any more taxonomical arguments!)

I am confused by your association of a change in locale with "real change"

...like I can throw out a whole bunch of ways characters have changed but I suspect you'll just dismiss them because they're all bound to the central location of an advertising office

― Roger Barfing (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, May 24, 2012 10:51 AM (1 hour ago)

i'm not using soap opera as a pejorative here. i see it as a value-neutral genre descriptor. contemporary, post-sopranos episodic dramas do push against the confined and static nature of the traditional soap opera formula, allowing a bit more week-to-week change than the genre typically allows. nevertheless, they do share certain formal qualities with daytime soaps, one of the most important being the way in the melodrama sort of churns constantly in place.

i see the change in corporate identity and office as a costume change, a cosmetic change. far less radical, for instance, than luke and laura going on the lam from general hospital's hospital (to compare it to the kinds of events that occasionally shake up the stasis of "real" soap operas). and sure, the characters and their relationships do change subtly over time, but that's also consistent with the traditional soap. people get married, divorced, form and break other alliances, move up and down in the world, heroes sometimes seem to become villains and vice-versa, etc. but the size, shape and general texture of the fishtank remain pretty constant despite all this "churning". that's what makes a soap opera.

afaic new soap opera eps are aired 5 times a week and are summarized in

http://www.discountmags.com/shopimages/products/normal/extra/Soap-Opera-Digest.jpg

novels *were* classically episodic! for chrissakes, people.

i mean i think mad men is only hard to categorize if your two points of reference are solely Married... With Children and 60 Minutes.

i just don't know what posters calling mad men a soap opera are trying to prove/argue/provide to the discussion. does considering it a soap opera give you an insight into the show, or is it just a passive aggressive way of being dismissive? are you just striving for taxonomic accuracy? bc who gives a fuck about the platonic form mad men most closely resembles?

sure, but the setting and characters of episodic, melodramatic novels can and often do change a good deal more than the soap opera form allows. children can grow to adulthood and have children themselves, protagonists can travel the world and change careers with each stop along the way, fortunes can be made and lost, etc.

the weekly episodic prime-time drama genre that mad men belongs to has a lot in common with the "traditional soap opera" (as covered in soap opera digest), but is also different certain respects. it's typically more subtle, the production values are higher, it's less single-mindedly focused on scheming and romance, and it aspires to sophistication in ways the traditional soap opera doesn't

does considering it a soap opera give you an insight into the show, or is it just a passive aggressive way of being dismissive? are you just striving for taxonomic accuracy? bc who gives a fuck about the platonic form mad men most closely resembles?

the aggressive aggressive tone here is baffling. as far as i'm concerned, calling mad men a soap opera is like calling a care a vehicle (or batman a superhero). it's taxonomic, but not terribly important. there's no dismissal intended. i love mad men and think that the automatic assumption that "soap opera" must be pejorative is a weird thing in itself.

^ "...like calling a car a vehicle..."

it's not aggressive aggressive. i'm aggressively challenging the value of your point. it's not like i made it personal. though you do seem to have a habit of strenuously arguing for things that are of minimal import. for example: if i started arguing about how Mad Men is actually a gothic drama in the tradition of 18th century English literature (a claim, btw, that I think makes way more sense than yours) you wouldn't be wrong to ask what my stake is in that argument. and if I answered by saying that it's "not terribly important" you might roll your eyes so hard that they cracked the ceiling of your eye sockets.

also, you are either ignorant about what a soap opera is traditionally, and what a soap opera means culturally in 2012, or you are being disingenuous. calling something a soap opera is immediately minimizing its significance and suggesting that the themes that are important are more about the dynamics of who is fucking who (wonderful discourse, btw, and makes for excellent gossip and I completely understand why ppl love soap operas) than things that, idk, matthew weiner might claim mad men is about. one issue here is that you want to make your claim without explicitly stating why the claim matters or what it says about mad men, and i have to believe that it's either because a) you don't know and haven't thought it out or b) because you think you're being a sneaky fucker.

The first season was very obviously and deliberately among other things a knowing take on 1950s domestic drama. If you want to call that, in some sense, a "soap opera", then good, that's simple enough. If you object to that term and have a better one, then, whatever. But the *point* to me isn't the term, but recognizing how it situated its cultural touchstones, seeing the source material it drew on, how in turn it commented on that source material, etc.

well, i think you used the term Melodrama above and that's the correct genre term for that insight (that it was a take on 1950s domestic drama). that's not what soap opera means tho, or conveys.

there may be crossover, i guess, but like it's not terribly hard to be precise. especially if it's something you think is worth arguing about!