Mad Men on AMC • Fifth Season Thread

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!

again, weird. i don't have anything against the soap opera as a form. like the romance novel, i honestly think it's maligned and ignored largely because it's so wholly and successfully "for women". for that reason, i think it's interesting to point out the fact that soap-opera-like dramas have recently become widely popular by managing to distance themselves from the scoffed-at genre without giving up its essential character and appeal.

lol, you think romance novels are maligned bc they're wholly and successfully 'for women'? i'm not speaking for all women, but i know a few who would consider that some condescending bullshit.

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.

i do notice that mad men is one of the most gossiped-about (twitter, tumblr, etc) shows on the internet.

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

obviously! I only meant by that distinction (between "episodic" and "novelistic") simply that if ANYTHING is new about tv drama in the last 15 years then its a different form of narrative than has historically been the case on tv. admittedly this is a small difference in a lot of ways and has lots of historical precedents, but then what doesnt? I think if you wanna claim there's no difference between Mad Men and, say, Dallas you might be obscuring as much as you are revealing.

no offense to all concerned but i gotta remember not to check this thread until a new episode comes out.

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

YES I SAID IT :)

― Peppermint Patty Hearst (VegemiteGrrl),

the gif above makes me think he's gonna die in an airplane accident coming back from Vietnam.

lol, you think romance novels are maligned bc they're wholly and successfully 'for women'? i'm not speaking for all women, but i know a few who would consider that some condescending bullshit.

i'm not sure. i'm speculating more than making an argument. i do notice that the soap opera and the romance novel are similar fictional forms in certain respects. similar in theme and subject, and similar in audience. they're also similar in how comprehensively ignored they are by critics. there isn't a comparable, male-identified fictional approach that's so completely dismissed.

do u think sandra brown is more critically maligned than marilyn robinson because she's more truly speaking to the experience of women???

also "there isn't a comparable, male-identified fictional approach that's so completely dismissed."

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b8/Zenescope1.jpg

do u think sandra brown is more critically maligned than marilyn robinson because she's more truly speaking to the experience of women???

that's not at all what i'm saying. i'm saying that i sometimes think that romance novels and soap operas are so comprehensively dismissed because they appeal almost exclusively to women, and perhaps because their area of concern is so tightly focused on simplified and/or idealized depictions of romantic relationships to the exclusion of all else.

comic books have a huge and "respectable" critical establishment attached to them. people take them very seriously. not at all comparable to soaps and harlequin romance novels in that regard.

actually, i studied amatory fiction shortly in grad school

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/517J-jqXPOL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

it could be that you're no aware of any critical discourse around romance novels + soap operas. which is okay. but you speak with such authority!

not* aware

comic books have a huge and "respectable" critical establishment attached to them

uh

(also the industry is dying cuz no one buys comics fwiw)

it could be that you're no aware of any critical discourse around romance novels + soap operas. which is okay. but you speak with such authority!

perhaps in academia (everything has some sort of academic discourse around it, goes w/out saying), but you point me at an even semi-popular publication like the comics journal that deals with romance novels or soap operas, and i'll eat my hat.

comic books have a huge and "respectable" critical establishment attached to them

health of the genre is beside the point, there's a lot of intelligent and serious criticism of current comics out there, written by both men and women. comics are part of mainstream pop, are often made into popular films.

the comics journal is the lone publication of critical discourse around comics and it is not semi-popular and never was, it's barely stayed afloat

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap_Opera_Digest ?

contenderizer, i don't know if there's a point to this or not so i'm just going to make one up for you.

"i compared mad men to soap operas bc i suspect soap operas are unfairly maligned* and i'm trying to demonstrate how things that are derided in soap operas are found in abundance in mad men."

"what ppl often deride in soap operas are poor acting performances and sloppy writing, not stories focusing on relationships which are found in many genres, not just soap operas."

i guess then we could say, idk, "i think citing 'poor acting performances' and 'sloppy writing' in soap operas are actually unfair critiques of particular traditions of acting + writing that appeal predominately to women and should be evaluated on their own terms, not by comparison to other genres."

and then i could say, "well, ppl generally praise the acting and writing of mad men. if what distinguishes soap operas from other non-marginalized media is the unfairly maligned acting + writing, presumably that means mad men is not a soap opera."

and then idk, we find something more productive to do

*tho i don't watch them myself and have not started an ilx thread about them

the comics journal is the lone publication of critical discourse around comics and it is not semi-popular and never was, it's barely stayed afloat

it's not lone, it's just the most prominent voice of its kind. and the fact that it's a nice product is neither here nor there. there is no comparable critical discourse and serious-taking that accompanies soap operas and romance novels.

nice = niche

"what ppl often deride in soap operas are poor acting performances and sloppy writing, not stories focusing on relationships which are found in many genres, not just soap operas."

i guess then we could say, idk, "i think citing 'poor acting performances' and 'sloppy writing' in soap operas are actually unfair critiques of particular traditions of acting + writing that appeal predominately to women and should be evaluated on their own terms, not by comparison to other genres."

and then i could say, "well, ppl generally praise the acting and writing of mad men. if what distinguishes soap operas from other non-marginalized media is the unfairly maligned acting + writing, presumably that means mad men is not a soap opera."

i agree that mad men and other contemporary episodic dramas have distinguished themselves from traditional soap operas in many ways - i touched on that a few posts back

^ weekly, prime-time dramas, i mean

... ok, u win. i'm out. have fun.

contendo is winnar

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9f/Breaking_Away_(TV_series),_cast.jpg