MAD MEN on AMC - Seasons 7(a) & & 7(b)

They're not going to piss in Phil Morris' mouth twice.

incidentally
Lou: You know who had a ridiculous dream and people laughed at him?

Stan: You?

Me:http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/1503/15037917/2442057-1627833308-mj-la.gif

the guy who plays lou is very convincingly uptight and hateful.

Cutler must feel kind of desperate to glom onto such a loser - but his other allies from his previous firm are dead/gone

i didn't buy don's performance or his bizarre "pitch" to philip morris (basically: "you get to be the folks that tamed don draper, won't that make your competition sore??")

he's appealing to their ids, essentially, hoping this will work better than lou and cutler's appeal to their egos. i mean sure corporate culture LOL but i don't buy that the tobacco dudes would, after having run the idea by their partners and thinking on it, really go for a don draper working their account.

seems like a hail-mary pass. but each season has to have some moment when don-draper-the-mover-and-shaker has some flabbergasting moment of inspired juju, although to the show's credit they often don't take very long to undermine that.

i still wish this show was 95% about advertising.

instead of "the 60s" or whatever. but i guess i can take that up w/ matt weiner.

i wonder if it's more that he found it hard to do more ad stuff or if his head just got big w/ all teh sixtiez chroniclerrrrr whatevers

because workplace plots absent rich frames for procedure, slotted-in content etc are not self-evidently teeming with fruitful story ideas

well sure "the 60s" would have to poke in plenty, just b/c there's a major shift in how advertising _works_ in that period, not unrelated to everything else going on. but i think that actually gets lost, or has gotten lost over the last few seasons, since advertising is only one of several major plot threads the show is insistent on following.

show's about the 70s and 80s now. what month did the last episode happen in? don's been back a little while, long enough for peggy to start to thaw towards him. may? june at the latest? guessing moon landing happens in the finale, or maybe that's next episode and we get to august. gulp.

there's been plenty of ad stuff though interestingly nearly every major campaign they're working on is for a doomed client.

I don't think there was a single contextual clue re: the date

xpost

i dunno tobacco companies still making good money overseas

Kodak wasn't doomed for decades!

maybe you guys know ppl hitting a burger chef drive-thru in their chevy vega and enjoying a nice commander cigarette afterwards but i don't

i still wish this show was 95% about advertising.

― espring (amateurist),

The last two seasons have concentrated on advertising through the prism of soap opera mechanics, and, yeah, I want more, partly because I've rarely seen a hetero threesome or hippie on camera working -- and I haven't in life either.

which might (and probably does) mean nothing, they use defunct (or nearly defunct in commander's case) brands all the time for a number of reasons but it's still interesting that of the three huge whales they've landed or looking to land - fast food, car, tobacco - they're defunct (and soon at that) or they're legendary disasters.

wait is the chevy thing they're working on actually the vega?

Would Ginsberg (or anybody at the time) have been aware of IBM's connection to the Holocaust? Or did that become well known later and the show is referencing it as opposed portraying as part of the reason Ginsberg is so hostile toward the computer.

nah I think Ginsberg, sensitive to technological innovations, fears obsolescence.

The computer is a machine and Ginsburg is R.P. McMurphy.

I thought Ginsberg was ENIAC...?

yeah all the gearheads had a big laugh when mad men landed the account - http://jalopnik.com/the-joke-behind-mad-mens-new-secret-chevy-account-493087484

oh man that's fantastic

It's funnier that they went with the Vega as opposed to the Pinto, which has the more famous disaster story. Although Ford could have been game, as they've been selling Pinto emblem t shirts recently.

shades of the invite to the sterling daughter wedding

http://tinypinepress.com/wp-live/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/madmen-screenshot1.jpg

Would that Mad Men could be on long enough to get to where irony is the easiest sell of all.

XP That one reminded me of the gag in Diner where we find out the couple is going to Cuba for their honeymoon at the exact moment Castro's revolution kicked into high gear.

"In a world where Irony is the easiest sell of all..."

... one man ...

Can I be a pedantic print geek and suggest that it looks like that invitation is letterpress printed, which is currently the trend and no doubt a fine way to present yourself (Sheffield Product) but back then for people like that, and even now, I'd think it would be much more likely to be engraved.

it's like kennedy's braaaaains before yr wedding day
a free riiide in a rusted chevrolet

I keep (apparently mis)remembering Megan having told Don to fuck off for good, but it seems not.

Like every time I see them being all lovely I'm like 'surely this marriage ended a few episodes ago'.

I keep (apparently mis)remembering Megan having told Don to fuck off for good, but it seems not.

She did exactly that, but he kept calling and after a while she started not hanging up and then began listening to him talk and then started responding. I think the show has left it up to the viewer to connect the dots, because there wasn't any pivotal "Okay, I'll you back, shitty husband I love!" scene.

after months of thinking i was kinda over this show i just sessioned the last five episodes over the course of this evening so i guess i still like it. it's both quite comforting and increasingly disorientingly odd. poor ginsberg, a presumably permanent disappearance even less dignified than that of sal.

also i had a mild mad men quip retweeted by molly lambert and my notifications went craaazy for a few minutes, dunno how people with lots of followers who produce actual good tweets can keep up with the twitter experience.

Yeah, he's gone. He's got a show in the fall. On NBC. So...he may be back.

I like how this show is structured, how characters kind of flitter in and out of the story. But it's been very disorienting to follow and I think binge watching may end up being the best way to see the show when all is said and done.

Though watching it as they slow-drip out the last season it pretty fun. Each episode is like an episode of musical chairs.

i want a spinoff buddy comedy starring the computer and ginsberg's nipple.

Good catch w the IBM/holocaust connection.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

In other news, Bob Benson's show w/Buffy & Popeye got cancelled, so he could return w/coffee, Vegas, Pete awkwardness etc.

Although I have enjoyed him as an unseen presence this season.

i'm wondering if the split-season was planned before the writing. if so maybe there'll be a cliffhanger.

anyone know the significance of the 'New York Film Festival 1964' poster on Peggy's office wall?

a token of handjobs of yore

saul bass design, presumably a tip to the master

and there's an xp for you

hahaha i'm imagining a vo on tcm: 'nobody could give a handjob like saul bass' *clip from the man w/ the golden arm plays*

Poor Ginsberg. He had always seemed so sliiightly-fragile, the computer was all he needed to collapse totally :(. The homosexuality stuff was weird/sad too

As soon as he held out that box i knew it was a body part. tbh this is awful but I fully expected him to suicide after leaving Peggy's

Geez, if I were Ginsberg I'd go publicly insane too -- considering how little he has been given to do these past couple seasons in favor of a bunch of tedious bland characters, when Ginsberg is clearly one of the best characters on this show

Man, the scenes with Megan+Stephanie were like watching a fucking bad acting competition. Could Stephanie sound more stiff and square spouting all of that "far-out, man" dialogue? Could not wait for those scenes to end.