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

tasty

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=814QdW4oDqI

Given that title, something that should be but won't be part of that ep:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnHmBvMJPXo

Ted Chaough's had a lousy season thus far.

xp maybe this is the big time-jump we've been waiting for:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sj_9CiNkkn4

i enjoy ted's misery tbh

If the point is that Ted somehow somewhere became a halfway decent person and is paying the price for it, sure.

i never really found him to be halfway decent

he's a real dick to Don at first

ted jumping in on the speaker phone was a+ comedy

No, I meant he used to be a grade-A asshole in the earlier seasons, but somewhere along the way during S6 he became only a B-minus dillweed.

he's slept with Peggy, he's married, he thinks he's better than all of them (because he doesn't drink or whatevs but he's not)

The evolution of Peggy disengaging from Ted to her kind of dismissively loathing him has been enjoyable

ted is sympathetic though. good casting

Yeah he just has a likable manner.

he projects intelligence in a good way. imo.

the screenshots tumblr has been real hit or miss as of late, but oh man this one:

http://24.media.tumblr.com/7936bfe050386dc6cf0e11aefef046b5/tumblr_n5wduyj08A1qdbluio1_500.jpg
http://31.media.tumblr.com/cc7028aa45fb3c5109c8694e6a3b0984/tumblr_n5wduyj08A1qdbluio2_500.jpg

I think it's Pete's facial expression that pushes it over.

Pete's weird insistence that he can have someone but Trudy can't because they're technically still married is some annoying bullshit, but his waiting at the house until she got back so he could act all jealous and smarmy put me back in the Pete-as-asshole camp

shit dude, can't you show a little confidence for more than a few episodes

haha

Don will never get w Joan, you think he's gonna get between Sterling and their love child? gtfo

xp

Wait, Don doesn't know does he? Joan and Roger keep a tight TIGHT lid on that shit.

idk, if anyone thought about it for more than a few minutes they might figure it out

shit, Bob probably has, he could drop it as he leaves

shit, Bob probably has, he could drop it as he leaves

he's the type who'd flush though

if anyone thought about it for more than a few minutes they might figure it out

yeah I don't think Don knows but anyone doing the math on when she conceived/delivered would figure it out. Also yeah Joan obviously not into Don lately.

It has taken years for Joan to ascend to this level, years during which she's walked a pushy interloper like Peggy rise. She's not sullying herself for the likes of Draper.

Or solidifying her personal life by marrying a gay man for the sake of appearances

Yeah, how long was Joan at the original Sterling Cooper before Peggy's first day (the pilot)? Long enough to already have a fully developed and comfortable relationship with Roger.

Pete's weird insistence that he can have someone but Trudy can't because they're technically still married is some annoying bullshit, but his waiting at the house until she got back so he could act all jealous and smarmy put me back in the Pete-as-asshole camp

― a strange man (mh), Wednesday, May 21, 2014 2:47 PM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is completely consistent w/ pete's character over the seasons.

i still have mixed feelings about this show, i feel like all the portentousness and critic-bait (like obvious, "meaningful" repeated motifs, bombastic episode closings) is just getting worse but from scene to scene or moment to moment the show is still capable of cagey little observations/revelations of character that are deeply pleasurable. reading the commentaries on each episode the next day make me hate the show, because all the speculation as to "what was this episode about?" or "what is this season about?" just recapitulate the worst tendencies of film criticism.

personally i feel like this show could actually be one of the best on TV ever _if_ it stopped trying to be one of the best on TV ever. there's a level of self-consciousness, of playing to the critics, that makes it just as annoying as it is great. but my idea of great TV is "taxi," so YMMV.

i really think they just need to cut off the betty character, I guess they can't at this point but what a waste of time her subplots are.

stan is the most entertaining character on the show not to really have had his own subplot. even ginsberg had a few scenes to himself (or with his dad, etc.).

all we know about stan is his moshe dayan poster.

I'm totally cool with Stan remaining a mystery.

i still have mixed feelings about this show, i feel like all the portentousness and critic-bait (like obvious, "meaningful" repeated motifs, bombastic episode closings) is just getting worse but from scene to scene or moment to moment the show is still capable of cagey little observations/revelations of character that are deeply pleasurable

Agreed, although this season is an improvement (he season after Draper married Megan taht opened with his reading Dante on the beach almsot made me hurl the remote at the TV). What's left are less offensive portentous bits like the women's-lib/Friedan dialogue with which Betty is saddled.

yeah, i'm fine w/ it too, just interesting that the writers haven't chosen to do anything with him plotwise even though they've slowly made him into something like a rounded character.

xpost

I like that Stan has stayed on the outside. He has his own life, girlfriends, whatever, and his job is just his job. So he gets to be perpetually amused by all the drama without being part of it.

amateurist are you saying the show feigns at meaning but isn't meaningful or that it's meaningful but clumsily so or that it should avoid an aesthetic of meaningfulness altogether.

for me the show is at its worst when it shows what its most ardent fans believe about it.

like, when it succumbs to fan expectations about how Deep and Meaningful it is.

Some of you people (won't name names) prob shouldn't be watching this show

He's probably said this before, but when Weiner was on Colbert Report last night he said it was a story about the sixties that's not about or for boomers, but people on either side of that generation to observe without rose colored glasses. Narrative detours aside, I think he's done a pretty good job of doing that over the course of seven seasons. Nothing about Mad Men is sentimental. (It's not a documentary either, but y'know...it does a good job of stripping away the reverence often associated with the decade.)

so glad the boomers' parents finally have a show about the 60s to watch oh wait

I guess they could be watching it in hell

Pete's behaviour is consistent with a lot of men's characters at the time. But OTOH my mother went APESHIT when my dad introduced us to his new (unconnected to the split) GF before their divorce was final, and that was in 1982.

Having gone through parents' separation/divorce in the mid-late '70s, I can remember some married mothers not allowing their kids to play with kids whose parents were divorced. Does anyone else remember people being like that? The woman in our neighbourhood who tried this shit was, in fact, born illegitimate and according to my mother, who was her friend when both were kids, totally ostracised through most of the '50s by other girls' mothers as a result.

some girls mothers are meaner than

it's just portentous. it means to Mean Something, but it often telegraphs that too obviously, and too narrowly, in a way that ultimately diminishes the episode's interest (to me, anyway).

. or rather, it's pitched in a way that's both coy (in that the meaning isn't explicitly recited by a character) but also rather obvious (in that you'd have to not be paying attention at all to miss it). in that way the episodes often seem constructed specifically more those critics who post lengthy exegeses the day after the show airs. they can pat themselves on the back for having recognized the implicit meanings of the show without having to really think about it too much.

I generally abhor when people flatten art into fabricated Meanings ("Bergman's film is ultimately about how when one loses sight of God, God loses sight of us"), so it bothers me when films or TV shows seem to deliberately court that kind of thing.

which as I noted is hardly _all_ that mad Men does. there's a lot to compensate for it. but it's a problem shared by much if not all "quality television" these days.

xxposts

haha yeah boomer parents are now, what? between 75 and 95? that's probably not the demo AMC is seeking.

man the shots of Pete with his daughter were so bleak

I don't remember divorce having that kind of stigma, feel like I grew up around a lot of kids w divorced parents

xp

i mean in terms of that kind of implicit meaning being a key part of the show, Mad Men is very what-people-used-to-call-"middlebrow." which is not a bad thing!!!! but it does have its limitations.

more xposts

im not trying to debate this point with you or anything, i've just seen you bring this sort of formalist (my word) critique against the show (and other things) quite a lot. i want to understand it better.

i suppose the distinction you're getting at is that while a show set in the 60s is gonna be "about" the 60s in some meaningful sense it doesn't have to add a meta-layer of "this is about the 60s" if that makes any sense. i guess i just find that distinction hard to process!