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

The rapes at Craster's place?

being curtly dismissive of some popular and entrenched pop-cultural phenomenon is something you do all the time

not a prime factor, i'm also dismissive of tedious student films by Wim Wenders

you probably shouldn't take my advice as to which screenings to attend!

guys please, not in the game of thrones nudity thread

Mad Men is a great show btw

Will you still be saying that after SEASON 7(B): ALL NUDE HARRY, ALL THE TIME

assuming some kind of torture is involved... maybe

i think season 7(b) is the one where they give pete's toupee its own voice-over

Hell toupe

"it was a quarter to six and already i was swimming in flop-sweat."

My main problem with the show is that I don't think Pete would be tolerated let alone be a successful businessman. It's not like he has any conspicuous talents that might lead people to overlook his awfulness. It just never rings true. Also, the actor is quite bad.

I like the show well enough not to dump it at this stage but I do think there are a lot of false notes in it and there haven't been that many great moments in later series, aside from its production design.

there have been a few plots that point to pete's talents, although because of the way the actor plays pete, those always seem more notional than real.

i don't know whether the acting is "bad" or "good". i think he plays pete in a more stylized way than some of the other actors, and you're right that he doesn't seem credible as a successful businessman b/c he telegraphs his cravenness too clearly. but it's still very watchable which is at least as reasonable a litmus test as "realistic."

Pete is totally credible in a world in which the likes of Roger are successful businessmen.

is he credible in the sense of "the bundle of traits assigned to this character is credible" or "the actual texture of this man's personality as conveyed by speech patterns/body language/etc. is credible". i feel like those things are contingently separable.

An unpleasant, underqualified person ... in accounts/sales?!

A lot of forgetting about the "Old Boy Network" of connections >>>> talent in this thread.

are you saying we're untalented?

yeah I don't get these complaints about a boorish, childish, relatively talentless rich white guy floating to the top of his profession somehow being unrealistic

I was only part of the business world for about 5 minutes 30 years ago, so I have no idea if people like Pete naturally rise to the top--instinct says sure, but I don't know. (Roger at the top makes sense to me--he's funny and likeable.) But I'm with jed: I just don't like the actor or the performance very much. He seems to working in some rhythm that belongs to a completely different show than everyone else.

Roger is at the top because his Dad cofounded the company.

man I dunno his line readings are so funny - "Not good Bob!" makes me laugh just thinking about it

Pete is where he is because his family has been in Manhattan since 1661.

yeah the guy who plays pete is terrifically entertaining!

Pete is where he is because his family has been in Manhattan since 1661.

― polyphonic, Wednesday, March 11, 2015 5:45 PM (47 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that really only answers 50% of the question (well, maybe 65%)

enduring this entire show was worth it just for "not good, Bob"

Yes, that's true of Roger. I'll amend that to say that I think he'd be successful anyway, because--well, because I like him.

https://themindlessphilosopher.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/not-great-bob.gif?w=300&h=164

Roger did say at some point that Pete was keeping accounts, so he was good for the company despite disliking him a lot. Pete basically said his own job was ass kissing clients and you do see him being more careful with them than some of the other guys are willing to be.

Realistic, good actor or not, I love him without reservation. He's my favourite character in the show by a long way.

Like, I'm actually going to miss Pete when this is over and I really hope I see Kartheiser in good stuff after this.

lookit this lovable douchebag

http://media.giphy.com/media/tBb19fjelFEnjSHfkNq/giphy.gif

Love it so much.

http://media.giphy.com/media/KXD1pSzGb3Khi/giphy.gif

I was trying to think if there's an obvious Sydney Falco (Sweet Smell of Success) character in Mad Men--they've got certain affinities; when Pete explained to Megan's father what an ad man does, he was a lot like Sydney explaining what a press agent does--but Sydney's probably distributed among a few characters, Pete being one of them.

oral history

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/mad-men-uncensored-epic-never-780101

ooh nice.

I still haven't cleared the time to read the Facts of Life one.

love these kinds of things, so many lol quotes

It's super slow, it's about advertising, everybody smokes, everybody's unlikable and it's period

When AMC plays new episodes, do they repeat them later that night, or at least at some point during the week? I bought a film ticket for the documentary festival on May 3 at 9:00, completely forgetting about Mad Men. (It literally hasn't been since Twin Peaks or Larry Sanders when I made it a point to watch a network TV show at a designated time.) That'll be about halfway into the concluding shows, and I won't even consider watching them out of order; if AMC doesn't play repeats, I'll have to suspend watching till the DVDs come out. Although I guess it's on torrent sites immediately? My brother-in-law could get it for me that way.

I can't imagine tv viewing without a dvr anymore.

they repeat it multiple times the night of airing and at least once directly before the new episode, or at least that's what AMC does with every single one of their other shows.

They repeat them all through the week, I think. Also you could always buy that individual episode via a streaming service (Amazon or whatever Canada has instead of Amazon for buying Mad Men).

Yeah I have always watched Mad Men via Amazon.

Thanks, that's what I was hoping (about the repeats). Forgot about streaming, but hopefully that won't be necessary. I'm sure this all must seem laughably antiquated...I watch so little TV, I haven't had to consider these things. Now that I'm starting to catch up on some shows, I may have to.

season 7a has just been added to Netflix, Facebook informs me.

pro and con analysis (not endorsing as i've only seen the first eight eps)

It’s one thing, it turns out, to ask those responsible for the texture of fictional TV worlds to re-create the 1960s, quite another to get them to take that re-creation and make it scruffier, meaner, more disappointing, more real; to accept that while the ideal 1964 might contain artefacts and costumes from 1964 alone, the perfectly real 1964 would be packed with the fashions of 1963 and 1962 and the distressed remnants of the purchases of the 1950s; to accept that banal interiors, clashing colours, tawdry novelties and dull messiness are also ideals in their way, ideals whose incorporation into costume drama might deter the viewer’s suspicion that the designers of Mad Men are answering a bigger share of the question ‘Why am I watching this?’ than the writers would like....

The writers of Mad Men consistently smother racial and gay storylines. They’ll start them, but they won’t follow through. The ugliness, mean-mindedness and contemptuousness of the things people say in private about groups they feel allowed to hate, the epithets, the jokes, the vicious folk legends – they’re not here. Mad Men’s enactments of past racial prejudice and homophobia are more vinegar than acid, and when they have power, they peter out.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n07/james-meek/the-shock-of-the-pretty

The ugliness, mean-mindedness and contemptuousness of the things people say in private about groups they feel allowed to hate, the epithets, the jokes, the vicious folk legends – they’re not here.

all I have to say is "blackface"

Towards the middle, in and around Civil Rights legislation, I think the show is very good on the kind of polite-but-cutting racism that I imagine was the norm at places such as Sterling-Cooper. Things like the water balloon from the window, or Bert's alarm when they put Dawn in the front lobby. And the show doesn't let Draper off the hook; when tasteless jokes are made behind closed doors, he usually laughs along with everybody else.

They didn't really dodge anything with Sal Romano's story; they just, unfortunately, abandoned it. (Even though it's been made clear he'll never return, I still hold out hope he'll turn up in the spring.)

Don's politics are entertainingly inscrutable - he'll privately acknowledge that the Vietnam war is wrong or that certain racist or sexist practices are wrong, but then in practice/public he'll happily go along with/profit from these very things. standard white American male hypocrisy/denial I suppose...