i feel like the payoff once i finish is going to be so much greater first viewing experience was also worsened by AMC spreading out the final season's eps over two "seasons"
S3E5 "The Fog" where Baby Gene is born is a pretty fantastic episode. Betty does a fantastic job portraying labor Can't find the still but there's that scene where Betty is being wheeled down the hall to go have the baby. Don is standing there looking after her. She looks back like one second after she turned her back and he's gone The dialogue with this guy is pretty good; wonder who his son grew up to be D'awwwwwww Pete talking to the guy in the elevator about why "Negroes" buy Admiral televisions First time Don meets "Connie" (well, first time with Don knowing who he is) Lot happening in that episode
Question about this whole incident....why does Guy MacKendrick have to basically retire after losing his foot? That's not that bad a deformity. Hell Ken Cosgrove continued on being an account man after losing an eye did he not? I'm not sure if I buy it, though obviously I love the development since without it Lane Pryce would have got sent to India
also, his new show http://www.townandcountrymag.com/le...9758/matthew-weiner-romanoffs-romanov-family/
I need to rewatch but I'm assuming prosthetics weren't as advanced at that point and he would have a terrible limp that would make every introduction start on the wrong foot
Oh hell yeah. Didn't know about this. Very stoked. I watched "Empire of the Tsars: Romanov Russia" with Lucy Worsley on Netflix and it was quite good for anyone interested
Hopefully Matt Weiner's latest is better than David Simon's (If The Deuce got better after the first half season someone please tell me)
Maybe I'll give Deuce another shot...after ~6 episodes I wasn't into it and the thread on here didn't seem to be saying much good. Never tried Treme but that's disappointing. I guess it makes sense that his show about Baltimore would be better than his shows about NYC or New Orleans as the former is the city he really knew inside out, wrote for the paper etc
When Connie calls in the middle of the night Don says he'll meet him in an hour. How does he get dressed into a suit and be in Manhattan in an hour? Ossining to NYC is a 1.5 hour drive per Google
I'm on a re-watch. I watched everything but the last 2 seasons when it originally aired so I've yet to see those yet. I had forgotten how damn good this show was/is. One thing in particular that I still always laugh at is Pete getting his ass kicked throughout the show at various points.
Just finished a rewatch and this episode through the end of season 3 is some fantastic TV. One of the best lines in the series IMO is from ep 11 "The Gypsy and the Hobo", where the Draper family is trick or treating at the Hanson's house. After identifying Sally and Bobby's costumes, Carlton hits Don with "And who are you supposed to be?" Absolutely brilliant writing given the rest of the episode.
Not sure why it took so long, but I finally started watching Mad Men. Maybe I waited because it's daunting to pick up a series that is 92 episodes long. Anyway, I'm a few episodes into the third season and my main takeaway is this: People in the late 50s and early 60s were just all-around horrible.
Will you be jealous when I start watching The Wire? That's the other all-time great show I've not yet started. Between The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad, and Mad Men, the only show I watched while it was running was The Sopranos.
Vulture article on re-watching Mad Men in quarantine by Matt Zoller Seitz https://www.vulture.com/2020/05/mad...tm_campaign=vulture&__twitter_impression=true Spoiler “There are people out there who buy things,” Don Draper tells Peggy Olson in “Shut the Door. Have a Seat,” the season-three finale of Mad Men. “People like you and me. And something happened. Something terrible. And the way that they saw themselves is gone. And nobody understands that.” Then he adds, looking Peggy in the eye, “But you do.” This is one of countless Mad Men moments that resonated with the experience of the 2020 pandemic. It strikes a nerve today, just as it did in 2009, when the episode first aired, but for different reasons. “Shut the Door. Have a Seat” is set around Christmas 1963, weeks after President John F. Kennedy’s murder plunged the nation into grief and paralysis. The Mad Men episode premiered in late 2009, and the timing created a historical hall of mirrors in the mind. At that point, we were a year into a worldwide economic crisis — the worst since the Great Depression, a period that the 1960s period show regularly revisits via flashbacks — and we were also embroiled in two Vietnam-like quagmire wars/occupations, in Iraq and Afghanistan. The emotional power in the scene came from the sight of a mentor reaching out to a younger writer in a humble, vulnerable way and telling her, “I need you on the team.” But there’s an ironic undertow, as there always is on Mad Men — and it comes from realizing what Don is asking Peggy to do: figure out a clever way to push American consumers’ buttons and get them shopping again, which would create a feeling of “normalcy” but also benefit the new ad agency that Don and other executives had invented days earlier. President George W. Bush advised Americans to “go about their business.” He said, “We can’t allow the terrorists to frighten our nation to the point where people don’t conduct business. Where people don’t shop.” Flash-forward to 2020: A nation of shut-ins watches and rewatches Mad Men during a pandemic. The crisis is so unnerving that some Americans wear gloves and masks whenever they leave the house, to protect other people from catching it, and others push in the opposite direction, refusing to take precautions out of defiance, a belief in “herd immunity,” a desire to troll the libs and signal that they “aren’t afraid” of a contagious virus that can kill, and most of all, a wish to return immediately to “normal” — that vanished world of Applebee’s and Subway sandwiches, bars and nightclubs, and cookouts on the beach. LEARN MORE » You can see our world’s present-day crisis peeking through the negative spaces in Matthew Weiner’s 1960s saga, which, like so many period pieces, is as much about the era in which it appeared as the era in which it was set. If I ever had any doubts that the show was an all-timer, this rewatch cemented it. I thought I’d had my fill after having recapped its fourth through seventh seasons for The New Republic and Vulture, then going on to write the critical companion Mad Men Carousel. But I ended up watching the whole thing yet again because I was in lockdown while serving as a caretaker to my wife, Nancy, who was declining from metastatic breast cancer and would die of it in late April. We were joined in our rewatch by two of our five children, ages 22 and 17. The elder had already watched Mad Men, the younger was a newbie. Our three other teens dipped in and out; to my surprise, they were able to understand and enjoy individual episodes despite not having followed the story in detail, perhaps because the writing staff knew how to supply important bits of backstory without being obvious about it, and letting the characters’ personality quirks tell you more about the plot, and their own development as people, than blatant exposition could. As I wrote in the concluding essay of Mad Men Carousel, “the show is built to last.” It’s built to last because, among its many other virtues, it makes these 1960s characters specific enough — and sometimes mundane enough — to become general, so that we can connect their experience of history to our own, whatever and whenever that may be. When Don entreated Peggy to help him figure out how to make traumatized Americans get out there and buy things again, my wife and I looked at each other sardonically. We’d been following the news and had seen the same stories of people marching — sometimes with firearms and often with face masks, ironically — to pressure local and state governments to “reopen the economy” to hasten a return to normalcy. Obviously, not every circumstantial detail from the 1930s, the 1960s, the early aughts, and today is exactly the same — to name one big difference, in those earlier eras, even if you had no money to spend, you could still go into a store or restaurant without worrying that you’d bring back a virus that could infect you or your family. But from decade to decade and crisis to crisis, the American psyche — the understanding of how this country thinks of itself and conducts itself — never changes. Mad Men got that and found truthful, clever ways to articulate it while focusing mainly on the characters. It showed how the individual travels through history, their own story mirroring the national story in ways they might not grasp, and how people keep doing the same things over and over again. The details change, but human psychology remains the same. On some level, Don’s drive to figure out how to sell things during a national catastrophe (via a new ad agency, spontaneously reinvented from disaster, in the spirit of Dick Whitman on the battlefield) was an expression of another great Don-Peggy moment, this one from season two’s “The New Girl.” Don visits Peggy after she’s birthed an out-of-wedlock baby in secret and given it up for adoption. He tells her, “Get out of here and move forward. This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened.” That controlled, willful amnesia is intrinsic to Don, Peggy, and other Mad Men characters and expresses a survival tendency in humans that persists throughout geography and time. It’s an emblem of strength but also tactical coldness, at times cruel indifference. And it’s often rooted in a refusal to truly confront one’s mistakes. Returning to business as usual is less traumatizing, even if it inflicts damage on others. Sometimes we watch Mad Men characters as they watch history: the assassinations of JFK, Robert F. Kennedy, and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.; Vietnam and domestic riots; the moon landing and the election of presidents. Television and radio coverage of 1960s markers contextualize the characters’ daily lives but only sometimes grind it to a halt. The hall of mirrors adds one more glass pane: Here we are in the pandemic of 2020, watching Mad Men, and then pausing to check out our own national catastrophe on a different kind of screen. Then there’s the integration of tedious but necessary everyday work: the cooking, the feeding, the conversations (and arguments) about relationships, our kids, our parents, our friends. And now here’s a shot of some men dressed up like terrorists invading a state capital with guns; and now here’s pasta with primavera sauce, and apologies for forgetting to include bread in the most recent grocery delivery order. We still have to refill the gas tanks of our cars as needed (gloves or bleach wipes before handling the pump) and enter grocery stores for emergency purchases (forgot to reorder dog food, where’d I put my mask?), and confer with other parents about whether it’s safe to let neighbor kids come over for visits and, if so, for how long and under what conditions. Is the rest of the house in play or only one room? Mad Men got this, too: how mundane everyday existence continued back then, as well as in its designated flashback era, the 1930s, another period of massive unemployment and anxiety about the nation’s survival. The daily slog continued for Don and Peggy and Betty and Roger Sterling and Joan Harris and Harry Crane and every other character on the show, no matter what world-shaking event was happening beyond the front doors of their homes and workplaces. Harry spent the days following Kennedy’s death worrying about how it would affect his TV accounts. Five years later, he fought with Pete over whether considering the financial impact of King’s murder was practical or callous. As the U.S. sank deeper into Vietnam’s jungles and buried its murdered leaders back home, Don and Betty continued to needle each other over child custody, discipline, and pickup times. Peggy and her boyfriend Abe worried about crime, noise, and vermin in their new apartment. Pete destroyed his marriage to Trudy and tried to repair it. Teenage Sally Draper worried about clothes and boys and her place in the world and took care of her mother as she struggled with cancer. She kissed a boy on the night of the moon landing. Even when life stands still, it goes on. Vulture also put all of their writing for every episode/season in one central location for the first time ever. Seems like it could be handy for those watching/re-watching for the first time. https://www.vulture.com/article/mad-men-recaps-guide.html
Just finished a quarantine rewatch (including the first time I watched season 7) Lee Garner Jr definitely would have gotten me too’d
Some funny discussion in this thread around the Pete-Layne fight, which is an unquestionably elite Mad Men scene.
We finished a rewatch a couple months ago. Probably my favorite series to rewatch, after maybe The Wire. There's so much more to notice when you're not as focused on the plot.
In a rewatch... it still never sits right with me that they shit can don after the Hershey debacle. I mean, I know he fucked up doing that but after all the money he had made them over the years and still being a valuable asset. Just seems like overkill for real.
Rewatching season 7… it really doesn’t and never has set well with me the “Don ruined Megan’s life” concept they were pushing when they divorced. because of her marriage, she’s chasing her dreams in California (the reason for their split) in a house Don purchased for her. What exactly of her’s did he ruin?