Nov 13, 2009 0
Season 3 was about Destruction, but the quiet kind of destruction. We saw JFK die, an event which Weiner once claimed he didn’t feel like showing, because what was left to say? Well, Weiner managed to be the first person in years, maybe decades, to say something new about the JFK assassination: far from changing everything and spoiling everyone’s fun and destroying Camelot, it was the best thing to happen to the characters all season. It opened their eyes.
Nov 11, 2009 1
There’s a risk of expecting too much from the fourth season — there are so many possibilities that whatever path Weiner ends up taking will be disappointing. I’ll leave the specific possibilities for later in the discussion. Right now, I just want to commend Matthew Weiner for taking the leap and recognizing that this show was in danger of becoming too static for its own good.
Nov 3, 2009 0
It’s been said that the Kennedy assassination grinded the season’s plot to a halt, which seems like a logical statement when you consider that the penultimate episode is usually a season’s climax. But what exactly was supposed to happen in this episode that didn’t happen? Don and Betty’s situation progressed, with Betty essentially deciding she hates Don. We saw more of Peggy’s gross affair with Duck. Roger Sterling’s life continued to devolve into a morass of booze and pining after Joan. Pete became further disenchanted with his job.
Oct 13, 2009 0
Don’s unhappy at work and typically uninterested by everything happening on Bullet Park Rd. We all know what that means: time to have an affair! At this point, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that Don wants to cheat or that he’d be attracted to a hot, independent brunette interested in things other than puppy dogs and ice cream. It’s also tough to say it’s about the thrill of the chase, because he doesn’t seduce Miss Farrell so much as bed her by sheer force of will. There’s no logic — it’s all about satisfaction, the one thing that he can’t get at work.
Sep 30, 2009 1
We’ve talked a lot over the last few weeks about Mad Men being about the Rise of the Boomers and how it pushed out a lost generation too young to fight in World War II and too old to drop acid with gurus and dropouts. The series depicts the end of a way of life, and if Conrad Hilton represents the embodiment of it, then Paris is the figurehead of what it has become. The Hilton name signifies something very different in 2009 than it did in 1963, and that dissonance says a lot about the culture shift that informs much of the series.
