On at 10 tonight on AMC.
I’m a little sick of the constant references to it in the New York Times, but it’s my favorite show on tv since “The Wire”. What makes it great, to me, is that Don Draper and Peggy Olson actually seem like intelligent people. There are times when you feel like you see them thinking. The only other examples of this I can think of on tv are Lester Freamon on “The Wire” and Frank on “Homicide”.
I do have one quibble, though. Could they have found two more unlikely Kennedy-haters than Roger Sterling and Bert Cooper? Sterling’s obviously as Irish as a pint of Guinness and Cooper has a Boston accent.
Cat Lady
John Slattery (Roger) is from Boston. Also. So yeah, it’s a bit of a stretch to think that an Irish guy from Boston would be a Kennedy hater.
Other than that, I’ve been waiting soooo long for tonight. Finally!
freelancer
Damnit, I’m going to have to give this show another shot.
And you’re right about sensing Freamon and Pembleton thinking. The scene in the Derelict playground in the second to last ep of the 4th season of the Wire where Lester figures out the row house-nail gun tactic and Bunk is all WTF?! is what immediately comes to mind.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpb4sFRrDWs
DougJ
John Slattery (Roger) is from Boston.
Yup. He’s a great actor, but it’s hard for me imagine him hating Kenendy.
amorphous
The fact that Homicide is never discussed when people are talking about criminally underrated TV shows makes it the most criminally underrated TV show ever. Sorry, Arrested Development, but people talk about you all the time.
@freelancer: Never watched it, but I’ll tune in tonight. And I never give in to TV buzzzzzzzz.
Rey
Big fan of this show. I love the part in the first season when the office received it’s first “copying” machine, all the secretaries looked at it like it was from out of space.
My mom always tells me stories about how office politics were back in the day, the drinking and the affairs were rampant. This one manager in her office was notorious for basically “raping” women- everybody knew about it, no big whoop. Fast forward almost 40 years and this same man hit on me at a friends picnic, in front of his wife! His old ass is still a playa…
geg6
OMG, OMG, I can’t wait. Love , love, love Mad Men. And DougJ? Don’t you think that don and Peggy are exactly the same? Don’t you think that’s why he doesn’t treat her the same as the other women, like Joan? And why he came to her in the hospital? He sees himself, despite the casual mysogyny of the times, in her? Anyway, good teevee night. I have some delicious BBQ ribs, loaded baked potato, and salad with bleu cheese plus a lovely bottle of Chilean wine. I will settle down with that (and a big fatty a friend gave me) and enjoy True Blood and Mad Men and be a happy woman.
Rey
@geg6
>a big fatty< damn you to hell- I’m jealous.
freelancer
@amorphous:
Well it’s not so much buzz, as it is other people who share my same tastes rave about Mad Men.
I watched the first 6 eps of the first season last year, and I think I may have missed the point. I grew bored with it because I saw it as a pretentious period piece done for the sake of doing a period piece, a la “Everyone’s smoking! Nobody ever does that anymore! The wasps are all cheating on each other. The 60s was so different, quaint, and yet not.”
I don’t know, I just let a bias get in the way. OTOH, I did go see District 9 earlier today. That movie was pretty great.
DougJ
OMG, OMG, I can’t wait. Love , love, love Mad Men. And DougJ? Don’t you think that don and Peggy are exactly the same? Don’t you think that’s why he doesn’t treat her the same as the other women, like Joan? And why he came to her in the hospital? He sees himself, despite the casual mysogyny of the times, in her?
He’s also always attracted to ambitious career women — Midge, Rachel, Jimmy’s agent.
Cat Lady
@geg6: My high school friend writes True Blood, wrote a lot of the episodes of Six Feet Under, and wrote Lars and the Real Girl. She struggled in the business for so long, and those of us who know her love to hear random people unbidden say how much they love her work. It happens a lot more now with True Blood. Vampires have been berry berry good to her (and Hollywood)!
amorphous
@freelancer: Wait, now Mad Men sounds horrible.
geg6
freelancer: You really need to see both Season 1 and Season 2. I, too, first went into it thinking, oh, period stuff highlighted to be edgy. But the writing is amazing. And the characterizations! Especially of the women! Amazing stuff. These women are nuanced, with rich emotional and intellectual lives. These are real women. I’ve never seen anything on tv more devastating, emotionally, than SPOILER ALERT Joan’s rape. One of the best and most real scenes I’ve ever seen in a fictional piece, in print or on film or on videotape. Devastating. And rang every bit true from start to finish. I was drained after watching it. Seriously.
geg6
Cat Lady: Holy shit! I love your friend! Oh, please tell her she has a huge fan! I just saw Lars OnDemand this past week. I love young Mr. Gosling. Sweet movie and very quirky. But True Blood? Genius! I’m a fan of the books and, though I have quibbles because of that, I think I’m almost completely content with the adaptation. Eric, especially, is perfect. He’s my favorite and I root for him.
amorphous
@geg6: Spoiler alerts really ought to come well before the spoiler.
freelancer
@geg6:
Yeah you should probably separate spoilers by putting them in their own paragraph with lots of line breaks to separate them from the other graphs. Somebody here spoiled a major plot element of District 9 here friday. (in fairness, it’s mentioned in almost all the reviews of the movie, but it felt like a spoiler when I read it).
JK
Doug,
Do you like Rescue Me and did you like The Shield?
Does anyone know how many episodes will air for this season of Mad Men?
I realize we’re not dealing with a History Channel series, but I’m very curious to see how they’ll deal with the 1963 Civil Rights March including MLK’s I Have A Dream Speech, JFK’s assassination, and the start of Beatlemania.
I’m guessing JFK’s assassination would be left for the season finale.
@amorphous: My choice for most criminally underrated tv drama series would be The Shield. I’d go so far as to call it the Rodney Dangerfield of tv drama series. The series finale was the best single episode of any drama series I’ve ever seen and those mooks at the Television Academy of Arts and Sci didn’t give it any damn Emmy nominations.
CT
@freelancer: I’m kinda with you-I watched 5 episodes last year and while everything is very well done, I didn’t really like any of the characters or care about what happened to them, especially Draper-he just seemed like a dick, and not a very interesting one at that.
Joshua Norton
The Kennedy’s were hardly the Belles of Boston before John was elected President. Irish & Catholic? In Boston? Prior to Kennedy being elected, anti-Irish/anti-Papist sentiment was part of the Proper Bostonian culture. The Kennedy’s were strictly “those people”. The main reason Joe Kennedy started the compound on Cape Cod was because they couldn’t get into any of the more exclusive enclaves of that time.
So anti-Kennedy sentiment from a Bostonian back then is not really that much of a flight of fancy.
Marc
He’s also always attracted to ambitious career women—Midge, Rachel, Jimmy’s agent.
I thought that was Jimmy’s wife?!?
I don’t think Don is attracted to Peggy, though. She wasn’t an ambitious career woman until he basically created her career. (Didn’t she make a clumsy pass at him in the first episode and get shot down?) He sees her as a protege, not a conquest.
DougJ
Do you like Rescue Me and did you like The Shield?
I like Rescue Me when I’ve seen it. I can’t watch The Shield because it’s got that guy from The Commish in it.
JK
@DougJ:
I urge you to reconsider your decision about The Shield. The cast was universally outstanding and the storylines were great.
SonnyB
A Homocide reference! And to my favorite character Frank Pembelton. A twofer. Ok time for True Blood.
geg6
Sorry, can’t do paragraphs on the Blackberry. And sorry for the spoiler, though I know the whole thing was discussed heavily in the media and also on this blog at the time. Anyway, what I said is hardly the most shocking aspect of the situation with Joan. I didn’t give it all away.
freelancer
LOL, Konservative Kulture Movie Review of District 9:
http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/ckozlowski/2009/08/14/review-%E2%80%98district-9%E2%80%99-brilliant-and-stupid/
Shorter:
It’s a movie about ALIENS! I think I can also suspend my disbelief about the mockumentary style.
Verbatim:
Yeah, why no sympathy for the chasers, I mean gawww, oppressing people is a full-time job!
Mona
I love Mad Men, but since I refuse to pay for cable/dish (until they become a la carte to a greater degree), I only order the DVD series from Netflix as it becomes available — so I’m always a season behind as I also am with Weeds and House. Thus, sadly, I won’t read any further commentary here on season 3.
eastriver
BEST DRAMA: The Shield, Homocide, House
BEST COMEDY: Black Adder, Fawlty Towers, Lucky Louie
drillfork
@Cat Lady:
Not familiar with any of those shows, but I did see “Lars and the Real Girl.” Wonderful, quirky story. Very moving flick…
DougJ
I don’t think Don is attracted to Peggy, though.
No, but he likes career women more generally.
Cat Lady
@drillfork:
It was a sweet story, and when it was nominated for an Oscar, we were all like Yay!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Oliver
Local girl makes good.
Mike in NC
Have just started to watch this show after all the great word of mouth. Saw a couple of episodes from Season 1 and 2 last year. Season 3 opener featured the fine actor from “Fringe” and “Benjamin Bratt”. One scene took place in the famous Baltimore downtown German restaurant Hausner’s, which closed down in the early 1990s. Excellent research since it looked convincingly like the real place, cluttered with baroque European art and sculpture. Gotta rent all of Seasons 1 and 2 now…
Don
Can’t watch the Shield because Chiklis was in the Commish? Did you refuse to watch Ocean’s 11 because Clooney was in an episode of Facts of Life?
Crazy talk. The Shield is five seasons of morally ambiguous delight. And if Vic Mackey ever heard you compare him to that doughy commish he’d make you taste his gun.
Anne Laurie
@Mona: Hulu.com runs the last 5 or 6 episodes of HOUSE a week after they’re aired (ditto BONES and FRINGE and RESCUE ME). I’m in your situation, watching “cable” shows only after they were released on Netflix, but some wonderful soul here at BJ introduced me to Hulu and guaranteed I’d spend even more time glued to the PC, happy dance!
I should also thank whoever mentioned yesterday that KINGDOM is available on Hulu (Season 1) and Netflix (Season 2). I adore Stephen Fry, and knowing he was doing a new series I couldn’t access was driving me nertz.
bh
i only have 2 complete series on DVD, homicide and the shield. the last episode of season 5 of the shield was probably the most riveting television i’ve ever seen.
Mr Furious
DougJ, if you watch a few episodes of The Shield, Vic Mackey will make you forget The Commish ever existed.
Wile E. Quixote
@Big Hollywood
Look, you’ve got to remember that Carl Koslowski is the guy who got thrown out of a theatre for repeatedly yelling “she’s in the attic! she’s in the attic!” during a performance of The Diary of Anne Frank.
The Saff
Couldn’t stay up for “Mad Men” last night so I’m going to watch it tonight (love the DVR). My husband and I have been hooked since the pilot episode. I reminded him last night of his failed prediction 2 or 3 episodes into season #1: “This show isn’t going to make. There are no likeable characters.” Wrong!
Vanity Fair has an article about it in the new issue.
I’m very impressed with AMC for both “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad.”
KXB
Very impressed with the opening of Season 3. I am not giving anything away by pointing out that Don has become such an adept liar, that when asked to recount a real story – he is simply at a loss for words. Not only can he not tell the truth, he does not remember the truth anymore. Plus, after being overlooked for much of Season 2, we get a Sal storyline that is at times comedic and painful to watch. While Don is relaxed about leading multiple lives, Sal clearly stumbles.
Was a big fan of Homicide – I own seasons 1-3 on DVD. I was thinking of getting Season 4 just for the episode A Doll’s Eyes – where Marcia Gay Harden’s kid gets shot at the mall. It also shows Pembleton struggling with his Catholicism – he clearly has an issue with the Almighty, given the violence he deals with in his line of work. But a part of him still wants to find comfort in the tenets of his faith, so although he rejects a free pair of tickets to see the Pope in Baltimore, he sneaks a peek of TV coverage in the break room, like a child staying up late to watch TV.
MNPundit
Hey! Hands off my show!
I saw the first episode on TV when it premiered because I like Vincent Kartheiser. Ever since the end of the first season I feel like people are coming onto my turf!
Get away!
Robert
Mad Men is an overrated soap opera.
ET
there’s a great interview with Bryan Batt in nymag this week
http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2009/08/mad_mens_bryan_batt_aka_salvat.html