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Mad Men
So, I rented Mad Men, and I have to say...I don't like it. Oh, I recognize what a high quality show it is, but I really don't like it. When the character I like the most is the one with the wife, the mistress, and the new girlfriend...something is seriously wrong. I dislike all the characters, and there are a few that I despise completely, to the point of wanting to turn of the tv when they are in the scene. It's not that I can't root for amoral people, but this isn't at the level of a Profit, where you're just waiting to see the new ways he destroys people. No, this show is about run-of-the-mill shitty behavior. Lives of quiet desperation, and all that. And I've never really gone for that. The only way I could watch The Ice Storm was by leaving it on and playing solitaire on the computer in the next room.
What really makes me uncomfortable is the rampant sexism, and the ways that women reinforce and tutor each other in their subservient roles. Yes, I get that this is part of the point--that they are showing what work environments were really like for women at the time, not some sanitized version, and are consequently showing how trapped both men and women were in that dynamic. But it's really hard to watch.
I think what I find interesting about the premise of the show is how advertising at that time created the American mythology--what it meant to be manly, or feminine, or American--in a way that we are still wrestling with. But I think I'd be happier with a documentary of the golden age of advertising. There's just not enough time in the show spent on the ads.
I'll finish out the season, but despite all the gushing I've heard over the show, I think that will be it for me. Sorry folks.
What really makes me uncomfortable is the rampant sexism, and the ways that women reinforce and tutor each other in their subservient roles. Yes, I get that this is part of the point--that they are showing what work environments were really like for women at the time, not some sanitized version, and are consequently showing how trapped both men and women were in that dynamic. But it's really hard to watch.
I think what I find interesting about the premise of the show is how advertising at that time created the American mythology--what it meant to be manly, or feminine, or American--in a way that we are still wrestling with. But I think I'd be happier with a documentary of the golden age of advertising. There's just not enough time in the show spent on the ads.
I'll finish out the season, but despite all the gushing I've heard over the show, I think that will be it for me. Sorry folks.
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Which isn't to say your reaction isn't valid, naturally, or that you should keep watching if it's uniformly unpleasant for you, but I wasn't sold at all on the show until ... well, the back third. Now, I'm looking forward to S3's start this Sunday with the kind of anticipation I feel for only a few shows.
And considering that I'm an avowed fan of likable, happy ending, crowd-pleasing genre hackery, the fact that I'm as into a show that's as decidedly ambiguous, often unlikable, and often seriously depressing as Mad Men is, that's saying something.
You might not change your opinion once you've seen the back half of the season, but I hope you do. And if not, I commend you for giving it an honest, full season try.
(and regardless of what you think of the characters, it is almost painfully gorgeous, isn't it? *dies*)
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The second is that the Drapers are disturbing like my grandparents. My grandfather also fought in the war and got a purple heart. He also worked in midtown Manhattan, and commuted by train to a nice suburb an hour out. In fact, they still live there, in the house they bought in 1952, that still looks like the Draper house. The decor has been meticulously maintained from the mid-fifties. My grandmother dressed like Betty and was a homemaker like Betty (she even got a feature in a ladies magazine for her interior decorating). In 1960, my dad and his siblings were 3, 6, and 9, spanning about the same age as the Draper children. As people, they are very, very different (not least of which that my grandmother was absolutely in charge of that family, while my grandfather wrote humorous limerics in quiet protest). But as far as culture, values, fashion, just the whole world being depicted in the show, that's my grandparents. And it's really hard to watch Mad Men and see any comparison between the people on the show and my grandparents.
As I said, the appeal to me is to look at the world of the 1950s (okay, 1960), which very much influences today, especially in my own family. So I am very curious about peeling back the layers of that time to try to understand the older generation. I just don't want to be shown, when I peel back the layers, that these people are what it was actually like.
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Entertainment that is challenging with morally gray characters is something I enjoy but there's morally gray and challenging, and then there's "stuff that depresses the hell out of me." D:
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