Mad Men

[Penny Lane]

Getting into Mad Men on Netflix. Currently watching the first episode. I hope January Jones doesn't ruin this.

[NoDayButToday]

I've been rewatching the last couple weeks. Season 1 January Jones is way more likeable than like, season 3 January Jones. It made me sad realizing how much I used to like Betty.

[Dean James]

Watching Betty, I finally realized where all the fucked up people in the 70s and 80s came from.

[Lobelia]

I wanna buy all the seasons and just start all over again. That's weird, right?

[angelais]

I wanna buy all the seasons and just start all over again. That's weird, right?

That is not weird at all. You are suffering from withdrawal and like drug, you need you fix.

[Miss A]

Houston, we have a date.

It seems like the last time “Mad Men” was on the air was sometime in the 1960s. Now Don Draper is finally back.
AMC has announced a return date for the critically-acclaimed period drama. “Mad Men” will be back on the air on March 25, kicking off its fifth season with a two-hour premiere. The special will be written by series creator Matthew Weiner and directed by Jennifer Getzinger.
AMC made the announcement at the Television Critics Association press tour in Pasadena, Calif.


'Mad Men' Returns to AMC on March 25 - Speakeasy - WSJ

[angelais]

Ooh a two hour premiere. I am soooooooo EXCITED!

[KrisNine]

Ok, I've watched this entire series, all four seasons, on Apple tv/Netflix. It took me a few weeks. One of the best shows ever. Can't wait until the new seaso, but it'll be weird watching one episode a week.

I also just read this whole thread in a few days, so I'm caught up on Mad Men. I love Don, but I also love Betty. She's a bitch, but the character is great. Aldo love Pete and Peggy. I was confused about their baby, too. She definitely gave it up for adoption. Her sister was pregnant at the same time, so the third child is the sisters. I even read where Matthew Weiner said he intentionally mislead people into thinking the sister might be raising the baby, but that the baby was adopted.

[KrisNine]

Anyone else excited??

[LynnieD]

Words cannot express how excited I am!!! Gonna break out the martini's and start smoking like its 1965!

[Lobelia]

OMG Lynnie, I thought about you last night when I started my mad men weekend marathon! I am watching all of last season (on my dvr) back to back so I'll be all prepared on Sunday.

SO. FREAKIN. EXCITED. I have missed my husband Jon something terrible

[LynnieD]

An interesting article about the upcoming season, no real spoilers:


That Mad Men is the greatest piece of sustained television ever made seems obvious, at least to me. The more interesting question is how. How did a show, without much violence, without much sex — a show focused on the office politics of morally dubious, greedy, shallow people concocting now-tacky campaigns for long-forgotten products — become nothing less than a vision of modern life? Fortunately, Mad Men has arrived in an era of great television criticism, so you can read many excellent competing explanations for its strength, several of which are quite compelling: that it takes place at the beginning of the age of persuasion, that it mixes nostalgia with contempt, that it's an Oedipal show, showing us the failure of our fathers and the desirability of our mothers. Any and all of these arguments might well be true, and the show is certainly large enough to contain multiple meanings. But to me the source of Mad Men's power is in its central, hidden theme, everywhere present and nowhere explicated: the unpredictability of life.

The greatest moments in Mad Men have always played on this unknowability, either for comedy or for tragedy. In the first season, after Roger Sterling's heart attack, he moans to Don: "All these years I thought it would be the ulcer. I did everything they told me. I drank the cream, ate the butter. Then I get hit with a coronary." When Joan is raped — one of the most shocking scenes on any show in television — her look of mute, horrified endurance is tragic in the full sense of that word. You can see her worldview instantly crumbling. She had everything under control, everything figured out; she had used the opportunities afforded by Madison Avenue to land a doctor fiancé. She had accepted the rules of the game and played it perfectly. Then life came along, as it will, to declare: You don't know a thing.

Everything in Mad Men is predictable, but only in hindsight. Marriages that seem functional collapse. Marriages that could never work out miraculously do. Suddenly women have real power. Who could have seen that coming? The best-looking man in New York finds himself in a shit apartment paying a hooker to slap him in the face. And as she's slapping him he wonders: How the hell did this happen to me? Exactly. Exactly. That's exactly what time does to people.

The fifth season, premiering this weekend, begins with the arrival of the civil rights movement. It is the first time in the show when the sixties — that era in the intellectual imagination when supposedly everything changed — have seemed turbulent. The sixties of the first four seasons of Mad Men have been guys going to work and trying to make a living; ordinary life has possessed more than enough chaos. Politics has been a minor concern at most. I suppose you could make the argument that the extreme volatility of our current situation, the total inability of our elites to figure out what's about to happen — whether it's the popping of housing bubbles, or the impact of occupations, or the effect of banking deregulation — has made the show particularly relevant to us now.

Maybe, a little. I think the truth, though, is that life's inexhaustible ability to surprise is so permanent that everybody in every time faces it. The fundamental mystery of the future is as ancient as story. The wisdom of Solomon warned, "For he knoweth not that which shall be: for who can tell him when it shall be?" (Ecclesiastes 8:7.) Who the fuck knows? is one of the earliest, most forlorn of cries. The question never goes away: How are we supposed to live when we don't really understand what's going to happen next? When we're not really aware of the results of our actions? It's in the Bhagavad Gita; it's in Shakespeare; it's in Mad Men. That's why the show is a classic.

The characters do what the rest of us do in the face of the future; they bumble through. They try to figure out what's happening and what's going to happen, and sometimes they're right and sometimes they're wrong. Every last human being is like that — you, me, and the rest, in the sixties or right now. We're all drinking the cream, eating the butter.


Read more: Mad Men Season 5 Predictions - Mad Men's Unpredictable Future - Esquire

[Just Kill Me]

I'm so excited!
Posted from my iPhone

[Trixie]

And I just can't hide it!

[angelais]

I'm about to lose control and I think I like it.

Okay, enough with the Pointer Sisters flashback tunes. I am so excited for the season premiere tomorrow. I am sure after it is over I will be posting some sort of Don Draper manifesto on GR, so be prepared.