TV Thread - beware, [expletive] can get spoilery

[JL21]

My favorite Mad Men episode is the one where Matthew Wiener and the writing staff develop a world and characters so rich that you understand their motivations so completely and where they're coming from that with a line or scene that seems innocuous on paper, you can feel so much because it is earned and designed. It's not always fun, it's not always relaxing, but it's a great piece of art/culture.

I'll be nice and put aside the snark. But you can understand that the show makes itself a ripe target for it since every ad for Mad Men makes it a point to tell everyone that it's the best thing in the history of TV.

I'm honestly bored to tears with that show at this point, and that wasn't always the case. Think back to what the five primary characters were in season one- Don, Joan, Peggy, Roger, and Pete. They're the same people now. Things have happened and we've gotten gobs of explanation about their motivation but the characters haven't evolved in any way. We know exactly how they're going to behave. That's a lot of spinning its wheels. It may be well done, it may be well written, it may give us a lot about the characters, but it's the same stuff we've seen for years now. I find it kind of masturbatory, really.

That's also why season 5 is my favorite in the series. They finally did something DIFFERENT instead of drilling the same character traits into the audience. It was when Don wasn't [expletive] everything within 10 feet of him, and when Peggy leaves the agency. They evolved. And then they immediately devolved right back to where they were in the next season.

Earlier on, I was on board because they played up the era-specific stuff, which gave us a great window into the way society has changed (and in some ways, hadn't changed). But they've abandoned a lot of that. I've read where Wiener purposely started scaling it back because he didn't want the show to be known specifically for that. To his credit, he's seeing it through with Peggy and Joan and the race relations stuff still shows up from time to time. That's when I'm not bored out of my skull.

[ghostrunner]

I wasn't a fan of Don going back into his spiral but I feel almost exactly the opposite otherwise. I like that the characters don't fundamentally change and I like that it's just about everyday people going about their sad lives. It's a nice break. It's about the only show I watch that doesn't routinely rely on character deaths or violence for its "twists." It doesn't even have twists, really. Beyond the early Don/Dick stuff which I didn't like anyway. I thought it also improved immensely after Don and Betty got divorced. It's a short story every week, and that sounds pretentious and cliched by now, but that's how I view it. And again it's why the secrecy over plot details is so strange.

[33anda3rd]

Draper might be unchanged (hey, he didn't bang Neve Campbell in E1 this season, that's progress) but he's being more honest about himself, and Sally telling him she loves him this week and him having to just stop and compute in his head that he's just been honest with someone and they love him despite everything was kind of awesome and that could be a game-changer for the rest of the series. It's oddly like the Sterling/Sterling's daughter in E1 this season, where his daughter is like "I forgive you Daddy" and Sterling doesn't know how to deal with it properly, but he knows how to deal with it as Roger Sterling--a flippant "I forgive you too, let's get a drink and have some eggs benedict." The difference between Don and Roger, the juxtaposition of these two characters over those two scenes in those two episodes is pretty dope IMO.

Peggy, we've never seen this kind of sociopathic frustration with her personal life, where it distracts her to the point of self-sabotage. We got hints of it with Peggy-as-landlord last season, but not to the point that it impacted her work. That's change.

[ThatGuy]

Peggy totally embarrassed herself with the whole flower situation. I know work sucks with Mr. Rogers/Lou Avery and her personal life has gone to hell, but I always figured she would remember the many indignities she suffered on the way up as a means of keeping herself grounded. She doesn't seem like the terrible/unreasonable boss type, but I guess her meltdown has nudged her in that direction.

Regarding Don and Sally, I think Sally dropped a bomb on him when she mentioned that it's more embarrassing for her to catch Don in a lie than it is for him to merely lie. The fact that she was going to sweep such a huge discovery under the rug is very indicative of her total disillusionment with Don as a father/respectable person. Matt Weiner doesn't seem like the "tie everything up with a big happy bow" kind of show runner, but I do hope this bit of honesty leads to some kind of positive change in Don. I've been watching some older episodes, and adding up all of his douche moves would appear to be impossible.

[thrill]

That's also why season 5 is my favorite in the series. They finally did something DIFFERENT instead of drilling the same character traits into the audience. It was when Don wasn't [expletive] everything within 10 feet of him, and when Peggy leaves the agency. They evolved. And then they immediately devolved right back to where they were in the next season.

That's interesting, because it's kind of why I like it, conceptually. Not while I'm watching it, but when I'm thinking about it. I really like it because it has the most human characters on TV. It really captures how people don't truly change, can't get out of their own way and how consuming culture and getting what you want, doesn't make you happy and how the pursuit of that can damage your life.

That scene last week where everything was played so small, so lived-in and how Sally in many ways was more mature than Don and just withheld herself and withheld herself when she knew her dad was fishing for a connection until her father finally broke down and came clean and when he finally did, she chose to accept that he is just that way - deceitful, duplicitous but because he was damaged and then without fanfare she turned to him and told him she loved him - the same way that I have to accept things about my parents that drive me crazy and then find a way to move on with loving them and the same way my kids will have to do that with me...it was just really honest and moving to me despite being quiet and uneventful.

[Vidor]

The Don Draper Humiliation Tour in Season 6 was very tiresome. So far this season I'm cautiously optimistic that Don has once again become a character who can grow and change, and is not simply a punching bag for the writers.

[Jocephus]

[/youtube]

auditioning the handy scene

[ghostrunner]

It's weird going back to that first season and seeing how Skyler, Hank, and Marie are written. Probably the biggest flaw early in the show. It's a credit to the actors that you buy the transformation.

[AWvsCBsteeeerike3]

It's weird going back to that first season and seeing how Skyler, Hank, and Marie are written. Probably the biggest flaw early in the show. It's a credit to the actors that you buy the transformation.

what was wrong with it and what transformation?

[ghostrunner]

I think they all come off as dopes. Unrealistically so, given what they become later. And I remember thinking they were caricatures the first time through. Hank is a big dumb cop who doesn't seem that competent. Marie is a flaky airhead. Skyler is an overbearing, henpecky wife, and it's played up in such a way that it creates sympathy for Walt. Similar in ways to the Annette Benning character in American Beauty. That hand job scene makes just makes her seem kind of terrible with no context.