Buy Curious
Mad Men - Season 1 (2007)
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
There's one thing at least that Mad Men shares with The Sopranos: they both condescend to gay characters. When Salvatore talks about a salesman pinning a particular tie to him for over an hour at the department store, he sounds like Tobias Fünke more than a closeted mid-century art department head. Why would someone like Sal sound any different from the rest of the guys at Sterling Cooper, instead of telegraphing his homosexuality to the oh-so-knowing audience every time he opens his mouth?
There was a moment, about halfway through the season, when that approach became pretty offensive - long before Joan's roommate enters the picture, too - and that might be the moment when the blush came off the rose. I think Mad Men is best when it's funny. Not "take back the night" funny - Betty in the backyard with a BB gun - but casually so: namely, Don Draper doing drugs with the bohemian crowd in Greenwich Village.
As Don, Jon Hamm is great in the role of a man of mysterious origins andcontrived complicated lies, and he and the show's wonderful actors carry a great deal of Mad Men's appeal with truly lazy assists from the writers. When the scripts succeed, they do so by showing, which they don't do enough. But when Don jumps the gun on firing a junior exec, and Roger hires the kid back in a way that lets Don save face, I feel pretty close to some approximation of what, exactly, made Madison Avenue suits different from the average dressed-up bear.
Betty, of course, looks a lot like a Gil Elvgren girl on the lawn with her cigarette and gun, but January Jones sounds - in her cadence and delivery - more like a Whit Stillman heroine to me. One thing I like about Whit is that you never see his characters reciting exposition at a New York psychiatrist's office. Not that Mr. Metropolitan couldn't set his own sights a little higher these days (whatever you say about Gossip Girl's Manhattan carousel of a plotline, shrinks don't figure into it), but Mad Men should be as consistently good as its first episode's opening scene, which is great. Instead the show just falls, falls away.
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
There's one thing at least that Mad Men shares with The Sopranos: they both condescend to gay characters. When Salvatore talks about a salesman pinning a particular tie to him for over an hour at the department store, he sounds like Tobias Fünke more than a closeted mid-century art department head. Why would someone like Sal sound any different from the rest of the guys at Sterling Cooper, instead of telegraphing his homosexuality to the oh-so-knowing audience every time he opens his mouth?
There was a moment, about halfway through the season, when that approach became pretty offensive - long before Joan's roommate enters the picture, too - and that might be the moment when the blush came off the rose. I think Mad Men is best when it's funny. Not "take back the night" funny - Betty in the backyard with a BB gun - but casually so: namely, Don Draper doing drugs with the bohemian crowd in Greenwich Village.
As Don, Jon Hamm is great in the role of a man of mysterious origins and
Betty, of course, looks a lot like a Gil Elvgren girl on the lawn with her cigarette and gun, but January Jones sounds - in her cadence and delivery - more like a Whit Stillman heroine to me. One thing I like about Whit is that you never see his characters reciting exposition at a New York psychiatrist's office. Not that Mr. Metropolitan couldn't set his own sights a little higher these days (whatever you say about Gossip Girl's Manhattan carousel of a plotline, shrinks don't figure into it), but Mad Men should be as consistently good as its first episode's opening scene, which is great. Instead the show just falls, falls away.
posted by NPK at 1:19 PM
<< Home