MAD MEN on AMC - Season 6

"mother-in-law" transformation is, like most of this stuff, so blatant a motif/metaphor as to be text not subtext, i am just stunned by the bad sfx makeup choices for jones. she doesn't look heavy, she looks like she has gout

with the exception of some of the garish formalwear, Don's creative team wouldn't look that out of place if I saw them at the bar.

Was just thinking that some of them would totally pass for today's hipster.

how long have you concentrated on this woman's neck

those ridiculously vague and meaningless 'next week on mad men' spots would be a good thing to parody.

― balls, Tuesday, April 9, 2013 11:05 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

its kind of comforting how this hasn't changed over all the seasons

i don't see the brunette thing as betty turning into her mother in law. she has been rebelling in petty ways against her immediate family situation since the early seasons, this feels more like another instance of that. anyway, betty's whole corny hobo odyssey started with her rejecting the mother in law's claim of privilege to the cop.

ok re the confusion over the heart attack flashback:

don & megan (wearing a leopard print coat) enter the building, greet jonesy and megan says how sorry she is to be back in the cold. then, cut, jonesy falls and megan (wearing an orangish jacket) runs panicked toward him. so the time cut is meant to indicate don's flashing back on jonesy's near death immediately after returning from hawaii.

That was either clunky as hell or its misdirection of some sort.

well yeah it was supposed to be a shocking open that made you think Don was dying

not sure how effective it was, though

i thought it was very creative and executed skillfully

i thought that new hairdo was a small gesture towards betty turning into violinist tearaway girl, the don draper to her dick whitman

this episode does cohere nicely thinking about it in retrospect tbf

how long have you concentrated on this woman's neck
― I, rrational (mh)

more than the makeup team apparently

january jones was pregnant last season and they decided to treat it as 'betty fat', continued this season (though she's lost weight) cuz it's not that long after last season (lane killed himself in february, it's december here) and nobody's invented jogging plus 'betty fat' fun way for writers to humiliate and torture betty. thought betty came off well here (even the bizarro wtf 'why doncha just rape her' line was meant teasingly, past few seasons she would've meant it), enjoyed her dealing w/ mother francis. somewhat wondering if she went brunette cuz she somehow was a bottle blonde like that hippie asshole accused her of or if cuz liz taylor is the role model for thick women at this point or just going to st marks made her want a change and token breaking free (sally - 'what happened to you?') and for betty that means hair and there was no way the writers were gonna leave 'she looks like his mom now' on the table. contrary to ppl above i actually liked heart attack misdirection and flashback, puts you in the mind of don death obsessed but doesn't dilly dally around for long w/ some 'who had the heart attack' twist.

re my friends whining about the look this season -- I think it's not so much the way Mad Men is executing the look as much as they're all mid-century modern spazzes and so the late 60's for them is just too much tastelessness to bear apparently

...

rmde

Roger says it to his daughter but I'm not sure who he's referring to (her husband Brooks? her new stepdad?)

yeah, Roger's talking about his grandson, and his daughter continues the reference by calling her husband Walt, the name of Skeezix's adoptive father in the comic strip.

i thought it was very creative and executed skillfully

the cold opening making you think it was Don having the heart attack worked fine but the time difference between them getting back from Hawaii and when the heart attack actually happened was weird.

agreed, but weird in an effective way imo

we have to skip it back a couple of times to figure out exactly what was going on. on reflection, it was really good.

also, initially we had a version with the last 7 minutes missing. those seven minutes proved kind of essential.

I enjoyed this but I've recently gotten into Battlestar Gallactica and the thrill of waiting to see what happens next on Mad Men kind of pales atm. Then again it's sort of a slow burn show, so two or three more eps and I'll be back on the edge of my seat. The second half was WAY better than the 1st.

don, haunted by death while vacationing on several active volcanoes in the middle of the ocean, returns to new york around the winter solstice, and upon seeing his doorman remembers when said doorman dropped apparently dead of a heart attack in front of him, but was revived, and continues to live and work, what does it mean.

weird editing but effective storytelling imo

loving stan w/the beard. and peggy realising she's really good at this shit. and meghan is so beautiful it hurts.

Yeah feel like Peggy is going to be great this season. Loved her shooting the breeze with stan on the phone.

Going to miss Lane though.

Can't wait for Don to yank the needle off "Revolution 9."

They should get a contract for a record company this year. Would be awesome to see Don coming up with the "The Man Can't Bust Our Music".
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_tBqi5ja-dgs/S9bsBdANCxI/AAAAAAAAC-A/OoeUAHZUgI4/s320/the_man.jpg

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_tBqi5ja-dgs/S9bsBdANCxI/AAAAAAAAC-A/OoeUAHZUgI4/s320/the_man.jpg

There was a point when Peggy was talking w the exec about the 'Lend me your ears' problem where i was thinking "Peggy aren't you supposed to be coming up with the ideas here? Isn't that what an ad agency does? Why aren't you guys going into this meeting with a dozen different ways to spin the problematic Super Bowl spot?"

the way they did meghan's makeup in Hawaii, where she's standing outside the hotel room looking slightly ruddy from the sun (in that still someone posted way upthread)... v v well done

There was a point when Peggy was talking w the exec about the 'Lend me your ears' problem where i was thinking "Peggy aren't you supposed to be coming up with the ideas here? Isn't that what an ad agency does? Why aren't you guys going into this meeting with a dozen different ways to spin the problematic Super Bowl spot?"

― Emperor Cos Dashit (Adam Bruneau), Wednesday, April 10, 2013 12:41 PM (25 minutes ago) Bookmark

cuz they established they didnt have time for a reshoot

But the final solution didn't call for a reshoot either, just some new voice overdub.

yes... that's... exactly... the... point...?

They weren't going into the meeting with a ton of ways to spin it because she didn't know what the real problem was until the obnoxious dudes at the office walked her through the jist of the Tonight Show routine, and by that point it was just a couple hours before the Koss people were in for their meeting?

point of meeting was to convince guy to stay w/ campaign, that there was no real crisis. she came prepared to spin this - pointed out that news story re: war trophies had been in the news for awhile so tonight show joke really presented no new information, no new crisis. client didn't buy it and suggested just scrapping slogan and having dull boilerplate copy about how koss headphones work. peg pointed out this would solve 'ear' problem but leave horrible ad that also had a non sequitor in it. you would have a dull ad that also didn't make sense. not sure if peggy just assumed green bay would beat dallas or if the ice bowl was earlier in the day than the afl championship but either way super bowl is too soon to conceive and shoot whole new campaign so they have to jerry rig something from the old campaign. even now i'm not sure how easy it would be for an agency to conceive and shoot a super bowl ad a week or two before the super bowl (though tbf a super bowl ad means more now than it did for super bowl II), ppl's minds were blown when oreo's twitter account was able to whip up a topical macro during the blackout at this year's super bowl.

(though tbf a super bowl ad means more now than it did for super bowl II)

I wondered about how big a deal an ad would've been then:

It was the first time a Super Bowl was televised live on only one network, which has been the case for all following Super Bowl games. While the Orange Bowl was sold out for the game, unconditional blackout rules in the NFL prevented the live telecast from being shown in the Miami area.

Kiss the south Florida market goodbye, Koss.

you know the funny thing is the day i watched this ep is the day my koss headphones broke :/

worst co-branding stunt ever :(

my leica cheated on me with an advertising person

on the ther hand, my doctor rollerskated to work.

i kinda spaced out during the scene where roger's daughter is pitching him on the fridge idea but she was talking about purchasing the patent for trucking fridge tech? bc that seems like a huge moneymaker

Investing in a fridge truck line. Still seems good, but a thing many people may be working on.

An Internetfull of fan-fic writers out there just created a new file titled "MAD MEN - SOPRANOS CROSSOVER.doc"

http://www.happyplace.com/23042/mad-men-facebook-recap-season6-episode-1

bad

it is bad but i laffed anyway. as opportune a moment as any to remind ppl that mad style is back also: http://www.tomandlorenzo.com/2013/04/mad-style-the-doorway-part-1.html

from that intro they saw room 237

why would anyone spend that much time creating something that bad? like 1/8 of the way though wouldn't you realize how terrible the idea was and just like... stop?

fake facebook walls of big tv shows are pretty popular

that's no excuse.

There were a few old ones for entire tv shows, but I saw one for Game of Thrones last week, so I guess the fake FB episode recap is becoming a thing?

I don't need that in my life

It ws something you could definitely do a lot better, but it's a shit idea.

I liked it.