MAD MEN on AMC - Season 6

but he finds fulfillment in being good at it

he does? i thought the whole final two seasons were just him giving up at his job and not even trying anymore. if anything his job is most of what defined him and without that, he's just some guy crying on a hippie's shoulder

And then he rediscovers that fulfillment in the finale.

Thought the show struck a perfect balance in its attitude towards advertising--far from golden-age deification, but recognizing that, as with any job, good work is good work. Agree that relentless condemnation would have been a drag.

That's a harsh read. Do you think it was really meant as a condemnation of Draper on that scale?

just to clarify, i don't think Weiner (as his post-finale interviews made clear) would be on board 100% with my reading. but i do think the contradictions of Don's character as expressed in the finale are consciously present throughout the series--i think any viewer who stuck with the whole run of the show would agree that the spark of empathy in Don (which was continually denied or misdirected) is what kept him from becoming a despicably self-involved and monotonously self-destructive character. I also think Pete repeats this dynamic in a more comic register. It's very Sopranos in the sense that the better angels of the characters are usually defeated, or in the more hopeful cases a kind of equilibrium is achieved with the good and the bad.

You see Pete as emphatic, too? Most of his plots that I remember involve him trying not to be awful, and usually falling very short. But I do love what they did with that character. He's the closest thing the show had to a villain in the beginning, and they turn him into one of its most sympathetic characters without really redeeming him at all. (Maybe that's just plotting, though: after the first season the plots rarely put him at odds with any of the main characters the way they did at first).

i thought the whole final two seasons were just him giving up at his job and not even trying anymore.

yeah but i don't think that made him happy, thus the show's climax

don draper went in search of himself, found nothing he liked, returned to the thing that made sense on some level

Joan: "Can we continue with the billings?"
Meredith: "Yes."
Joan: "Where were we?"
Meredith: "'Meredith, why don't you step out?'"
Joan: "Well?"
Meredith: "Oh."

<3

Two characters I love who only show up intermittently but were around for pretty much the show's entire run: Mona, Roger's wife, and his secretary Caroline. IMDB has Mona listed for 13 episodes from 2007-2014 (one more than Bob Benson, two fewer than Rachel Menken, Freddie Rumsen, Jane Sterling, Jim Cutler, and Carla); Caroline has fewer seasons (2010-2015) but more episodes, 20 (exactly the same as three other prominent secretaries, Alison, Meredith, and Hildy--weird). Something I completely missed until I started looking at credits: Teyonah Parris, who played Dawn, played the lead character in Chi-Raq.

Mona + Caroline are both wonderful

Mona strikes me as a version of two of '66/'67's iconic female movie characters, Elizabeth Taylor in Virginia Woolf and Anne Bancroft in The Graduate. But she feels more real to me.

The Roger-Peggy interplay in Season 7A's final two episodes (too lazy to switch threads) is phenomenal: dancing to "My Way," Don handing over the Burger Chef presentation to Peggy, Peggy's presentation. It's nice, after so much debauchery and instances of letting everyone in his life down, to see Don recapture some of his stature from the first couple of seasons (not that he wasn't philandering around then, but there was something a lot more solid there). Peggy bringing her neighbor's boy into her presentation is such a Don touch.

The actress who plays Mona, Talia Balsam, is John Slattery's wife in real life.

Had no idea. Just looked her up, and it's even more interesting than that: Martin's daughter (suspected that might be true), also George Clooney's ex-wife.

and dick van patten's niece!

http://pixel.nymag.com/imgs/daily/grub/2017/03/13/13-heinz-mad-men-ads-all.nocrop.w710.h2147483647.jpg

http://www.grubstreet.com/2017/03/heinz-don-draper-mad-men-ad.html?mid=facebook_nymag

Saw Bombshell today. Both Duck Phillips and Lou Avery are in it...it's almost like they raided Mad Men when they were casting for creeps.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BnZ66wCCAAAtigB.jpg

"You know who else they laughed at?"
"You?"

one of my fave exchanges from the show

Forgot about Woke Pete

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwviZz4wQ4s

Kartheiser is grossly underrated as an actor I think

what kind of monster watches dramas with motion smoothing on

Harry, probably.