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Mad Men - Season 2 - Page 6

post #251 of 267
1/13/09 at 8:18pm
How can you not get a little misty eyed during the Carosel speech in Season 1?
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post #252 of 267
1/13/09 at 8:24pm
Thread Starter 
That speech is amazing in ways that have nothing to do with nostalgia. It's really a commentary on nostalgia as much as it is a speech about nostalgia, knocking the wind out of that idea and whatnot, especially in the context of the episode. I used part of the v.o. for a video I edited and it played perfectly in the context of that, but I was really using it to take the piss.
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post #253 of 267
1/14/09 at 7:28pm
Thread Starter 
Jimmy Barrett's scenes with Don and Betty at the end of Gold Violin are astonishing. I mean, holy crap.
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post #254 of 267
1/14/09 at 8:20pm
You ain't seen nothing yet Rath.
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post #255 of 267
1/14/09 at 10:19pm
Thread Starter 
Maybe because I'm watching the season all at once, but it really seems like a lot of this season is Weiner and co. daring us to like these characters despite their despicable actions. The difference being that these are supposedly productive members of society, as opposed to the guys of Sopranos and Deadwood and so forth.
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post #256 of 267
1/14/09 at 11:28pm
What's not love about misogynistic alcoholic adulterers (hey, that's a pretty alright band name).
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post #257 of 267
1/15/09 at 11:14am
Thread Starter 
Fuck Harry Crane.

The ending to 'Night to Remember' may be my favorite ending in the series yet. But I'm a sucker for that kind of stuff. I love when the show touches on the folk/Village scene.
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post #258 of 267
1/17/09 at 2:12am
Weiner signed for 2 more years.

Fuck yeah

http://www.variety.com/article/VR111...goryid=14&cs=1
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post #259 of 267
1/17/09 at 4:19am
Whew! I needs me some more Joan Holloway.
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post #260 of 267
1/17/09 at 2:15pm
Here comes '64 and '66.
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post #261 of 267
1/17/09 at 7:08pm
Thread Starter 
What's great about that announcement is not only Weiner signing on (although we'll probably have to go through this again in two years -- the show has a five-year plan), but that he negotiated more money for the show's budget.\

Also, Weiner has said that he doesn't want to directly deal with the Kennedy assassination, but he has considered using it as the backdrop for an episode. So the jump to next season may be shorter than we think. (The premiere could easily start in November of '63 and have the majority of the season take place in '64.)
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post #262 of 267
1/17/09 at 8:07pm
Keep watching Rath.
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post #263 of 267
1/17/09 at 8:17pm
Thread Starter 
I finished the season this afternoon. So very good, although I liked "The Mountain King" and its ending more than "Meditations." I loved all the religious symbolism run throughout "Mountain," and I definitely got a little misty at Peggy's final scene in the last episode. Although this is definitely the best show on tv right now.

And for those who were asking, Don made about 3.5 mil in modern dollars on the Sterling-Cooper merger.
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post #264 of 267
1/17/09 at 10:30pm
So, it may be part of my tradition of feeling empathy from the characters people usually despise or something, but am I the only one that feels bad about Duck's last scene? I kinda like that guy, even though I realize I should hate him.

Oh yeah, I've never posted in this thread, just saw the second season in one binge. Best show since The Wire/Sopranos etc ended blah blah blah.

Rath, what's that you say that you've been reading about comparisons to short stories? Link or something?
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post #265 of 267
1/17/09 at 10:39pm
Thread Starter 
It was proposed in a recap/discussion of "The Benefactor" by the late Andrew Johnson at House Next Door:

http://www.thehousenextdooronline.co...episode-3.html

Quote:
The Sopranos was a highly serialized show from the beginning, and in some ways became more serialized as it went on (for evidence, look no further than the adventures of Vito Spatafore). But with the fifth episode of Season One, “College”, it became clear that David Chase was trying something new--coming up with a self-contained TV episode that would change the protagonist in ways that would be evident for the series’ entire run. Over the course of The Sopranos’s six seasons, Tony, Uncle Jun, Carmela, Dr. Melfi, Bobby Baccalieri and Johnny Sack (in the final season’s superb “Stage Five”) would all receive such episodes. With each one, The Sopranos became less a crime drama and more a portrait of individuals baffled by a changing world--who in turn added up to a community baffled by a changing world. Like light, which can be both particle and wave depending on your viewpoint, The Sopranos was both a serial and a collection of shared-universe vignettes, albeit perhaps one closer to Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology than to Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories or any of Updike’s story cycles.

Which, finally, brings us to Mad Men. In his comments on my write-up of “Flight One,” Matt Seitz praised what Matthew Weiner is doing this season and connected it to The Sopranos, but I don’t think he gave Weiner enough credit for taking the David Chase approach further than Chase himself ever has. The Sopranos launched a golden age in American TV--Deadwood, The Wire, The Shield...you know the drill--but most of Chase’s acolytes have been content to stick with relatively conventional serial narratives (even if shows such as The Shield took the serial in bold new directions by embracing the novel as thoroughly as Chase has the short story). Only Weiner has seen fit to fully embrace Chase’s vision and offer a sort of fractal drama--one that contains conventional continuity, to be sure, but also one where the narrative model is layered rather than strictly linear, and in which it takes quite awhile (unlike with B5 or The X-Files, which wore their complexity as a badge of pride) to realize that the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

This has all been a fancy way of saying that Mad Men often feels like a collection of short stories about the characters rather than a conventional TV series. Strip away the Peggy material from last week’s episode and you’re left with a beauty of a short story about Pete, one in which he learns hard lessons that TV characters seldom do. Prune away Betty’s activities this week and what remains is an equally fine (and equally resonant) double-helix story about Don and Harry Crane.
And as has been said before, the two primary literary inspirations for the series were Revolutionary Road and The Stories of John Cheever.
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post #266 of 267
1/18/09 at 12:31am
Ever since I got hooked on season one, I've been thinking the Chase/Weiner thing and I think a lot of people are overlooking the other way around. Retroactively, I can see a whole lot of Weiner in the structures of later day Sopranos, it's just that then we didn't know that.
Now, of course it all fits with what Chase was trying to do, but the way say Marriage of Figaro or The Jet Set were structure in a way that the episode began, then it split into something that felt like a tangent until you "got" that the tangent was actually the point and the "opening" was all about getting to it reminds me a lot of, say, the weird-as-hell structure in Kennedy and Heidi. Of course, that episode has a "major" plot point, but it's the fact that the reaction to it is what gets showcase in a way to makes more sense to the overall point of the series that makes me think Weiner actually influenced Chase a lot.
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post #267 of 267
3/28/09 at 2:12pm
Just finished rewatching Season 2 after coming to back to England and catching a few episode on the Beeb, and decided to burn threw it all again.

You know who doesn't get enough love in this thread?

Sally Drapper

I don't what that girl has but to me she is the most endearing character on the show (although it could be that her age is about perfect for my mothers). The look on Jane and Dons face when she tells him she called the office, and the way Betty looked like she could screw Don over without the kids, until Don mentioned it was up there with the whole season finale.

Also her at the office, and the line from Joan where pitch perfect. So was having her saying she was going to be quite so Don wouldn't hurt himself.

Also surprised no one else spotted Mr. Sheffield as St. John Powell.

Get here now Season 3!
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