Mad Men

[neko]

[rubble-rouser]

Oh lordy!

[Rex Banner]

I'm a big fan and a bigger fan of Christina Hendricks. I can't wait for the new series the way the last one finished left the new one open for a lot of possibilities.

[Josef Svejk]

I've been getting into it. At its worst, it's well produced soap opera; at its best, its very atmospheric and strangely engaging. And the two ladies pictured above are gorgeous. I'm quite fond of Don's Jewish lover too...

 

[neko]

very interesting interview with 'pete campbell' from the guardian...

 

Vincent Kartheiser: 'I definitely do psychopathic. I don't try to, but it just sneaks out' | Television & radio | The Observer

 

too long to post the whole thing, but here is a snippet...

 

Some of the ways that Kartheiser has chosen to do this are unconventional, at least among Hollywood TV stars. He has, for example, in the city of cheap gas and freeways, given up on a car.

 

"I go on the bus, I walk. A friend left his car recently at my house and I took it out one day just for 15 minutes and it was terrible. You know why? I felt like I was back in LA again. Four or five years ago, when I had a car and I had been out of the city I wouldn't feel I was back until I got in the car, you know. But now I feel off the grid. I feel that I am not part of the culture. And because I don't have a car I don't really go anywhere to buy things. In fact, I have been in a slow process of selling and giving away everything I own."

 

He has? Like what?

 

"Like, I don't have a toilet at the moment. My house is just a wooden box. I mean I am planning to get a toilet at some point. But for now I have to go to the neighbours. I threw it all out."

 

(As he says this, I'm wondering whether this is just another of the parts Kartheiser might be trying on for size, but to prove the point he later takes me back to his house, which really is an empty wooden box, a small one-room bungalow on a nondescript Hollywood street and indeed it has no lavatory.) Is that a Buddhist thing, I wonder, or an early midlife crisis thing?

 

"It started a couple of years ago," he says. "It was in response to going to these Golden Globe type events and they just give you stuff. You don't want it. You don't use it. And then Mad Men started to become a success on a popular level and people started sending me stuff, just boxes of shit. Gifts for every holiday, clothes. One day, I looked around and thought 'I don't want this stuff, I didn't ask for it'. So I started giving it to friends or charity stores, or if it is still in its box I might sell it for a hundred bucks. I liked it so I didn't stop."

 

Does he have a bed?

 

"I do," he concedes, "but that might go…"

 

A TV?

 

"Actually, that was the big discussion today, when a friend came over: I was wondering, should I have a screen in my home? It seems like the next step. I haven't had a mirror for six or seven years, though I admit that causes a lot of problems when I have to tie a bow tie. Or if I have to, you know, comb my hair for something. I'm forever looking in the mirrors of parked cars."

 

It sounds a bit like an extreme reaction to the venal material desire of Mad Men (and Money). He's not worried about this tendency at all?

 

He laughs. "I probably should be worried. Sometimes, I look around my house and think: is this normal, Vinny? I mean it's a bit more than just a remodel…"

[Hand Shandy]

Disappointing.

 

Was hoping for more pictures of those outstanding breasts.

[neko]

Disappointing.

 

Was hoping for more pictures of those outstanding breasts.

 

pete doesn't really have any breasts.

[neko]

there.

 

better ?

 

[Hand Shandy]

Hmmmm, I'm not sure it's doing it for me.

 

While I don't need complete nakedness, a hint of cleavage would be nice...

 

She might as well be wearing a sleeping bag.

[Johnni]

Hmmmm, I'm not sure it's doing it for me.

 

While I don't need complete nakedness, a hint of cleavage would be nice...

 

She might as well be wearing a sleeping bag.

 

 

 

 

 

[Hand Shandy]

Now that's what I'm talking about!!

[neko]

Back to Work for ‘Mad Men’

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/arts/television/18mad.html?_r=1

 

“WHO is Don Draper?” is the question that opens the premiere of the fourth season of “Mad Men.” And that’s an insider’s joke, a wink at viewers who have spent three years burrowing into the cryptic ad man’s buried secrets and damaged psyche.

 

AMC’s drama about Manhattan’s advertising world in the early 1960s isn’t just a cult favorite anymore; “Mad Men” has become a cultural phenomenon much in the way “The Sopranos” once was. The two shows are mirror opposites of course.

 

“The Sopranos” amused viewers with unexpected glimpses of bourgeois ordinariness — lawn mowing, school meetings, psychotherapy — inside the scary, alien world of organized crime. “Mad Men” offers a far more commonplace milieu — the rat race — and finds comedy in the distortions of a rear-view mirror. There lies the spectacle of people just like us doing things that today seem scary and alien, like smoking, drinking old-fashioneds at lunch, letting children play with dry-cleaner bags.

 

It’s a series set in the days of ice-cold martinis and cold war anxiety that has seduced contemporary fashion, advertising and even the English language. There are “Mad Men” Barbie and Ken dolls, a “Mad Men” clothing line at Banana Republic and pop culture books like “Mad Men and Philosophy: Nothing Is as It Seems.” The term “mad men” has become an adjective, a shorthand way to describe things that are louche, elegant and dissipated in an antediluvian way.

 

And accordingly there is “Mad Men” overload in the air and, in some corners, even a backlash. Don’s angst at times grew tiresome, as did his marital woes. Viewers yearned to get away from the home front and back to the office skirmishes at his agency, Sterling Cooper. Fortunately the series’s creator, Matthew Weiner, has found a way to finesse “Mad Men” fatigue at the end of the third season by giving his story a mulligan.

 

Sterling Cooper is starting over, as Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, and so is Don. When the series began in 2007, its main characters were established, slightly jaded players in a field that was on top of its game in a nation still puffed up with postwar confidence and superpower brio. The advertising firm was so successful, despite its disreputable office parties, that it was practically white shoe. And its creative director, Don Draper (Jon Hamm), married to lovely Betty (January Jones) with two lovely children in a lovely suburb, had little to prove, except, perhaps his effortless prowess as an extramarital ladies’ man.

 

But when Sterling Cooper’s British parent company was sold at the end of last season to an even bigger advertising behemoth, Don and his colleagues broke away and lost their complacency.

 

Suddenly they became small and scrappy without the huge accounts, vast office space and bottomless expenses of yesteryear. And that final episode, as Don banded his loyalists together to start a new firm, was the most exhilarating moment of the season.

 

Now, at the beginning of Season 4, which begins next Sunday, it’s a year later, and the executives of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce go on cattle calls to woo clients. Contracts melt away. The business is precarious and copywriters stoop to publicity stunts to gin up business.

 

His personal life is just as altered. Betty is freshly embarked on a new marriage with Henry Francis (Christopher Stanley), an older man and an aide to Nelson Rockefeller. Henry, who has grown children from a previous marriage, promises Betty a better life — though this one comes with a scornful mother-in-law.

 

And Don, who had women falling over themselves trying to get him into bed when he was married, finds himself alone in a dark Greenwich Village apartment, shining his own shoes and going out on blind dates. Being a bachelor back in those days before the pill and “The Sensuous Woman” did not automatically include swinging. Don tries to kiss a young woman in the back of a cab but can’t get any further. She won’t let him accompany her to the door to the Barbizon, then a women-only hotel, because, as she puts it coyly, “I know that trick.”

 

“Mad Men” keeps confounding expectations — the ’60s fashion, mores and cultural landmarks keep getting more familiar, but the characters maintain an elusive weirdness. Betty looks like Grace Kelly, but she seems blandly prosaic — except when she picks up a BB gun and shoots the neighbor’s pigeons, a cigarette dangling from her perfectly curved lips.

 

Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser) would be just another irritating office brown-noser, a prep school Sammy Glick, except that he too has a screw loose and a mystical rapport with firearms. Peggy (Elisabeth Moss) should be an easily identified Rona Jaffe heroine — an unmarried career woman breaking the barriers of sexism — but she too is peculiar and enigmatic. Even Don and Betty’s forlorn daughter, Sally (Kiernan Shipka), is more strange than sad.

 

“Mad Men” is a period piece that reverses the template. Historical dramas like “The Tudors” or “John Adams” sift through a remote, archaic culture to highlight the most familiar and contemporary concerns of historical characters. “Mad Men” wallows in the comfort of a recent and well-known past by way of characters who are always a little opaque and unknowable.

 

The narrative snakes through a Life magazine timeline of political turmoil and social change — the John F. Kennedy assassination is a transforming event, and so are the poems of Frank O’Hara and the songs of Bob Dylan. In the season premiere, a character cites the killing of Andrew Goodman, the civil rights volunteer who was murdered with two co-workers in Mississippi. It’s a mention that marks the year as 1964 and the mood of the country as nearing a boiling point. Or as one character puts it, “The world is so dark right now.”

 

But it isn’t always obvious to those living in it. Copywriters goof around at work. Peggy and a young colleague jokingly coo the names “Marsha” and “John” at each other, an oblique nod to Stan Freberg, an ad writer and comedian who had a huge hit in 1951 with a recorded single, “John & Marsha,” a soap opera parody in which actors intone the words “John” and “Marsha” over and over to organ music.

 

Don has dinner at Jimmy’s La Grange, a Midtown restaurant favored by advertising executives where chicken à la Kiev is a specialty, and diners are given bibs to protect them from the splatter of butter.

 

Those kinds of oblique references tether the fictional world of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce to the real advertising world of those times. That’s partly professional pride on the part of the writers, who dread complaints from old ad executives. Emeritus “mad men” can be as finicky and exacting about the historical details of their bygone days as Civil War re-enactors are about the uniforms worn at Bull Run.

 

But those cues also hold out the promise that the coming season will once again pivot the story on the workplace. It’s where “Mad Men” started and where it was best. A fresh start at the rat race is just what the series needs.

 

[Rex Banner]

Anyone been watching season 4? I think the first 4 episodes have been great, it'll be the best season so far if it keeps up.

I'm glad his ex-wife isn't in it as much so far, she's a looker but I never though she added much apart from a few good episodes last season and I don;t think she's that great an actress either. There is more time for other more interesting characters this season.

[Johnni]

I'm up on Season 4. Much better than last season and although i was miffed that Betty was'nt in it as much i have to agree with you its for the best as the charecter can be quite annoying and there's more time for Don onscreen.

[Xherdan]

Just finished season 1 of this and have seasons two and three to look forward too.

 

I find it strangely engaging but it can really piss you off with some of the ridiculous detail it goes into, which, in the main, have nothing to do with the development of the story line.

 

ALso, January Jones really does it for me:

 

 

 

[Ted]

Shall I get this for Christmas? Is it any good?

 

I'm not reading the thread incase I do get into it and there are spoilers.

[RedKnight]

It is ace. And Don Draper is the smoothest man alive. Draper!

[Ted]

Done.

[Xherdan]

Yeah mate, Id recommend it. Makes smoking and drinking scotch look like an olympic sport. Very cool.

[Johnni]

Just finished season 4. I have to say this was one of the best seasons of any tv series i've seen. The writing was up there with The Sopranos, Deadwood & The Wire.

 

'She was born in 1898 in a barn. She died on the 37th floor of a skyscraper. She was an astronaut'

[neko]

not good...

 

Season 5 of ‘Mad Men’ Is Delayed Until 2012

 

“Mad Men,” the three-time Emmy Award-winning drama, will not return to television until sometime early next year, AMC confirmed on Tuesday, because of a deepening dispute with the show’s creator, Matthew Weiner.

 

In the meantime, fans will have to settle for the public negotiating and the posturing.

 

AMC, which has showcased “Mad Men” for the last four summers and has benefited mightily from it, has offered Mr. Weiner a three-season deal that would be worth $30 million, according to people with knowledge of the negotiations. But Mr. Weiner is bristling at the channel’s proposal to shorten each episode by two minutes (to add commercial time) and to cut the cast budget (to save money). He says the changes would fundamentally make “Mad Men” a “different show.”

 

“I don’t understand why, with all of the success of the show, they suddenly need to change it,” he said in an interview on Tuesday, the last day of a planned ski vacation.

 

He added, “All I want to do is continue to make my show, and make it in the way I want to, with the people I want to make it with.”

 

Mr. Weiner would not talk about the specific proposals. But another person with knowledge of the negotiations said AMC had also demanded additional product placement in the episodes. The people spoke only on condition of anonymity because they did not want to impede the negotiations.

 

Mr. Weiner, who has a reputation for taking his creative integrity seriously, is recognized as the soul of “Mad Men.” His contract expired last October, at the end of the fourth season.

 

Since then the future of “Mad Men” has been uncertain. AMC has always insisted that the show would resume, but for months it was at odds with Lionsgate, the company that produces the series. Last week there were reports that production would not start in time for a summer premiere.

 

Apparently the companies have settled some of their differences. On Tuesday morning — shortly after AMC’s proposals for cuts to “Mad Men” were published by Deadline.com and The Daily — the channel said it had authorized Lionsgate to produce Season 5.

 

“While we are getting a later start than in years past due to ongoing, key noncast negotiations, ‘Mad Men’ will be back for a fifth season in early 2012,” AMC said. “Noncast negotiations” was a reference to Mr. Weiner.

 

Mr. Weiner has clashed with AMC in the past. Two years ago, during his last contract negotiation, the channel similarly tried to add two minutes of commercial time to “Mad Men”; the show eventually was lengthened by two minutes to accommodate the added commercials.

 

This time AMC has shown no willingness to make a similar accommodation, according to one of the people with knowledge of the negotiations. AMC declined to comment.

 

Fans of the show have swamped social networking Web sites with complaints about the delay, with some taking AMC’s side and calling Mr. Weiner intransigent, while others have faulted AMC.

 

Fans took particular exception to the possibility that $1.5 million, roughly two regular cast members, would be excised from the cast budget each season. Vanity Fair’s Web site asked in a blog post which two characters should be cut — and helpfully recommended Betty Francis and Harry Crane.

 

People in Mr. Weiner’s camp, meanwhile, deflected blame for the delay and suggested that AMC never intended to start Season 5 before March 2012. Thanks largely to “Mad Men,” which had an average of nearly three million viewers per episode, AMC has become well known for its cable dramas, and it has several other shows that it wants to put on its schedule this year.

 

Amid the contentious contract talks for “Mad Men,” AMC’s parent company, Rainbow Media, is in the process of being spun off by its owner, Cablevision, and renamed AMC Networks. The process is expected to be completed this summer.

 

AMC’s $30 million offer to Mr. Weiner would make him an exceptionally highly paid producer — perhaps the most of anyone working in cable television. But for now he is objecting to the channel’s terms.

 

He said on Tuesday: “I love the show; I have every intention of it working out. This has been the most creatively satisfyingly experience of my life.”

[cochyn]

Whilst, season 4 definitely benefited from jettisoning some characters. It would be pale shadow of itself without Red. That said, ther should be these lovelies still aboard to keep the dads watching:

 

Megan

 

Warning! The following content is NOT WORK SAFE. Click the Show button to reveal.

Trudy Campbell

[Kevin D]

I gave it even less of a chance than Paul, the first episode I watched irritated me so much I haven't been back. I just thought it concentrated too much on showing just how many cigarettes they used to smoke (a woman. smoking. while doing the washing up? Woah) to the detriment of any plot. I know it's supposed to be brilliant, but I found it tedious in the extreme. I don't remember seeing that woman though, that may change things considerably.

 

I agree, it put a lot of stock in the show's novelty - the same is true of a lot of shows, like Big love, since American television started diving into unchartered concepts - but doesn't see to have much else going for it. I think I'll keep at it, though, mainly because of the awards it has won and the level of competiton it beat to get them; it is surely something special to have beaten S2 of Breaking Bad.

[dave u]

Girls' telly, in my view. Dull as fuck because nothing ever happens. Mrs Paul loves it, but I fucked it off after about five episodes of the first season. It basically seems to be office gossip as entertainment, but set in the 50s. I concede that I haven't seen the whole thing and may therefore have it wrong, but if something can't hold my attention after five hours of perseverance then the fault lies beyond me, in my view.

 

This is pretty much my take on it too. I watched the entire first season, and stuck with it even though nothing happened and I don't like any character in it, not even Don.

 

I've got the box set, so I'll watch the rest of it but I am really struggling to see what the fuss is about.

[cochyn]

It's had a massive effect on popular culture. Mind you so has Big Brother.. Anyway, there's a phenomenon of American men dressing in sharp suits, fedoras and drinking Canadian Club at work whenever they get the chance. They're called 'Donnabes'.