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DVD : Mad Men - Season OneBrowse or Search and Buy Online our Best Sellers Shopping Sales of DVD and Mad Men - Season One. Rating:  - Promise UnfulfilledMad Men begins with such promise - interesting characters, good writing, colorful costumes, great setting -- and it maintains that quality through 2/3 of the first season, but then it begins to turn into a fairly routine soap opera, with some predictible twists ands turns. I would recommend the series, but the high hopes I had based on the uniqueness of the early episodes remained were deflated by the end of the season. Rating:  - MadMed Delicious ViewingBaby Boomers will love this show as they will feel comfortably familiar with the decor (being the early 60's), the attitudes (omg,how these businessmen treat their female workers....we've come a long way, baby!) and the story lines are not far fetched. I chuckle at the "smoke in your eyes" and all the other double meanings! Rating: - Excellent showit is really an amazing show, especially compared to all the terrible programming on tv now. it is highly recommended. Rating: - Suffers from Premise BloatI can't fault the acting on this show. The problem is that these are not particularly real characters, so the situations they are in do not seem natural. The lead (certainly not the hero) is Don. Don was in Korea for a couple of days and the guy next to him was blown to bits. So Don took the dog tags and moved on with his life. Er, well, the other guys life, sort of. The need for this premise is not that easy to see. The real guy (Dick, who becomes Don) leaves behind a little brother who needed him, but he's not there. That becomes one of many plot lines. Don is a fallen man. You can tell that 30 seconds into the show. He is falling out of a building, while rather tense and discordant music plays. This is the opening theme, and it is exceptionally well done, I think. But I tended to think in terms of the Christian idea of the fallen Man. Don will not only end up in Hell, he will handle their public relations. This show is sort of stuck the way that Rescue Me got stuck. Yeah, the characters were compelling. But the extremity of it left them with rather limited choices if they want to continue with 'extreme' characters. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it means that later seasons are dependent on what the show has built up in prior seasons. There's sort of a Film Noir character to this series. I don't think it is real Noir because that is long ago and far away. Noir characters are generally in over their heads for external reasons, or because small mistakes cascade. Don makes big mistakes. The DVD set is well worth the money. There are copious commentaries, and most are interesting. It interesting to know how the music works. The actors explain their characters, often defending them. And you get some interesting interpretations. There's a scene with Don's wife, Betty, and a young boy. The boy is vaguely attracted to Betty. Betty is in the depths of depression and reached out to the boy in a strained way. The scene is a little off-putting. Some of the comments say that this shows Betty is at the level of the 9 year old, in terms of maturity. Well, this is a tough assessment, given that Betty is really in the eye of a wicked storm, and is only beginning to see the realities. If Betty is a 9 year old, what is Don? It an interesting show. It is, in many way, a critique of the period. It is obvious that some people will like this world, for all of the faults. Others may ask if a thoroughly dysfunctional man creating touching family moments for Kodak can really represent much that is good. There is a level of political correctness to this show. Twice in the first season people try to 'come out' to others, and they are simply rebuffed. Nothing else happens. Apparently it was both a bad time to be married, and a bad time to be Gay. The only character who exhibits obvious character, of a sort, is Peggy. Well, she gets a nice bonus at the end, another slight strain of cred. The secondary male characters all surrender their masculinity to Don who, of course, is a total fraud. The show does not offer a role model for males, not that it should. Don't be too hopeful that Don's little Bro will offer a path to redemption. On one level what the producers and participants in this show are doing is making a show where the people are 'so' bad, it's obvious it is not 'real'. So, if there are obvious criticisms about, say, 'family values', they can say that *is* their message. Bad things happen to those who are lax and dishonest and basically uncaring. But I don't know how long any show can exists in that barren desert. And it's hard to see who will be redeemed, and how. Rating: - The richest show on TV"Advertising is about...happiness." So declares Don Draper (Jon Hamm) to a client in one early scene of Mad Men, the richest and most complex program on television right now, at least in terms of its portrait of a specific period in American history. Since so many of the great reviews here provide detail about the setting and basic premise of Mad Men, I won't repeat. I will simply say that no current TV show deals either directly or obliquely with so many interesting ideas and concepts as does Mad Men. Ostensibly about the New York-based ad industry in its early go-go days near the dawn of the TV age, Mad Men is really about a host of things, including: The male-female dynamic in the pre-women's movement workplace, and its debilitating effects on women. The rampant and causal repression of blacks, gays and women and the sense of entitlement among professional white males of the era that the world was their oyster. The growth of a post-war generation of newly affluent Americans and how the ad industry played on their wants and desires to create artifical demand for unnecessary products, and in the process helped create a culture of consumerism, materialism and envy that is having ramifications even today (witness the mortgage crisis). The early warning signs of the coming fractures in society that would explode only a few years down the road in the late 1960s. Bottom line, Mad Men beautifully illustrates the irony of Draper's comment. Advertising, it argues, creates unhappiness - by convincing us that we always need to smell better, look better, and own better things, that nothing we currently have is as good as what we could have, whether that means our refrigerator, our car or our spouse. But I hope I haven't given the impression that the show is a downer. Far from it. Mad Men is also a treat for the eyes in terms of how it captures the styles and artifacts of 1960 America - from the burled wood and frosted glass of the ad agency offices to the omnipresent ashtrays to the sleek Hart, Schaffner & Marx suits. The dialogue is sharp, the performances terrific (especially Elizabeth Moss as naive and ambitious Peggy Olson, Christina Hendricks as the secretary of every man's dreams, and John Slattery as roguish Sterling-Cooper partner Roger Sterling) and the production design impeccable. Buy this now and catch up as quickly as you can. Season 2 is well underway and is equally compelling. |