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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:  - Well DoneExcellent character development, but a bit of a downer with the protagonist being an unhappy man. Rating: - DVDs have wonderful commentaries and extrasMad Men is an absolute masterpiece. I agree 200% with all the rave reviews here. I'm not going to add to the ample reviews of this show. Instead, I would like to comment on the generous extras included in the DVD set. I debated a long time before buying the DVDs since I own the season on iTunes. I'm glad I bought the DVDs -- the commentaries and extras make it worth every penny. Each episode has at least one commentary track, usually two separate commentary tracks. And there are other extras - a 20-minute piece, "Advertising the American Dream", a 10-minute video on scoring Mad Men, and the hour-long 'Establishing Mad Men'--all excellent. A word about the commentaries -- the ones by creator and writer Matt Weiner are superb, very insightful and interesting. I haven't listened to all the other commentaries yet. Of the ones I have listened to, Weiner's are definitely the best, Vincent Kartheiser, January Jones, and Jon Hamm also provide interesting depth. The brilliant costume designer Janie Bryant also provides wonderful commentary. I wish some of the other commentaries had been edited, though. For instance, in Jon Hamm's, January Jones', and Elizabeth Moss' commentary on the last episode, 'The Wheel', Elizabeth Moss' comments on the padding used to show her weight gain. This is an interesting aside, but Moss' commentary goes on far too long and it's all trivial, with no insights into Peggy's character. She repeats the same stories again and again--for well over 10 minutes. Her commentary drones through an important part of the Draper story (Don looking at old photos of his brother). It's a shame that we miss Hamm's commentary during that emotionally moving portion of the episode. But that's my only criticism, one small quibble. The DVD set is marvelous and if you're a Mad Men fan it will add substantially to your enjoyment and insight into the show. Rating:  - Where's the Beef?I was really looking forward to this series after reading the rave reviews but I have to say I was disappointed by this tepid view of the heyday of advertising. The series certainly scores high style marks but substance is woefully lacking in this rather narcissistic view of 1960 Madison Avenue. Once past the good looks, crisp lines and jaunty banter, I found myself wondering "where's the beef?" The directors seem to revel in this decidedly man's world where women seem little more than muses, except for Peggy Olsen who finds herself quickly rising up the ladder with her honest view of products. The firm of Sterling & Cooper comes across as a sexist bastion during a time when many women were breaking through such barriers. You get the sense that Peggy is a younger version of Helen Gurley Brown who had worked herself up from the mailroom of the William Morris Agency to become one of the highest paid ad copywriters of the early 60s, eventually taking over Cosmopolitan and turning it into the magazine we know today. Sexism was pervasive at the time, but this show seems to revel in it, with little sense of irony. The episodes are painfully slow and Don Draper is painfully boring. It takes 12 excrutiating episodes to find out about his hidden past, which in the end doesn't appear to make the slightest impact on the story as Cooper dismisses Peter Campbell's revelatory scene out of hand. Seems Don Draper can do no wrong, although he appears to have an increasingly hard time at home as his lovely wife Betty comes apart at the seams like Sylvia Plath in the Bell Jar. After 12 episodes, I feel like I've had enough, although fans of this series keep telling me how things pick up in season two. Maybe so, but the first season didn't do much for me. Rating:  - It's like watching what your parents or grandparents were doing :)I am amazed about the amount of smoking and drinking going on. I really like all the female characters - January Jones reminds me of Grace Kelly, Christina Hendricks is as delicious as Marilyn Monroe. The intrigues, affairs, and secrets are positively tasty. And yet I can not find one single thing I like about Don Draper. Sure, Jon Hamm is a great actor, and a quite handsome man, but the character is very unlikeable. It is hard to feel sympathy, pity, or compassion toward him. The show is pretty juicy and well worth watching though. Rating: - Well directed sleeper hit has signficant flawsAMC's sleeper hit, "Mad Men", is garnering rave reviews. Although the directing is masterful, especially the cuts, and the mood lighting is excellent, both the pseudo-sophisticated writing and the casting are naive and uninformed. The cynical show suffers from the lack of even one major character who could be viewed as a person of integrity. Maybe the author intends to indict the advertising profession? Maybe he intends to present a vacuous domestic life of the 50s and early 60s? Whatever his motives, an emphasis on pathological selfishness weighs down this dark show and leaves the viewer with a bitter taste. An unwholesome bleakness permeates; the scripts lack the occasional light moments of boilerplate soap opera. There are major anachronisms in the set design and props, such as the electric typewriters, which were not in offices yet in March of 1960 when the show opens. The language also is not period authentic: "Pretty much", a ubiquitous expression today, was rarely employed in 1960. The meetings with clients often turn confrontational; if advertising folks conducted themselves in this fashion, then and now, their firm would not remain long afloat. Considering the major failings of "Mad Men," it is the directing alone that qualifies it for hit status. |