Cereal Monogamist: Mad Men Watch-a-thon: 1st and 2nd episodes

Mad Men Watch-a-thon: 1st and 2nd episodes

This show has been enjoying a lot of critical acclaim lately, and I kept saying, I’ll watch it soon enough. Recently, spurred on by (star of Mad Men) Jon Hamm’s recent appearance on 30 Rock as the dreamy doctor who may date Liz, I obtained the complete first and second seasons.

Of course, I’m in school, which means I can’t get sucked into a binge that lasts like, an entire weekend. (And it would not be the first time I’d lost a whole day or whole weekend to some TV show.) So I’m doling out episodes a couple at a time, and I thought I’d comment with early impressions.

I wasn’t blown away by the first two episodes, but I wasn’t underwhelmed, either. I can tell this show is going to be a slow burn, which I like; it means they’re spending a lot of time introducing characters and setting a nice tone, and, if they do the slow burn right, the plot will pick up momentum and head out of the season on a roll.

Plus, most of the things I didn’t care for were clearly symptomatic of the show being new. For example, in the first episode, a lot of the dialogue felt a bit unnatural because every character was stuck saying these hugely representative things. Nobody could talk naturally about the daily business of the show because they were too busy speaking in mission statements.

What I did like: the tone, the music, how crisp and sharp everything looks. I love the closeted gay guy (Salvatore) and his “so people live their life one way and think the complete opposite? preposterous!” Little details, such as those that subtly remind viewers how things had changed since Kennedy. (The best example of this: the scene in the second episode when Don’s wife sees her daughter wearing a plastic bag over her head and gives her the old “come here, young lady,” warns her the dry cleaning better not be on the floor, and sends her off again.) Another really perceptive detail is the way the men respond to the women; mostly they leer at them and glower at them with condescension. But in at least one moment, when some ad business was urgent, the men passed by Peggy without the slightest visual acknowledgement, like she was a ghost in the room.

There’s a lot of sexism on the show, of course—that’s a simplified term for what we’re seeing in that moment. There’s racism, too—there would have to be to accurately reflect the era. What makes a modern show inherently not sexist and racist itself is how it treats those themes; that’ll be interesting to see.