In a poll conducted looking for the most influential man in America, Askmen.com readers (more than 500,000 participated) selected the fictious Don Draper from AMC’s Mad Men as their top choice. Not to be outdone, however, they slotted in Olympic sprinter Usain Bolt #2, Obama slid in 3rd, with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Simon Cowell rounding out the top 5. Adding insult to their intelligence they had zombie-Michael Jackson in the top ten. [via]
By James Furbush | September 21st, 2009 | 10:31 am PDT
I didn’t catch the awards because I was at a Modest Mouse show (tough choice, really?), but essentially Mad Men and 30 Rock won, Neil Patrick Harris rocked as the host, Michael Emerson won a much-deserved Emmy for his work as Benjamin Linus on Lost, John Hodgeman brought it as a sort-of color commentator and Ricky Gervais livened things up.
Anything go down that’s notable or not to be missed? What about the high points of last night’s ceremony? Seems as if everyone is talking about the Dr. Horrible sketch.
It was an even-keeled premiere, laying the foundation for what will be eventually be a turbulent season both at home on the social front and in the work place.
Even though the premiere was subtle and the characters seemed stuck in their ways — Don the cheating husband, Pete the shmarmy child, Ken the golden boy, Roger the absentee boss, Joan the alpha secretary, Peggy the quietly confidant worker, et al. — it’s evident that enough of a foundation has been layed to guess where this season is heading.
We’ll try to go spoiler free as much as possible for those that haven’t watched yet, but here’s what stood out to us. MORE »
We’re only three days away from the season three premiere. In a video at the end of this post, Film Freak explores the cinematography of Mad Men. Love the use of Miles Davis’s “Sketches of Spain” to open the video. [via]
We’re less than a week away from the season three premiere of AMC’s Mad Men. An expression that has invariable stuck with me, was something my middle school music teacher told me. He said, of a particularly difficult ragtime piece, “Music is not the notes played but of the silences in between them.” I never quite understood how that expression specifically applied to music, but it always seemed apropos of life in general.
Vanity Fair’s cover story on Mad Men echoes that notion — that the show excells in the quiet moments before and after huge events.
But while the show, like its subject, has many surface pleasures—period design, period bad behavior (if you like high modernism, narrow lapels, bullet bras, smoking, heavy drinking at lunch, good hotel sex, and bad office sex, this is the series for you)—at its core Mad Men is a moving and sometimes profound meditation on the deceptive allure of surface, and on the deeper mysteries of identity. The dialogue is almost invariably witty, but the silences, of which there are many, speak loudest: Mad Men is a series in which an episode’s most memorable scene can be a single shot of a woman at the end of her day, rubbing the sore shoulder where a bra strap has been digging in. There’s really nothing else like it on television.
But also just as interesting, was learning that the women dominate the writing of the show — “the core five of whom are all women, unusual in television,” as the story’s author Bruce Handy notes.
It is easy to assume that this show is about men behaving badly; advertising executives smoking, drinking and engaging in infidelity in excess. But the true strength of the show is that it is about female empowerment. Long after the men become forgettable archtypes, it it Peggy, Joan and Betty that are memorable.
A WSJ story picks up the same theme, expanding the numbers a bit: “Seven of the nine members of the writing team are women.” Many of the story lines are drawn from personal experience or even familial anecdotes.
Also, interesting, is show creator, Matthew Weiner’s slavish devotion to detail. It’s actually a bit unnerving.
So we heard yesterday that the Sesame Street gang were going to drop aMad Men parody/homage on the world yesterday. Which seems like a curious to show to pick, given the drinking, infidelity, smoking, tricking people into buying things they don’t need, etc. aspect of the show. Except that they also did a Desperate Housewives thing a few years ago.
Said Miranda Barry of the Sesame Street Workshop: “You may have seen our parody called ‘Desperate Houseplants.’ It was about a houseplant not getting its needs met by the gardener. So it always works on two levels.”
Can’t wait to see what they come up with for the November episode. Flavorwire took the time to put together a casting breakdown of who should play whom in the special episode. It’s not a bad list at all. My favorite is the Prairie Dawn/Peggy comparison:
Season 3 of Mad Men debuts on August 16th on AMC. No word on the exact date of when the Sesame Street/Mad Men episode will air.
Only 16 days to go until the season three premiere.
When we last left Don and the gang changes were afloat, including: “the Cuban Missile Crisis, a takeover of the Sterling Cooper advertising agency, and news of a third Draper baby. All this and Pete (Vincent Kartheiser) professes his love for Peggy (Elisabeth Moss), but she confesses that she secretly gave birth to his child only to give it up for adoption in order to pursue her career. And self-indulgent Roger (John Slattery) left his wife for Don’s former secretary Jane.”
Season three picks up in 1964, amidst the dawning of great social upheaval. Mad Men airs on AMC, Aug. 16 at 10 p.m.
The theme of season three is change. “We wanted our key art to be more high-concept,” Schupack explained, unveiling the new poster, which hits this week: Draper is sitting in his office, looking nonchalant, as water rises up to his knees. The image was devised by the Refinery, a Burbank ad agency that beat out three other firms. Schupack flipped through a binder of rejected ideas: Draper at an office party (“too kitschy”), Draper trapped on an ice floe (“too obvious”), Draper getting sucked into a vortex (“too end-of-the-world”). Once the final concept had been chosen, a replica of Draper’s office was built on the Paramount lot and filled with water, and Hamm posed in it for two hours. Earlier in the week, Schupack had taken a copy of the poster out to the sidewalk, to see how it would look in bright sunlight, and a security guard had weighed in: “He goes, ‘That’s how I feel sometimes! I’m just sitting in my office, totally unaffected, and the waters are rising around me.’ ” Season three also has a catchphrase: “The World’s Gone Mad.”
Mad Men returns to AMC on Sun., Aug. 16, at 10PM | 9C
Someone let a small cat out of the Mad Men bag and at least one particular question is already answered for fans before the show’s season premiere in August.
Thanks to the good folks at Oh No They Didn’t, you can see two photos of Don and Betty after the jump. Just putting them there in case anyone is sensititivo to el spoileros. MORE »
But still made me chuckle. From last night’s John Hamm-hosted episode.
Me thinks the ratings-resurgence of SNL this political season will swiftly fall by the wayside once Tina Fey returns to 30 Rock and audiences are left with Andy Samburg, Kristen Wiig (gosh I wish she didn’t get the nose job), Darryl Hammond and the fat dude from Fat Burger who does the awful Bill Cosby impersonation, and the like. Oh well.
By James Furbush | September 22nd, 2008 | 7:26 pm PDT
Yes, the redheaded vixen who plays Joan Holloway on AMC’s Mad Men is beautiful. To be honest it took me the entire length of the interview to realize it was an interview. Yes, as the interviewee notes, Hendricks is what a woman looks like.
Do I hate to objectify? Slightly, but I’ve love Hendricks ever since she was Captain Mal’s crazy one-day bride on Firefly so I feel less creepy. It feels like I’ve been monogamously objectifying her for about five years now.
Mad Men won the Emmy for Best Drama. But. I. Can’t. Stop. Starring. At. Her. Cleavage. Seriously.
Everybody loves Mad Men, AMC’s sexy and stylish show about advertising execs in the 1960’s. Season 2 has already started and though only one episode has aired the show is still going strong. Every episode is like watching a movie. The small things matter, the camera lingers, sometimes small events equal big drama, sometimes major events matter little.
Despite all of the delicious roles – the boys trying to be men, the cantankerous men trying to hold back the tsunami of feminism, the women caught between the modern world their daughters will inhabit and being the proper housewife their mothers taught them to be - it has always been the women which fascinate the most. MORE »
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In a poll conducted looking for the most influential man in America, Askmen.com readers (more than 500,000 participated) selected the fictious Don Draper from AMC’s Mad Men as their top choice. Not to be outdone, however, they slotted in Olympic sprinter Usain Bolt #2, Obama slid in 3rd, with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Simon Cowell rounding out the top 5. Adding insult to their intelligence they had zombie-Michael Jackson in the top ten. [via]
