These last two episodes of Mad Men have felt either disproportionate or clumsy. This is, I think, because life is both disproportionate and clumsy. It is common for critics to excuse the shortcomings of TV shows with this same logic. A script takes a left turn into fan service, or really fumbles some aspect of a series […]
Playing off Mad Men as a series of object lessons in modernity is like shooting fish in a barrel. Time and time again, the show has justified the utility of its repetition of Don’s moods and fantasies as an evocation of this era. Around him play out the little dramas of an ad agency and its growing […]
The Emmy Awards are weird for a few reasons. We know that the nomination and voting process makes any Emmy honor kind of dubious. The award exacerbates the age-old craft vs. popularity issue in mainstream media. It has always been difficult to tell the difference between the comedy and drama categories, as really good TV […]
In looking at prior Mad Men episodes, I argued that the series has taken a slight turn toward absurdity, reflective of the way the passing of an age has taken its toll on Don. Epidemiologists often observe the natural history of a disease by simply watching patients suffer their symptoms over time. In a […]
(Prior thoughts on Mad Men can be found here.) There are a few moments in which Mad Men has deposited a great deal of existential crisis on the shoulders of a biblical reference, the fleeting Eucharistic reference in “The Strategy” a good example. Mad Men is an exercise in an invigorating form of historiography that […]
“With such a console in his office, an executive can call for the curves that he needs on the screen; then, by touching the screen with the light pen, he can order the computer to calculate new values and redraw the graphs, which it does almost instantaneously.” (Via HBR Blog) — The IBM System/360 […]
One is immediately suspicious of any attempt to distill the glorious complexities of Mad Men down to any single theme. Depending on who you ask, it is a show about the birth of the cool, a nostalgic look at the 1960s (some people talk as if it deserves an official papal pronouncement: “It is how […]