Mad Men: here be spoilers
I’ve just watched the latest episode of Mad Men and I simply do not have the words to express how much I love it right now. My friend Nathan watched the first couple of seasons but complained that it didn’t go anywhere so never experienced the unbridled joys of season three’s GOLDEN FINALE, ie THE GREATEST HOUR OF TELEVISION EVER MADE.
Five episodes into season four and it feels like Don Draper was simply made to be a divorcee. It’s all going on. Roger’s taken a swing at Pete Campbell, Laine Pryce has slept with a callgirl, Peggy’s embracing New York’s underground art scene and Joan (oh Joan) has dressed as a hula girl and led a conga round the office. It’s funnier than ever before (apart from maybe the lawnmower episode - that’s yet to be beaten) and we’re seeing how desperately sad the supporting characters are, as well as how desperately sad Don and Betty are.
Let’s hear it for season 7: Sally Draper’s rehab years!
Oh yeah, and that line a few weeks ago about how Don’ll be remarried within a year? TOTES going to be the Betty lookalike who does the focus groups. Bet he proposes when his LA ‘ex-wife’ snuffs it.
OH GOD I LOVE IT SO MUCH *deep breaths*
The following blog post includes spoilers for Mad Men season 4, episode 1. Most of you Americans have already seen it but for the moral Brits out there who don’t download their telly: look away.
Audible yelps were heard in my house during the following moments/revelations:
Peggy’s hair. Amazing.
Peggy drinking in the office. She is one of them now.
Don getting slapped about in bed by a prostitute. But of course!
The new office.
The new office chairs.
Whatsisname’s mother at the Thanksgiving table. The stuff of nightmares.
Don telling Betty to move out or he’ll start charging rent. In yo’ face, biatch!
Joan saying they still don’t have a conference table. (I love you.)
Sally with her own key. Sob!
The awesome outtro music while Don talks to the New York Times. Could not believe it was over already.
Roger, all the time.
Just because.
HERE BE SHITLOADS OF SPOILERS
I seriously fucking love Mad Men. I’ve just finished watching series three and have realised that it has only been in this series that I really started to care about Don Draper. I loved it in series one and two of course, but that was mainly because I loved the office politics and was a little bit gay for Joan Holloway. Now that Don’s wife has actually left him (for a slimy little toad, more’s the indignity), those poor-little-country-boy flashbacks rip my heart in two. It’s not exactly like he’s an angel or anything; he just needs to be loved.
And it is good to see Joan and her hips back in the action too.
MASSIVE COINCIDENCE ALERT!! HRRRRNK!!!!
When I was little my favourite TV programme was Sesame Street (although I called it “Sessy Street” at the time) and now my favourite TV programme is Mad Men (I can pronounce that perfectly well).
He can’t work. The doctors have said he’ll never golf again.
I love Mad Men.
Don’t Think Twice, It’s all so unfair and all men are chauvinist bastards
So, how does this new grey and red affair look then? I did have all the posts scrunched up on the right hand side, and then I decided I wanted to put a picture where the Hallowed Lords Of HTML decreed there shalt be no picture, and then I found a site that said it matched colours for you and I turned the whole thing dog-sick yellow. So now its grey. For the time being at least.
I wanted to post a little something about Mad Men before bed, but every time I think about it I just imagine slinking around in hourglass dresses like Joan Holloway and my fantasies turn to dust when I consider the sheer quantities of hairspray that woman must go through. I simply could not afford the styling products on my current budget, let alone the body contouring surgery.
Anyways, I’ve just watched the final three episodes of series one and have been left with a gaping hole in my heart, yearning for cars with chrome trim and gender equality in the workplace. The last episode played out with Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright, and everyone ended up just sooooo utterly lonely it was heartbreaking.
This week’s illegal downloading session begins and ends with series two, guvnor, I promise.
Every time I pass a shop window, I am stunned that this is not my reflection.
Adventures in Telly (like spoilers, except you won’t have a clue what I’m going on about)
Mad Men, series one, episode eight:
00.01 - The James Bond people should really sue them for these opening titles.
01.53 - Pete Campbell looks like Leonardo DiCaprio’s uglier brother.
06.56 - In another life, I am Joan Holloway.
11.48 - Look at that hat.
21.07 - Why can’t I have a shabby but massive Greenwich Village apartment to listen to Miles Davis in? Life is so unfair.
24.17 - Here comes a white trash flashback.
28.01 - GAYDAR!! GAYDAR!!
36.50 - Has the tramp got a tampon?
36.57 - Nope, just some chalk. This is why I need Hi-def.
37.46 - £100 says his wife finds that picture.
39.33 - “You make the lie, you invent want”. That’s deep man.
43.48 - Don Draper is just like a gangsta rapper really, isn’t he?
45.19 - Most inappropriate use of bluegrass music since the Rednex charted in 1994.
Lost, series five, episode eight:
01.22 - If the true rules of time travel were adhered to, that rope would totally have disappeared.
02.05 - Crazy prehistoric statue is wearing surprisingly ‘on trend’ jumper dress.
04.58 - Polar bears! Finally!
06.08 - It’s like those 118 runners have actually got parts in the show for real.
06.46 - OMG. Sawyer is like, Captain Boss-Man now.
07.25 - Where are they getting their petrol from, exactly?
09.40 - Juliet has lips like Marge Simpson.
15.05 - “We’re sweaty, gun-toting hillbillies from the future, pleased to meet y’all!”
19.44 - This is what it would be like if Kid Rock had the keys to the Manson family’s commune.
26.54 - It’s the eyeliner robot guy who looks like Rob Lowe!
34.22 - I would totally love to take a submarine to 1974.
39.07 - Blah blah soppy shit blah.
Timewatch - The Real Bonnie and Clyde:
00.36 - Faye Dunaway was so much hotter than the ‘real’ Bonnie.
01.48 - A small part of me hopes this new Depression will increase the number of bank robberies.
06.35 - I swear that’s the same hat Angelina Jolie wore in Changeling.
08.07 - Clyde’s middle name was Champion.
09.45 - “Cop killa! Better you than me! Cop killa! Fuck police brutality!”
11.59 - I hate documentary reconstructions.
17.00 - Clyde Barrow’s choice of a faster car than the police is deemed “acute tactical determination”. Yeah, and looking both ways before you cross the road “demonstrates a calculating drive for vitality”.
20.40 - Shot of moody Midwest pylons.
21.07 - Some moody slide guitar.
21.27 - Shot of prison reflected in murky puddles = generally moody.
23.35 - Inmates dressed like Westlife.
27.28 - I would not want to meet a Browning Automatic Rifle down a dark alley.
28.13 - Shot of overweight Texan shooting at breezeblocks.
29.45 - This Jeff Guinn guy is like the human version of Brian Griffin from Family Guy, except with Owen Wilson’s voice.
40.22 - Schmoot Schmidt? Really? That’s your name?
43.18 - Slide guitar moves from moody to melancholy.
51.20 - Fuck me that’s a shitload of bullet holes.
57.04 - Second inappropriate use of a bluegrass soundtrack in one night.
-END-
Running away to a suburban wonderland
The recent advent of Mad Men series two on BBC4 has reminded me that I never watched the first one, and this has been an omission I’ve been rectifying, thanks to LoveFilm. Annoyingly, they’ll only send me one disc of the box set at a time, but at least I’m not going on enormous telly binges like when me and Andy got The Wire and then neglected to wash or get dressed until we’d seen all sixty-plus hours of it.
I love watching American stuff about ‘wholesome’ families in the sixties. I love the glamour and well-roundedness of it all, even if things are distinctly darker below the surface. I love Mad Men for the secretary’s hairstyles as much as the plot intricacies. There’s one woman (a satisfyingly shapely woman, in these size zero times) who has the most incredible hair. It seriously must be glued in place. There’s no hairspray strong enough to maintain such perfection.
Coincidentally, I’m reading Rabbit, Run by John Updike at the moment, another tale of young wholesome 1960s families who fall apart at the seams, albeit in gorgeous lace nightgowns and with ribbons in their hair. In keeping with my ability to discover authors via their obituaries (see also Kurt Vonnegut and Iris Murdoch) I’m new to Updike, but I chose Rabbit, Run as my introduction because of I kept seeing it referred to as the suburban equivalent of a Kerouac novel. I hated On The Road, partly because I don’t think the man can string a decent sentence together, but also because I already know what it’s like to get pissed and sleep on someone’s floor. It seems silly, considering all these books and films and TV shows about 1960s America are about society’s dysfunction (I daren’t go anywhere near Revolutionary Road in case it depresses me too much), but when you live in one of the more notorious districts of south Manchester, where gun crime is rife and rainfall is above the national average, the idea of wearing a ribbon in my hair and cooking dinner for my white collar husband in upstate New York feels like the very epitome of escapism.
(Yes, I know that Rabbit’s wife is a alcoholic and he runs off to live with a whore, but at least she’s a shapely whore! She has hips and tits and ass, and that gives this fat woman hope.)
