Ad It Up
Posted on | August 17, 2008 at 6:29 pm | 1 Comment
Movie Review Sunday!
Okay, I haven’t watched any movies this week. However, I did finally finish watching the first season of Mad Men, which I had recorded on my DVR since last summer, and the three episodes shown so far for this second season. I had actually watched the first episode last summer (twice), so I knew I wanted to keep it around to watch the whole thing. But with so much else to watch, I never caught up with it. Then, a few months ago, I finally watched the second and third episodes and liked them. But again, I just couldn’t get beyond that. Finally, over the last week or so, I did some marathon sessions and watched them all pretty much straight through. And I’m glad I did.
Yeah, there’s a lot of hype about the show, what with the Emmy nominations and all. And yeah, it’s wildly entertaining. It’s kind of like Sex And The City if everyone smoked more and didn’t wear seatbelts. It’s a little hard for me to believe that this is a representative slice of the era, as I don’t remember a lot of this at all. Granted I was just being born at the time the show is originally set in, but I have a really good memory. Yeah, my dad smoked and “brought home the bacon” and wasn’t much involved with the kid-raising (aside from being the disciplinarian), but I’m not sure how much drinking he did at the office and I kinda doubt he was fooling around with the secretaries. But I haven’t asked him. Yeah, my mom was the homemaker and devoted her life to us kids, but she didn’t go ride horses on the weekend.
The coolest thing about Mad Men is that one of the main characters has the same first name as me. That’s very rare in TV. The other retro-set show of the summer, CBS’ Swingtown (which I’m also enjoying a lot), also has a main character with that same first name. Bonus! I guess my name used to be more popular than it is now. Actually, it’s pretty interesting contrasting the two shows, one set in the 60s and one in the 70s, for how much had changed between the two eras and how much had stayed the same. The 60s shown in Mad Men (the very early 60s) seemed to have more glamour, but the 70s as shown in Swingtown were more glamorous, if you know what I mean. Wait… I don’t think even I know what I mean. But both shows feature the same sort of stereotyped gender roles that everyone thinks about when remembering those eras.
Like Don Draper, the conflicted He-Man at the center of Mad Men, I yearn for those caveman days of yore when a man was a man and a woman was a woman, and little things like morals didn’t get in the way of doing what I want. No I don’t really think that, but I thought I’d say that anyway. At any rate, it’s fun watching it all play out and wondering at just what point it became not okay to keep whiskey in your desk drawer.
So far, I have a sense that the second season of Mad Men has jumped the shark just a tiny bit, but I’ll wait to reserve judgment. Could be just a slight sophomore slump.
Latre.
Pet Peeve of the Day: I’ve tried a couple of different captcha plugins to my WordPress installation today to combat the frequent onslaught of spam, but none of them seemed to work right. If anyone has any they would like to recommend, please let me know! Thanks. The ones I’ve tried so far are myCaptcha and yacaptcha.
Poignant Search Term Of The Day That Led To This Blog: “sometimes i think that becoming a hermit would be a good idea.”.
Comments
One Response to “Ad It Up”
August 17th, 2008 @ 8:47 pm
> one of the main characters has the same first name as me. That’s very rare in TV.
Maybe in live action TV, but don’t make me post a list of the cartoon characters…
(and that’s leaving to one side the 40 screensful of results from an IMDb character name search…)