Posted on 07/19/2010 3:05:08 PM PDT by OldDeckHand
A show that divides America politically plunges into its fourth season.
Mad Men is a show about an unbending generation on the cusp of dissolution; Matthew Weiner, the show’s head writer, has often said that the majority of America in the early ’60s was still, by and large, living in the domestic ’50s. Weiner, a Baby Boomer, has a conflicted relationship with this time period. Because it is the generation of his parents, he wants to explore it and pore over it; because it’s the generation that, through Weiner’s specific political prism, reflects a hypocritical façade, he’d like it to form a gangway for the liberation to come. This ambivalence creates a divide in the audience’s responses to the show, which tend to fall along political lines.
Conservatives and liberals just can’t help but see Mad Men differently: the former with apprehension, the latter with anticipation. The show inspires a certain self-satisfaction in the type of viewers who would observe each instance of sexism, racism, and general prejudice as just more foundation for an interpretation many critics have arrived at: “The show explains why the ’60s had to happen.” Rod Dreher says, “For unreflective liberals, Mad Men is only temporarily tragic. It has a happy ending. Deliverance from all this sexism and repression and cigarette smoke draws nigh.”
(Excerpt) Read more at article.nationalreview.com ...
Daniel Foster has a friendly, good-natured rebuttal piece which may be found below...
and Jonah Chimes in with his assertion that Breaking Bad is the best show on TV, not Mad Men.
He makes some good points, and clearly Breaking Bad is an excellent show. It's too bad both shows share this far too uncommon trait amongst television scripted dramas - excellence.
Conservatives by and large don’t look at such Hollywood fantasies to justify their worldviews. Liberals do. That’s the real fundamental divide.
PS It is a decent show.
The Greek word for hypocrite means “actor.”
I’m just saying.
“The show explains why the ’60s had to happen.”
Just as the French Revolution was “an idea whose time had come”. Why do center-lefties take umbrage at being labeled communist? They, perhaps unknowingly, embrace all of its principles and methods.
Haven't seen the show, don't watch much TV. But did see the 60s.
The major fantasy was not Hollywood. It was the news media and academia. Pre-Reagan Keynes was the only responsible answer to Marx as my Wheaton College economics professor told me when he gave me an 'F' for mentioning Friedman 6 months before Milt got the Nobel prize. No Democrat, no prominent Republica, not Nixon, Ford, not minority leader Dirksen allowed for the metion of any discredited capitalist.
Pre-Reagan, everybody agreed detente and compromise with the Soviets was the only way to avoid nuclear holocaust.
It was a schizophrenic society. Starting with the Tet Offensive Jan 1, 68 the media informed us the Vietnam war was unpopular in the USA. Yet the Democrat base overwhelmingly nominated pro-war Humphrey over anti-war McCarthy. And then in November the voters elected pro-war and notoriously anti-communist Nixon over pro-war Humphrey ... and with Wallace picking up significant 3d party support even more anti-communist and pro-war than Nixon.
Four years later pro-war Nixon trounced anti-war McGovern,. On the day Saigon fell, the public opinion polls showed the public still supported the war and was more pro-war than Nixon. Yet the news media and academia insisted in an alternate reality until Watergate so weakened Nixon that he thought the way to survive was to compromise with the media that was crusading against the war.
I don’t have tv, but a friend of mine loaned me the firs Season DVD package. I watched part of a DVD and I was done. The show has some amazing technical qualities and incredible sets.
That said, it is not about the 60’s so much about a tiny subculture living in the 60’s. I was there and I remember that era. The disrespect that guy showed to his wife when his boss came on to her would never have happened in my circle. I know, because a similar event happened and it was the BOSS that was chastized.
I like to say there are as many subcultures as there are people. The show did a good job of making fun of some of the sensibilities of the time, but it doesn’t mean we are “better” now. As someone pointed out a couple of years ago, nowadays you would be shocked if, after eating, a dinner guest simply lit up a cigarette at the table, yet you wouldn’t think twice about them using mild (and sometimes not so mild) “adult” language. In the early 1960’s and before, the opposite was true. So, which is better?
Conservatives by and large don’t look at such Hollywood fantasies to justify their worldviews. Liberals do. That’s the real fundamental divide.
&&
Excellent point.
Watched the show once. Not impressed. Full disclosure: I usually just don’t watch TV “drama” or sit-coms.
I think people enjoy Mad Men because it harkens back to a time when people weren’t afraid to be what they were: men, women, drinkers, smokers and whatever else they wanted to be without the Godforsaken hours of self-loathing and introspection.
Thanks for that pithy insight. By the by, who in your view is "looking at such Hollywood fantasies to justify their worldviews"?
I've highlighted three plainly conservative people who at some length and effort, were motivated to opine on a cultural phenomena. If the discourse is either above you, or beneath you, I apologize.
"PS It is a decent show."
Let me guess, you yearn for the days of the Rockford Files and Marcus Welby?
More lib propaganda on evil white men and how white women are sluts. More evil and racists WASPs too. Trash with an agenda.
Idiots who watch TV empower Obama. Keep up the good work serfs.
These writers have all seemed to have forgotten that Don Draper is a fraud, his life, his name, everything is pretense. He is really Dick Whitman, who assumed Don Draper’s identity to escape from the Korean War.
I enjoy the series, and I admire many of Don’s virtues, and none of his vices.
I like the new stuff: Cheers, the Diane years.
I haven’t seen Mad Men, I have trouble focusing on too many shows at once, and I don’t really like much on TV. I like to watch as a diversion at times, and my husband has his shows that catch my attention (Burn Notice, NCIS Ice Road Truckers). But aside from those, it is all dreck, bread and circus’, morally vacuous.
Except Breaking Bad. I cannot remember a scripted show that has had me so captivated. The show is well written, expertly acted, has creative camera work, but most of all it has a moral undertone. The road to hell really is paved with good intentions. People can try to say that it is commentary on the WO(s)D, health care, etc, but really it is a show on how we all are vulnerable to temptation, and once you take that first step down that slippery slope there is no turning back. Actions have unintended consequences. Oh what a tangled web we weave.
Oh yeah don’t forget South Park!
I think you've touched on the very thing that Foster was alluding to in his rebuttal piece when he says...
It seems to me that the brilliance of Draper, and of Mad Men as a whole, is its ability to make people born in 1974 or 1983 or 1990 nostalgic for a world they never knew, except through a second-hand public school narrative that paints it in the gray flannel and sharkskin tones we've been trained to find so stultifying.
For all of Draper's flaws, there's something genuine and primal in him that appeals to men and disgusts women - and women love the disgust. I think you've touched on the reason - the show reflects our more instinctive nature, and that terrifies some people and liberates others. Don Draper isn't trying to be or please anyone other than Don Draper, and it's refreshing as hell.
What about idiotic posts on Free Republic? What's the net effect of that?
Frantzie,
A bit harsh. I agree with you on most that you say, but Mad Men is not that bad. lol.
The average rate was around 10%, but I think the marginal rate was around 20%. The top marginal rate was well-above 90%, maybe even 95%.
However, the collective tax rate - that is to say the sum of all taxes paid versus gross income was WAY lower in 1955. While our income tax rates are close to the same, or perhaps even a bit lower (on average) compared to 1955, we're getting nickel & dimed to death. Just look at your telephone bill some time.
Liberals don’t label. They throw away a language that includes labels.
They are black and progressive and gay.
The real words are pejorative and forbidden by Jim Robinson
They have captured the language and frightened conservatives into newspeak
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