Me too. I'm roughly the age of Drapper's second oldest, so I saw those days through that same prism. But, while the artifacts of nostalgia bring back long-forgotten memories, the family dynamic that is being portrayed is COMPLETELY foreign to me. I'm not saying there weren't families just like this, but I grew up in a loud, Catholic Italian family with an entirely different dynamic.
I don't know if Betty Draper is a caricature of Matt Weiner's (the Producer and show-runner) own mother, but she doesn't remind me of anyone in my own childhood.
Umm... hate to say this, but sounds like we’re about the same age and it was uncomfortably like that for me in my family. Actually not until later, and my dad was no Jon Hamm and my mom was no Jan Jones. Although Jon Hamm did go to the same private school in St. Louis where my uncle used to teach. Probably had him for class, but that’s another story. We were pretty happy in 1965, as far as I knew, but there was that incident in which Mom flew off to Wichita for a long weekend. Nobody was talking about why.
Betty is the “Hitchcock blonde”—this is obvious to me, from her hairstyle, carriage, upper-cate tone. Think Grace Kelly, Tippi Hedren...
That's well-put. And that's the biggest reason I tune in--they do a very good job of capturing the era.
Do you remember when we all casually littered, threw trash everywhere? There's a picnic scene in MM when the Draper family flips the trash onto the ground from the blanket. Embarrassed to say, I remember that from childhood.
The story of Draper's double-life is the most hilarious, stupid soap opera gimmick--secret identity! Next we'll have amnesia and long-lost illegitimate children.