Celeb look alike?

Is it just me or does Jon Hamm look a lot like our newly minted Speaker of the House John "Orange" Boehner?

[Image courtesy: alan.org and austinpost.org]

Don Draper takes a detour through Sesame Street

Since there are no more episodes of Mad Men left to review (season 5 will presumably return in summer 2011. I say presumably because AMC has not officially renewed it for the 5th season, although Weiner's contract does stipulate another year), enjoy this spoof courtesy of your friendly denizens of Sesame Street:


Couple things I want to mention:

• Are kids these days so advanced they understand SAT level words like sycophant? 

• The whole thing seems more for the benefit of adults who are at least aware of what Mad Men is. I can't imagine a 6 year old knowing this is a parody of a TV show.

• As one commenter on Youtube points out, "Mad, Sad, Glad" would have been better.

Mad Men season finale: There are no fresh starts! O rly?

Compared to the hyperactive Season 3 finale, where a large contingent of rebels left SC en masse to start the new SCDP, this season finale was a bit underwhelming. I mentioned before that I thought this season's theme was change and specifically how Don makes a genuine effort to bring productive changes in his life. This episode sort of represented the culmination of that theme.

Henry Francis tells Betty, "There are no fresh starts!" But we viewers know better, don't we? We know Don Draper is the sultan of fresh starts. And once again, he proves this right. After spending months as a grovelling, sleazy drunkard, Don is back at the top. An impulsive proposal brought him to the summit. Although I have to say that I thoroughly disliked the Don-Megan marriage. Seemed an awfully close imitation of the Roger-Jane marriage from Season 2. We know Don is impulsive, but this was way over-the-top, even by Don Draper standards. He is just mesmerized by Megan's motherliness and I think he is amazed at how different she is from Betty (see the milkshake scene. Betty would have created a huge ruckus, whereas Megan handled it very coolly and efficiently).Will this marriage survive? Will Megan be relegated to a 38 second scene next season as Jane was? No. Yes. Draper's impulses make him a bad stable spouse. He is no Henry Francis.

Meanwhile, things are going incredibly south for Betty. Despite being free from Don and his shenanigans for a while now, Betty finds it hard to find peace and happiness. Her character didn't get to do much this season, and I think this is the writers' fault. At some point, Weiner and the honchos (meant to be said in the same rhythm as Alvin and the chipmunks) must have decided, "This is it for Betty. We developed her quite a bit over Seasons 1 and 2, now lets just throw her overboard." I found that contrived meeting with Don at the end (where Betty pretended she came back to pick up a box she had forgotten) incredibly sad and pathetic. This is something we would have expected early Season 4 era Don to do. But in this touching scene, Don appeared confident; Betty desperate.

Apart from Don, no other person has evolved so much as Peggy has over the past four seasons. Season 4 Peggy is suave, imposing, creative and most of all, full of possibilities: a mini Don Draper. Someone commented over at Alan Sepinwall's site (an incredible place to discuss the show, BTW: http://www.hitfix.com/blogs/whats-alan-watching/posts/mad-men-tomorrowland-i-spill-your-milkshake) that Peggy's story is almost as fascinating as Don's. If Weiner et al. had focused the show on Peggy, it would be just as absorbing and complex. In this episode, she rescues the firm from ruin singlehandedly by landing the Topaz account. It was great to see her pitch idea after idea to the Topaz folks. Loved the bonding moment with Joan over Draper's ill-advised marriage as well.

Finally, Joan. Turns out she didn't get an abortion after all! I think this represents a fundamental shift in her outlook. She is really hoping to settle down in her life.

Some misc. things:

• I still don't care for the Sally-Glen subplot. Yawn
• Greg in Vietnam! 
• Harry Crane's metamorphosis from a naive fruit loop into a sleazy womanizer. Terrible.

So that's it for now. I guess I will be back doing these next year.
Here is my ranking for the four seasons: 1, 3, 4, 2.

Review of Mad Men: Dawn Drapah's vigah!

To my extremely loyal Mad Men reader/fan base (currently numbering 1): I am sorry I am lagging behind in my reviews of the show. I have to watch the show via alternate means (euphemism for the internet) and with school in session, I don't get as much time to ponder over each episode as I would like to.

With that in mind, I will keep this short.

This was the penultimate episode of Season 4, and I think it was one of the strongest episodes of this season (right after the Don/Peggy duet). After a few lackluster episodes in the recent weeks, this was a mighty relief.

I am now convinced the main theme of Season 4 is change. Specifically, Don's quest to make significant changes in his life. And so it was ironic when Midge (a refreshing blast from the past, I might add) says, "You haven't changed, Don." How little she knows...

Don's full-page ad in the New York Times (a pretty gutsy albeit selfish move) shows a marked change in his outlook. Earlier in the season, he chewed Peggy out for orchestrating a catfight in a grocery store to attract sales for Ham. Now, as Peggy so adroitly reminds him, he does the exact same thing. His partners accuse him of trying to garner undue attention and humiliate/insult them, and I think I partially agree. By signing his name on the ad, Don pretty much makes a bold statement that he IS the agency.

His interaction with Midge also illustrates how much he has changed. Whereas a circa Season 2 Don would have gladly jumped in bed with her, Season 4 Don knows how disastrous that can be, and genuinely tries to stay away from her. Throughout the season, we have seen Don ask people to restrict him (e.g.: he tells Megan to make him stop at three drinks) and it's nice to see that he is finally paying due respect to self-control and discipline.

Even though the Betty-Sally-creepy Glen (who BTW is creator Matt Weiner's son. Talk about typecasting your own son) storyline did not appeal to me in the slightest, I liked this episode overall.

Finally, this was a episode full of many little memorable moments:

• Don-Pete "bro" nod after Pete finds out Don bailed him out
• Peggy and the rest of the minions desperately to eavesdrop on the partners
• The absolutely hilarious Robert Kennedy prank call (and the inspiration for this post's title)
• "Mr. Crane! OUT!"

Can't wait for the season finale. 

Mad Men - "Hands and Knees" : Men down

I will be honest here. Didn't like this episode that much. I hate it when shows like Mad Men resort to the pregnancy plot device. It was sort of OK when they did that with Peggy in Season 1/Season 2, but to do it again with Joan?! I expected better from the creative gurus on this one.

I didn't have enough time to do a post on last week's episode, but I enjoyed that episode a lot. For a show set in the 60's, Mad Men has been very coy about tackling the social and political upheaval of the times directly (with a few exceptions. See: Nixon v. Kennedy, JFK assassination, and Liston v. Ali fight). So it was refreshing to see last week's episode tackle civil rights issue and women's rights issue as well. All three of the strongest female characters on the show (Peggy, Joan and Dr. Miller) realize they are missing something in their lives (either due to personal choices or society's restrictions) towards the end of the episode. Honorable mention goes to Sally, who tries valiantly to escape her mother's house to stay with her father. Like the grown-up trio, she too realizes at the end that she can't always get what she wants (zing! I worked in a Rolling Stones reference). Miss Blankenship's death provided the same black humor that the lawnmower incident did in Season 3.

With that out of the way, on to Sunday's episode. Seems like this was the male version of last week's episode. Don, Lane, Roger and Pete all end up devastated when they are confronted with terrible situations. Don goes into uber-panic mode when he realizes he inadvertently applied for a security clearance from the DoD when his firm chose to work with North American Aviation. He is a deserter from the Korean War, a man who stole a dead lieutenant's identity so he has solid reasons to be afraid of the government finding out about his sordid past.

Roger finds out from a callous Lee Jr. that Lucky Strike, the client that keeps SCDP afloat, has decided to pull out. Both men inherited their respective businesses, and seems like both are gettint irrelevant now. Roger also has to deal with the shocking news that he got Joan pregnant when they went out for dinner.

A side note here: like the Peggy pregnancy plot line, Weiner was coy with one also. We see Joan at the abortion clinic, but we never actually see her going in or coming out with an abortion.

Lane Pryce. Oh Lane, I feel for thee. A fully grown-up man like him getting brutally whacked on the forehead by his father's mean-looking walking cane and being forced to call his father "sir" - very very poignant. Sure he made a mess of things in the U S of A, but for him to bow down (literally) to his father's orders was just a shocker. I guess that explains his obsequiousness from Season 3.

In many ways, Pete Campbell acted as the adult in this episode, which is something of a rarity for this character. He handled the Don issue quite effectively and went as far as to take the whole blame of ditching NAA on himself. His rant about how dishonest people leave everyone around them in tatters was pretty impressive as well.

But like I said, didn't enjoy this that much. Too disjointed, lumpy and out-of-character moments in this episode. The creative cabal rushed us through very many pivotal moments in one single episode (Joan is pregnant! SCDP is on the brink of ruin! Don may be outed! Lane is heading back! Don and Faye might break up now!). The Season 3 finale rushed us through many developments as well, but that one was crafted masterfully. This one reeked of clumsiness.

Some random things I liked:

• Sally's reaction when she found out Don was taking her to see the Beatles!
• Don's "You're not a real doctor" to Faye (who has a PhD) in the middle of his panic attack when she tried to help
• Betty not being portrayed the monster, for once
• Roger's fury unleashed

Mad Men 'The Summer Man': A cliche-fest

"He's a handsome two-bit gangster like you" - Dr. Faye Miller describing her dad to Don Draper.

I don't have much time (and it's kind of late here in Pittsburgh), so I will keep this review of tonight's Mad Men short.

After last week's episode, where the writing and acting were phenomenal, this one was a huge letdown for me. Riddled with cliches and non sequiturs, this one didn't seem to go anywhere. And I understand that with shows like Mad Men not every episode will advance the plot (if Mad Men can be said to have a plot in the conventional sense) significantly, but this one was just were gauzy and detached, floating somewhere in the ether, much like that episode where Don visited California in the previous season and hung out with a bunch of weird wealthy Europeans.

It seems that Don has finally decided to change. He stays away from the usual morning drink, resists taking Dr. Miller to his apartment after that date (and what a date it was, with the elaborate game both of them played - Dr. Miller strongly hinting her dad is connected to the Mafia somehow and cleverly sequestering Don's coat), and finally reminds himself to play the responsible father.

But the diary writing? Blah. Don's diary is full of cheesy one-liners. "I should've finished high school." Is this the creative genius Don Draper behind such legendary ad campaigns as Glo-Coat and Kodak? Even James Patterson writes better than that. Heck, even Roger's supposed memoir (horribly titled Sterling Gold) sounds better than this tripe.

The Peggy-Joan subplot didn't really work for me either. I know the show was trying to touch on the serious problem of workplace sexual harassment, but Mad Men has been a bit heavy-handed from the beginning, and I thought they handled this clumsily by making this a Peggy-Joan turf war.

To end a cliche-infested episode, the writers used another cliche: Aesop's well-known fable about the contest between the wind and sun about who can get a man to take off his coat sooner.

Some cool things I liked in this episode:

• Very nice use of The Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction" in the beginning!
• Joan reprimands the troublemakers (who are making a terrible ruckus by banging the vending machine) by asking them to call the customer service line to get help from adults. Pete Campbell chooses that exact moment to poke his head in to investigate the source of all the noise, which is very ironic. Much has been said (on Mad Men analysis blogs) about Pete Campbell's child-like psyche.
• "Go S**t in the ocean!" - such a piercing insult.

Mad Men: Review of tonight's episode

I am huge fan of the AMC TV show Mad Men. The show has had trouble finding viewers over its three seasons, but has become the darling of the critics, winning back-to-back Emmys and a host of other awards.  For those of you interested in the technical part of TV producing, Mad Men was created by Matthew Weiner, who wrote for the highly acclaimed Sopranos on HBO. The show is set at a mid-level ad agency on Madison Avenue in the 1960's and depicts the social environment of the era. Although it can (and does) get heavy-handed when treating issues like sexism and racism, I think the show's portrayal of the pressing issues of the era is very clever and nuanced. Unlike most shows Mad Men is paced and composed like a rich novel, rife with ambiguities and complex character development (HBO's The Wire is another show that "reads" like a novel).

Season three ended quite dramatically. Draper, Roger Sterling, Bert Cooper and Lane Pryce decided to stage a coup to teach their British masters a lesson and defected en masse, taking a few key staffers and accounts with them to start a new agency. Season four (which began last week) is set 11 months later, and we see that the new  SCDP (Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce) is doing quite well in chic new offices but not well enough to afford amenities like conference tables. We also see that Draper is having a mid-life crisis of sorts, what with wife Betty leaving him for Henry Francis.