As glittery and shiny as the spanking new 1962 Coupe de Ville that Don Draper buys (and whose new-car smell Betty ruins in the stunningly appropriate final scene of Sunday's episode), as rich and textured and ambiguous as the modernist Mark Rothko painting Cooper displays in his office, AMC's Mad Men is firing on all cylinders midway through its second season. Sunday's brilliantly structured episode, another home run in a recent string of winners, had me looking anew at the show as a work of art, something transcending mere TV. I could devote an entire column to quoting great, meaningful, loaded dialogue from this episode. Surely they'll publish collected scripts of Mad Men some day. It will make great reading, possibly even as satisfying as watching it.
read more
Jon Hamm, a Golden Globe winner and likely Emmy nominee, isn’t taking the critical success of Mad Men for granted. “It’s phenomenal. It’s a wonderful experience. But the swirl that happens around the show exists outside the show.” Still, as he quotes his co-star John Slattery, “It makes you feel like … you’re not crazy. Other people like good stuff too.”Critics certainly like good stuff, and AMC’s session promoting Mad Men’s upcoming second season was easily the biggest lovefest so far in the TCA press tour, currently in its first week devoted to cable presentations.The group laughed when a critic challenged the show’s famously tight-lipped creator Matthew Weiner to explain to fans why the mystery surrounding what happened to Peggy’s illegitimate baby — the jaw-dropper of the Season 1 finale — remains unresolved by the end of the July 27 season opener. “I would say, trust me. I will give you the informat...
read more
You could get vertigo tonight, scaling the heights of the finale of Mad Men on AMC, and then plumbing the depths of the tone-deaf misfire that is Viva Laughlin, premiering on CBS in the plum slot after CSI before moving to Sundays. There, only those with the most morbid curiosity to watch a show’s slow yet hopefully quick death are likely to follow (unless every critic I know is totally off the mark).First, a salute to the best and most fascinating new show to arrive on TV this year (and I’m even including my quirky new treasure Pushing Daisies in that equation). Mad Men, so hypnotic in its look and style as it recreates a classic movie-worthy image of 1960 Manhattan, is a period piece that says volumes about today, or about any era in which salary and status is tied to self-worth and where people construct a false reality to sell themselves on the American dream.Don Draper (instant star Jon Hamm) would seem to have it all. Besides the movie-star looks, he enjoys upward mo...
read more
