The show is so good, in fact, that anonymous fans took it upon themselves to start up and maintain Twitter accounts for the various characters.
Show centerpiece and cooly charamastic junior partner Don Draper has been Twittering, as has office bombshell Joan Holloway and budding copywriter Peggy Olson, along with a host of other characters both major and minor. Normally, this would seem like exactly the type of viral marketing put out by AMC, but in this case it can be safely assumed AMC isn't behind it. After all, if fans are crazed enough to microblog about the characters for the show, then why not let them? As of yet, none of the people involved have used the Twitter accounts in anyway that AMC could interpret as harmful to their property.
Dick Whitman, future adman, solved the problem of his miserable life by rebranding himself. It was, on one level, a classic story of self-reinvention and -deception. All of them came from rural poverty and none of them talked about their childhoods, or they lied about them.
As the series evolved, it would add secrets. Big ones, like the fact that Peggy had a baby and gave it away just as her copywriting career was launching. Minor ones like whether the advertising agency had added a second floor to its offices before season five. All of this worked: The cultivated sense of mystery created an air of intense speculation in a show that was not about monsters or dragons but advertising and infidelity.
Pepper album. Those butts, for instance. The actual cigarettes are herbal: they stand in for both tobacco cigarettes and joints, and give the production an appropriately weedy smell when the actors fire them up. On Mad Men , see, perfection means that nothing should be too perfect.
One mistake that period dramas often make, for instance, is to have every set look like a design-magazine shoot from whatever the year is. There are keepsakes and hand-me-downs and heirlooms. Look at your own house: Did you buy all your furniture this year? The clothes in your closet? Weiner, and thus his staff, are fixated on nailing the details to a granular level.
The theory is: Even if the audience never sees it, the actors will. The Rolodexes are filled with actual vintage cards with KLondikestyle numbers. The production department has been an excellent customer for L. Actresses were discouraged from working out too intensely, because the s had some meat on its bones. Beyond simple period accuracy, Mad Men is acting out a philosophy, handed down from Weiner, that informs its entire approach to history and character. A story set decades ago, it believes, is also about the decades that came before that.
So a house on the set of Mad Men has ghosts. Think of Bobby Draper in season six, tearing at his bedroom wallpaper to get at the wallpaper underneath. Both in script and in style, Mad Men treats history as a palimpsest, rewritten and rewritten on the same sheet of paper so that you can still read traces of the earlier drafts. There is always wallpaper under the wallpaper. It contrasts him with, say, Bert Cooper, the idiosyncratic, Japanophile, Ayn Randian capitalist, his office outfitted with antique furniture, bonsai, and a Mark Rothko that he bought as an investment.
The End Place. Some seashells. So we had to figure out: What does an Italian hospital look like? For the actors, the very act of putting on the wardrobe, with all the clothes signifying the attitudes and even demands of the times, was part of getting into character.
It turned how tied-in and implosive Betty was into a literal fact. Even on the set, history repeats. Then, suddenly, the scene is reset, the iThingies are stashed, the cameras roll again.
And you begin to see the writing, direction and performances that turn all of these carefully curated vintage objects into the achievement: you, feeling something. There are any number of standout scenes in the pilot. Don has a problem. It was more than a clever angle.
AMC loved that scene. That decision made a statement about what Mad Men would become. There would be other memorable pitches on the show, but only when the story called for it. Weiner recalls an early episode in which a fellow train commuter recognizes Don as Dick Whitman.
His writers pitched the idea of having Don lure the man between cars and throw him off the train. Instead, the show surprised in subtle ways, by zigging where half a century of TV conditioned you to expect a zag. Through the years he becomes more weary, defeated, but wiser and more thoughtful. When she realizes Don has paternalistically arranged to have her psychiatrist report to him about her therapy sessions, she uses this to send him the message that she knows about his cheating.
Mad Men would be, mostly, the story of people who stand outside change, who fear it and have done fine without it. This extended to the work at Sterling Cooper. Sterling Cooper was not one of those firms. Don sneers at the ads. By the end of the first season, Sterling Cooper is trying to insert itself into the presidential campaign, developing work for.
Richard Nixon. That theme is even more pronounced by the second season. Don, angry, orders one of them to take his hat off. In other words: Show some damn respect. But respect is a dying currency.
Even the space age is threatening. Where change comes to Mad Men in those early years, it comes at the margins. It comes, especially, through Peggy. Closer, generationally, to most of us watching, she enters the world of Sterling Cooper the way we do, as an outsider.
The first season establishes her as a wide-eyed newcomer, but soon complicates the picture, then recomplicates it. This never happened. Another seismic social change of the period—the civil-rights struggle—happens mostly off-camera, and comes to us mostly through the experience of white characters. Paul Kinsey takes off for a voter-registration drive in Mississippi as much for his own self-discovery as anything.
Mad Men has always been conscious of the fact that it is a show about privileged white people and of how minorities are, generally, cordoned away from them. Despite criticisms of the show, the offices are not integrated until the latter seasons—and then, by secretaries.
Weiner has remained purposeful about his intentions. And I chose not to lie about the interaction these characters are having with different kinds of people. Bigotry comes up in a more blatant way in season three, when Don—the man with a secret—learns that Sal is gay.
At first, Don tolerates him, in a way. But in those early seasons, Mad Men showed a talent for making a well-trod stretch of history fresh by coming at it, most often, at odd angles. By setting the show at an advertising agency, Weiner was able to focus the passage of time the way most people experience it—through culture, work, the decisions of everyday life, the day-to-day.
And after it had seemed that Don and Betty would weather her discovery of his identity—one Big Lie too many after a marriage full of them—the Kennedy catastrophe seems to push her to make a decision.
As with the Cuban Missile Crisis at the end of season two, this calamity is not a deus ex machina that suddenly causes people to change their lives. Rather, it just causes them to live their lives, as they might have anyway, but more intensely, maybe with a greater—if temporary—clarity of purpose. The words one uses when describing, well, a divorce.
The business has relaunched itself. JFK is dead. Weiner designed Mad Men symmetrically. Mad Men also built a symmetry between its two major characters, Don and Peggy. Like a mirror reflection, she is both the same as him and his opposite. They can both be difficult. They have, to some extent, cut ties with their past to try to make a future. In some ways, in season four, things have never been better for Don. It would come apart, literally, as the agency was swallowed by McCann-Erickson and the office gutted in the second half of season 7.
The reality in Mad Men is unpretty. Don is a rudderless, morose drunk, living in a Manhattan bachelor pad. When asked by ShortList. The thing is, it was apparent from the beginning how annoyingly good he was in that role. Trying to communicate so much from a guy who keeps his cards so close to his chest is almost an impossibility.
January Jones auditioned not once but twice for the role of Peggy Olson, which eventually went to Elisabeth Moss. The old-school cigarette brand, which played a recurring role on the show since its very beginning, benefited from its association with Mad Men : The company nearly doubled its sales during the show's run selling an additional 10 billion cigarettes. And to me, yes, it is really physical danger—'I almost dodged a bullet.
It always felt to me like a flaw.
0コメント