Mad Love

I’ve spent the past 4 days devouring the entire Season 3 of Mad Men (thank you, Jakarta) and god, I love this show. I’m not generally a television person, for some reason or another; I guess I usually find it kind of difficult to sustain interest in characters or stories than span such a long run-time, as opposed to a nicely packaged, self-contained and focused movie. After a while with most fictional television series I find myself ceasing to give a damn. Lost, the only other series I really still follow, has still managed to hook me in all this time solely because of the central unsolved mystery at the heart of that damn island. If it wasn’t for that, I would’ve long given up on that show’s stupid dialogue and irritating, implausible, boring characters.

Mad Men, on the other hand, has by far the best writing I’ve ever seen on television; clever, subtle and extremely layered. I think some people find its deliberate ambiguity slow; it did frustrate me a little initially but I soon grew to appreciate it. It forces you to pick up on the little things, and I eventually realised there’s a reason behind every single word – kind of like watching a (Fitzgerald) book. Dense? Yes. But also continually fascinating and unexpectedly funny. Plus, watching an episode makes you feel instantly smarter.

The show’s setting is New York in the ‘60s but its concerns are universal: the slow disintegration of an identity, of a marriage; the gradual replacement of the old with the new, whether or not anybody is ready for it; the irony of a man who comes up with advertisements founded on basic human desires, but has no idea what he really wants in life; the hollowness of the glossy world of images and how people get trapped in the roles they make for themselves. Still, the ‘period-piece’ quality of it lends an intriguing and ominous dimension to it all. There’s always, in the background, the faint sense of impending tragedy, be it the Cuban missile crisis or the Kennedy assassination. This was a period of change and instability, and the setting mirrors the flux at the core of many (all?) of the characters.



And I really have genuine affection and investment in practically every single character, impenetrable and mysterious as most of them might be. They are incredibly real and multi-faceted and the acting is just brilliant. Many of these people aren’t easily likeable, the ostensible protagonist Don Draper especially – this show just doesn’t deal in simplicity – but I find myself hoping the best for them in spite of everything. Betty Draper, for example, played by January Jones (I can’t believe I thought she wasn’t pretty at first! This girl gets prettier every time I look at her, like an Ice Queen Barbie. And she wears her clothes so awesomely.), is the character I have the least amount of sympathy for right now. This past season she’s been withdrawing into herself more and more, her mouth strained perpetually in a thin, fixed line, her (pretty! but dagger-like) eyes glazed over with some kind of buried rage, and her total self-absorption having horrible effects on her children. A couple of times I caught myself wondering why Don ever married this cold, selfish, desperately sad little girl in the first place; but then suddenly she smiles one of her increasingly rare smiles and you remember that things weren’t always like this, that this anger and bitterness closed in on her slowly over the years like a trap, and it’s tragic, and you wish their marriage could somehow return to where it must have once been.

Also Mad Men has the most awesomely jazzy-yet-sinister theme song (“A Beautiful Mine”) ever. I enjoy it every time. And there's a great Simpsons parody too.



Whew, nice to get that all out. I know nobody else watches Mad Men here but it’s really a show that needs to be pondered and discussed and debated, and one day if ever you find yourself inexplicably hooked... come sit by me.