Mad Men: Season 2
by Admin on Dec.15, 2009, under New Movies
Product Description
Genre: Television: Series
Rating: TV14
Release Date: 14-JUL-2009
Media Type: DVDAmazon.com
Mad Men returns, and guess what? It’s still one of the best shows on TV. Season two continues the slow progression to absolute greatness. The first season left us with a number of cliffhangers, and the beginning of the second season doesn’t cleanly wrap things up. Instead, we leap forward nearly 2 years and are thr… More >>
December 15th, 2009 on 2:44 pm
I don’t get it, the rave reviews, the awards, totally unreal. I was so excited when this show was airing, watched several episodes just hoping it would get better it never did. The characters are bland with no substance, the plot is always the same. The 60’s were better than this show represents by a long shot. It’s unreal that this series can be in the second season going on 3. Breaking Bad is great, Rome was superb, Big Love is fantastic, The Tudors, excellant, Damages, intriguing, Dexter is interesting (& those are all the series I have or will have on dvd) but Mad Men is depressing and disappointing to the nth degree.
Rating: 1 / 5
December 15th, 2009 on 3:51 pm
The first season of Mad Men reached for greatness but was pulled down by its flaws. The second season is an embarrasing train wreck. All the flaws of the first season have now become the heart of the show. The premise has degenerated to a bunch of baby boomers telling us how great they are through a melodramatic story full of one-dimensional characters whose only purpose is to tell morality tales.
The most telling scene is a picnic set-piece done in one episode. We have the idealic family picnic in the woods. But at the end of the picnic, the family simply shakes off their blanket dumping their trash on the ground and walking away. The scene is very dramatic but at same time completely inaccurate and almost unreal. The US had a little problem in that era, but it wasn’t a litter problem involving rich families who didn’t know what trash cans were. The typical litter problem of the era was people throwing things out of cars and treating roads like landfills. In every era there are of course people with no class who would dump picnic trash right on the ground, but that behavior carried through to the rest of their lives. It did end (as in the show) at the picnic grounds. But thats the real problem. The picnic isn’t about storytelling or building characters, its simply another set-piece “morality moment” in the show that ends up being untrue to the characters and the history of the era.
Jon Hamm’s brilliant portrayal of Don Draper in the first season has decended into self-parody. Where in most of the previous season he was a window into business of the era, in the second season he is nothing more than a pathetic punching bag. “Betty” is just pathetic. She is nothing more now than a collection of tired “helpless women” stereotypes. The relentless logic of the show is generally that men are evil and must be punished….while women are helpless victims of the world who we should cry endless tears of pity over.
Elizabeth Moss’s character Peggy is in many ways even more pathetic than Betty. After the stupidity of her giving birth without even knowing she was pregnant, what we get is more unreal melodrama. Peggy is supposed to be the 1960s uber-woman ushering in change. But the writers were utterly disinterested in making a real character out of her or trying to understand what such a person would be like. Peggy is supposed to be the rising star, but she is written as the classic affair secretary in the office complete with married man who really loves her and love-child. I mean in one breath we are supposed to believe that she is this smart and ultra-talented women who rises in advertising because she is so good. But at the same time she is supposed to be so thick that she is unaware of being pregnant up to the moment of giving birth.
As for the rest, we get an office rape. We get a bunch of one-dimensional gay characters doing their piece of the morality play. We get another stereotype to show us how we should all eat right and exercise so we can successfully chase younger women when we are older. Its like they have a chart and every character has a “problem”, a victim event and a path to redemption through a childish interpretation of the 1960s.
What sad is that it could have all been so much better. The cast, the music, the direction and the production design are all incredible. But the show collapses because the plotting is just soo bad. What I wanted to see was how people really lived in an era of bad habits and many bad ideas. What the show has given me is a one-dimensional morality tale melodrama where every plot-point is about how bad and messed up “those people” were.
Rating: 2 / 5
December 15th, 2009 on 6:50 pm
I have ordered and paid for this but have not yet received it?
When can I expect to receive it? I understand it came out in
Jan??
Season 1 was wonderful. Best show on TV.
Rating: 5 / 5
December 15th, 2009 on 9:42 pm
Mad Men – Season OneMad Men: Season 2Mad Men – Season One [Blu-ray]Mad Men – Season Two [Blu-ray]
Rating: 5 / 5
December 15th, 2009 on 11:12 pm
“Mad Men” – a perfectly shallow and narcissistic show – bears as much relation to the emotional, psychological, moral and political moods of the early 1960s as does Twitter, “So You Think You Can Dance?”(no you can’t), the iPhone, and places like [...] Far more of a version of “Sex and the City” with much cooler clothes and music(and girls), what’s left out of this piece of plastic is everything we truly know about the time, which is everything its smarmy Yuppie audience has had a major hand in exterminating in our current culture: earnestness, optimism, a sense of community, grace, complexity, self-deprecation, hatred of the rich and big business, a refusal to demonize others and puff up ourselves, and (perhaps most important) the assumption that people are basically good.
Not only were slick and shiny dime-a-dozen ad-men no one’s idea of a role model in the early 1960s, they became the embodiment of everything repulsively corporate, compromised, materialistic and oh-so-1957. (‘Course one of the wonderful things about that time is no one thought along the lines of “oh-so-1957″.) Take a look: “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”, “The Dick Van Dyke Show”, “Lilies of the Field”, the Beach Boys, David Janssen, Jasper Johns, the 1962 Dual-Ghia, “The Hustler”, Rosemary Clooney, “The Ladies Man”, the TWA Terminal at Idlewild, and of course Jack Kennedy himself.
What we get here, rather, is the same old campy, self-referential, “I gotta go right out and buy that tie!” mutant elite ass-kissing. Creator Matt Weiner tries very hard(and very successfully) to pull the wooly over the eyes of the self-enchanted mind-travelers who read/watch/listen in order to feel even more self-enchanted, for this glamorama soap opera has all the “subtlety” of a Bloomingdale’s store window. (Come to think of it, “Mad Men” is the ultimate Bloomingdale’s store window.)
Let’s just take the role models from “Mad Men”. We have the ubercompetent corporate drone. The hysterectical stay-at-home worthy of “Desperate Housewives”. The frail, tremulous heroine buried under an avalanche of agency problems. (With the coming gravy of sexual harassment ladled over her. Abortion, anyone?) The porcine connected jerk invulnerable to retribution because of his seniority. The burnt-out case, with bad job, bad marriage, stacks of unpaid bills. And everyone always chirp-chirp-chirping at those oh-so-important client meetings. (My kingdom for a cell phone!)
Sure smells like 1963 to me! (Or is that the Starbucks down the block?)
What’s most repulsive about “Mad Men” is how this time(the “last time before America became a slave to anxiety,” as Mailer put it) is seen through the Weiner-ish prism of contemporary Yuppoid self-congratulation. Yeah, sure they had the music and the cars and a real man as President. But we’re so much smarter now! So much more dedicated to our work, our appearance, our health, our environment. So much more civilized about race, and gender, and sexual preference. So much more educated with so much more knowledge right at our fingertips. And how `bout that clunky & pathetic old technology?!
An incredibly stupid show for its appropriately stupid audience. How is it possible to make a show about a time that seems more golden as the years go by, especially from the POV of the emotional & cultural cesspool America has become, without so much as a glimmer of regret, sadness, or melancholy toward what’s been lost?
But then what narcissist is capable of sorrow and loss?
Rating: 1 / 5