merelyn | Mad Men is Awesome and Everyone Should Watch It

Actual content in my lj! Woah!

So Mad Men came out on DVD on Tuesday. I pre-ordered it months ago, so it was a lovely surprise to find it waiting on my doorstep.

Now that I have both roommates hooked on the show, I'm taking my pimpin' to the internets. For those who don't know, Mad Men is a show centered around an advertising firm in the early 1960s.

I'm not fannish about it in the usual way, but it's brilliant and AWESOME and I want people to squee with.

SO.

5 Reasons Why You Should Be Watching Mad Men:

1) The amazing detail and world building
Since the show is set in a time when the world is on the edge of transformation, between the Eisenhower Era and 1968. Beneath the gloss and martini lunches and idyllic suburbia the earth is beginning to shift under their feet. And yet the show never feels dated, and the time period is not a gimmick, but necessary and fully integrated. (For a lesson in how to do this wrong, please see the American version of Life on Mars.)

2) The acting
John Hamm, who plays the show's lead Don Draper, won a Golden Globe- but really the entire cast is top notch. This is important, as otherwise it would be very hard to like most (if any) of the characters. Everything is so stylized, the advertising world as artificial as the suburban ideal that housewife Betty struggles to maintain. It would be easy for the entire production to become glossy and inaccessible. However, the cast is excellent at drawing you in to the (deeply, deeply) flawed people that inhabit this world.

3) The thematic subtlety of it all
Mad Men is jam-packed with so many Issues that it could, were it a lesser show, devolve into A Very Special Episode of Mad Men- this week's topic: sexism! There is a lot of ground to cover (besides sexism, which, woo boy, is pretty rampant)- racism, anti-semitism, homophobia, and the breakdown of the American Dream. The show is very deft at touching on these topics in a straightforward way without underlining them or preaching. They trust the audience to cringe, and think, and wonder how far we've really come in the last 40-odd years. Likewise, the characters themselves are equally complex, and defy being reduced to simple stereotypes.

4) There are no easy answers
The Draper's marriage, Peggy's struggles to break into the male dominated advertising world, even the closeted characters brief attempts at finding love outside the margins- no one is getting a happy ending handed to them.

Also, the show is weird. Unpredictable. I'm normally the Queen of spotting plot devices a mile away, but with this show I never see most of it coming. (Anyone who has seen the season finale, CALL ME. I have no one to go "OMG HOLY CRAP WTF" with.)

5) Don Draper, who the fuck are you?
The enigmatic black hole of a character at the center of the show is part of the reason why I keep coming back, just so I can finally figure out who the hell he is. The pilot is a great example of this. You go through the entire episode getting one idea of Don Draper, and then, in the last unsettling two minutes you realize you know nothing about him. He's the perfect centerpiece for the show, a man who has created himself and his life from a picture in a magazine. A lot of the tension in Mad Men comes from the creeping feeling that it's all going to crumble around him. However, Don is never more fascinating as when he is backed into a corner- I can't wait to see if he keeps it all together.

*cue TV Announcer Voice*
Available for download at the usual sources, Mad Men can also be purchased from Amazon.com here for only $31.99 with free shipping. What a bargain! They're practically giving it away! *wink*