Mad Men 2: Judgment Day

I posted earlier about the Mad Men pilot, the series having now aired on CTV for a month. From the pilot, it was hard to tell whether the show was over the top or sharp. I've now come to the conclusion that the majority of its critical acclaim is due to good acting, a unique setting, and probably a little nostalgia - not the quality of the show itself.

They've kept up with the heavy-handedness of the stereotypes of the time - surely there's a way to demonstrate the realities of things like institutional anti-Semitism and pregnant women drinking like it's going out of style without being so "look! Look! Aren't they backwards???" as I find Mad Men has been. And they're plunging into the generic "man works long hours, cheats on family" storyline with both feet, again quite heavily, and bringing nothing especially interesting to the table - despite the overarching contemporary contempt for the submissive retro housewife, the show isn't doing anything to overturn that into sympathy for the woman, resulting in an affair as about un-dramatic as they come. How can an audience be invested in a woman being wronged by her husband if it thinks that woman is spineless and backwards? I feel like every character is a caricature. The small-town typist determined to make it in the business by putting out is still going strong, as is the hard-drinking, chain smoking, casually unpleasant head of the firm. The message? Corporations are bad. Corporations ruin lives. Corporations pervert people. People who run corporations are bad. Cry me a river, but try to keep it down so I can sleep. If you're going to fall back on such an overdone theme, it's just got to be executed in a more interesting fashion than Mad Men is doing.


It has it's fleeting moments, like a surprisingly tender scene involving Vincent Kartheiser's irresponsible, cutthroat yuppie playboy Peter realizing that one of the unique joys of a newlywed is knowing that someone who loves you will be there when you get home, but even these moments of potential character growth are quickly overturned, House-style, by the tired idea that people don't change. The biggest problem with a TV series relying on that idea is that stagnation is boring - there's nothing dramatic about characters who stay the same. I've said it before and I'll say it again, that is why Battlestar Galactica succeeds so well: its characters either get better or get worse, but they don't stagnate; and the only character who does stagnate, Gaius Baltar, is fascinating because of he is surrounded by constantly growing humans and Cylons alike. One character who stagnates is an intriguing contrast. A whole cast of them is painfully dull.

And there you have it.