.Mad Men (TV Series 2007-2015)DramaSet in 1960 New York, MAD MEN reveals the lives of the ruthlessly competitive men and women of Madison Avenue's “Golden Age”, where key players make the art of the sell while their private lives get sold.
A place to discuss Mad Men, AMC's first foray into producing television.The show is critically acclaimed and award-winning, earning nine Emmys and four Golden Globes. It is the first basic cable series to win the Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series, winning the award in 2008 and 2009.So go get a bottle of scotch and a glass, and kick back in your favorite easy chair with your favorite brand of smokes. We'll be here after each episode.Please. We mods don't want to have to delete good conversations. Even before the first scene, we get a musical cue of a 1950s-era male singing group, the first of many deft uses of music on Mad Men. It indicates how radically popular American music changed over a relatively brief period. By “now”, 1960, rock’n’roll hasn’t really hit the mainstream yet, and there’s a strong barrier between black music and white music.And here we see Don Draper for the first time, from behind as in the last image of the title sequence.
He’s sitting alone in a bar, smoking, drinking, and working; three of his four unhealthy addictions at once.Don’s conversation with the black waiter, Sam, serves multiple functions. It shows Don’s knack for striking up conversations with people, even strangers. It also shows that in 1960, the racial divide is very real. Black people like Sam may serve drink to and light cigarettes for white people like Don, but they don’t have even casual conversations. The white bartender’s intervention in this scene, and his terse comment, “He can be a little chatty.”, suggests just how much tension is hidden in a seemingly trivial encounter.
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When Don tries to reach across that divide, if only to figure out how to sell cigarettes to black people, he encounters resistance from other whites.Seeking a solution to his creative blockage and his loneliness, Don goes to see Midge. For a series that operates on the level of subtext, Midge is remarkably subtext-free.
She already knows Don and what he wants, knows his mommy issues: “I don’t want to go to school tomorrow.” The following morning, Don rests his head on Midge’s chest, and fantasizes about marrying her (though Betty hasn’t been introduced yet). This is echoed a few scenes later, when Joan introduces Peggy to the offices of Sterling Cooper, and Peggy walks around with a “Please don’t hurt me” grimace. Joan says that these men are looking for “something between a mother and a waitress”; either way, they expect to be coddled.Don apparently curses Pete, though when he blames it all on Pete’s unlikeability, he’s ignoring the fact that Don himself is not well-liked, and only slightly better at long-term intimate relationships. After Don’s rejection, Pete goes behind his back on the Lucky Strike account and nearly scuttles it, only confirming Don’s estimation of him.This is also Don’s first “happiness” speech, in which he describes happiness as not security, but “reassurance”; not the lack of anxiety (which Don is riddled with), but something that takes anxiety away. Latent in this is the idea of addiction, which Don knows well, even if he won’t admit it; a need that can temporarily be satiated, but always returns. In that regard, cigarettes are the perfect consumerist product: they both create a desire and satisfy it.We get Don’s “love was invented to sell nylons” speech to Rachel.
As striking as it sounds, Jon Hamm’s delivery suggests that this is just another pitch, one calcuated to appeal to Rachel’s sensibilities which Don elicited from her earlier. Perhaps this is the same routine he used to seduce Midge the beatnik. It’s just as much a performance as what he said to Lucky Strike. Rachel doesn't quite buy it, but she's intrigued.Even though this was the pilot episode, and shot six months before the rest of the first season, it’s all here, if only in embryonic form: Pete’s slightly too aggressive ways with women, Peggy’s nascent feminism and father-transferance, Roger’s frenemies relationship with Don, Don’s denial of the past and his glib cynicism, the constant sense of vainly trying to catch up with a changing world, the drinking, the smoking, the casual racism and sexism. Unlike a lot of pilot episodes, this feels of a piece with the rest of the series: no forgotten characters or plotlines.
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I think Don's got a very nihilistic worldview, and in his 'happiness' speech he acknowledges the fact that all cigarettes are identical products. There is no real meaning behind the “it’s toasted” approach, or any creative approach, for that matter. The sole purpose of the tag line is to make people who see the ads feel content with their purchasing decisions.Basically, I think Don is making a Nietzschean affirmation. I think this is how he deals with his anxiety and is able to continually cheat on his wife. He says 'happiness is the smell of a new car.
It's freedom from fear.' I think he is using women to make himself feel okay, even if just for a brief moment. They are his 'new cars,' and they can justify whatever it is he's doing. After all, Don lives 'like there's no tomorrow, because there isn't one.' The consequences of his actions don't matter to him because nothing really matters. 'You're born alone and you die alone,' he tells Rachel later.
Rachel notices that Don is 'disconnected,' and is intrigued because she feels the same way.“If we affirm one single moment, we thus affirm not only ourselves but all existence. For nothing is self-sufficient, neither in us ourselves nor in things; and if our soul has trembled with happiness and sounded like a harp string just once, all eternity was needed to produce this one event—and in this single moment of affirmation all eternity was called good, redeemed, justified, and affirmed.” -Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power.
I always watch this episode when I'm bored for some reason. There is something about Don that just pulls me in. Maybe it's the fact that we are just meeting the everyone, but it really eloquently ascertains the whole future of the show. Pete Campbell being a dick, Don controlling everything, and how the secretaries play a huge role in the lives of the important peoplePlus the beginning really entices me. I don't know I just love that scene when Band of Gold plays and we see Don in his prime, I guess.