Don't you love Mad Men? Have we ever discussed it before? I don't believe so. I just love it. It's totally my kind of show and I'm intrigued to know what's going to happen at the end of this series.
Someone of my acquaintance dismissed it as style over substance, but I disagree. It builds layer upon layer each week until the whole thing can't take anymore layers. To the uninitiated it's draggingly slow and dull as ditchwater. But who says everything has to be so fast? It's collective ADHD. I find the langorous pace rather relaxing. Stuff does happen. And Jon Hamm really, really reminds me and my brother of our dad back then. Hair, suit, job, everything.
It's been a great season: Betty's dissatisfaction with his marriage; Don and that teacher and being at the beck and call of the bonkers Conrad Hilton; Sal's sacking over his sexuality; Roger Sterling - my absolute favourite character - and his dry as vermouth wit; Peggy's transformation into a real woman; the English guy having his foot cut off by that lawnmower. It's all here. It's such a time of limitless possibilities and opitimism. It makes we want to throw it all in and take a big chance on something new. But of course I won't. Sigh.
So much as I love it, my only grumble would be there's not enough locations. It's probably very hard to make them look like they did 50 years ago, and that recent trip to Rome was clearly not shot there, but they could try. I want shops, streets, tiki lounges, roadside lodges and motels. Perhaps that's all a bit obvious but they had much more in the last series, when Don went AWOL in LA.
The series is clearly building to the Kennedy assassination, after which America was never the same again. So it'll be interesting to see what happens after that. I live in fear that January Jones or Jon Hamm will get some rom-com film deal and rashly leave the show, meaning it'll lost its allure. Not that they're the best characters, but everyone's of equal weight and to lose even one them would be disastrous. I want to travel through the Sixties with them and come out the other side. I want to see Pete Campbell grow his hair and Peggy start wearing groovy prints. I want someone to be conscripted once the Vietnam war breaks out...
Are you with me?
