white christmas

I started watching Mad Men with friend this year, on her TiVo. And I got so into it, I insisted on watching the final episode "live" so to speak. How do we say this? "When broadcast?" Then, over the winter holidays I made an effort to catch-up and watch seasons one and two. By the time the NYT published that story about Netflix maps I wasn't surprised to see Mad Men mapped neatly on to spaces of privileged whiteness.

Recently, I've been speculating wildly at resistance is fertile, where lagusta wrote a fine series on Mad Men for Feminists. There are a variety of perspectives from the Emdashes people. And I started searching the New Yorker archives to see what they said. Lots of Mad Men references in the blogs.

George Packer: "So the question is obvious: what’s so interesting about this annoying show?" He's got one answer ready.

Ben Greenman gets to the point, "sometimes the plotting is too elliptical (read: nonexistent)" and then goes on about Hendricks and Dungeons and Dragons.

Nancy Franklin's first mention came in a piece that I'd read for other reasons (Glen Close, romantic comedy, etc). She wrote:

Have any states yet legalized marriage between human beings and TV shows? If so, I’m going to throw a few things in a bag and run off with “Mad Men,” the new drama on AMC set in the world of advertising at the dawn of the sixties—and encompassing New York life, and marriage, and sex, and repression, and what America was and was not. It is gorgeous in every way. As it should be—it’s the spawn of all those handsome, stylish office movies that were made in the fifties. Like those movies, “Mad Men” is smart and tremendously attractive, and it stirs you more than it probably should. It may not be deep, but if you’re a certain age and have a certain sensibility and certain fantasies of what New York used to be like (thanks to those movies) it hits a deep place in you, like a straight-up Martini made of memory and desire.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/television/2007/07/23/070723crte_television_franklin?currentPage=2#ixzz0d03Kqeji

WHAT ARE these stylish office movies she's talking about? Anybody? I've been thinking a little bit about mid-century office ennui, but I had mostly literary references in mind . . .

And, finally, Franklin has a nice review and recap of the tantilizing changes - for men and women - that the Season Three Finale promised. Promises, promises.