newcritics

When we last saw Don, he was in the glow of sunlight through the window of DC8 on his way to Los Angeles to get away from his domestic travails. It’s the primal tactic of flight when fight doesn’t work. Good old running away. After the week we have witnessed, we should all be so [...]

Among true fans of Mad Men, Jon Hamm’s loss at the Emmys was something of a body blow. Hamm’s portrayal of the surly two-faced creative director Don Draper on the early 60s period drama was the favorite going in, a buttoned-up Madison Avenue heir to Tony Soprano - the new leading leading man.
But as good [...]

It’s been a week of certifiable madness.
Stock market insanity; bank and company failures on an epic scale; the dollar amount of 700 billion said with a straight face.
And now the maddening reality of the loss of Paul Newman, who embodied the sea change of generational sensibility that is rocking Don Draper’s world.
The gang at Sterling [...]

As I mentioned in our last outing, the life in the edges in Mad Men is often more entertaining than the faux suburban turmoil that makes up the lives of Don and Betty Draper. The world of Sterling Cooper is really coming into its own in season two, even as the cardboard angst of Ossining [...]

Is boredom of interest? The affliction troubling the two main characters of AMC’s wildly popular Mad Men seems to be some type of low-grade non-fever, the after effects of a suburban existentialist bomb that exploded far off camera leaving viewers wandering the frozen landscape of Draperville without the pleasure of fire. Don and Betty Draper [...]

No live-blogging of tonight’s episode because of the holiday. Feel free to use this as an open thread.
I was an altar boy from the time I was in fifth grade until just about halfway through my first year of high school, when getting up at six o’clock on a Sunday morning became as physically [...]

As fun as it is to get lost in, and quibble with, the exhaustive amount of period detail in Mad Men, that’s not quite where I come from on it. Right or wrong (or more to the point, right AND wrong), the period details of Mad Men are meant, I think, to frame the story [...]

Live blogging tonight!
“God, I miss the fifties.” Roger Sterling
“I miss the blacklist.” Harry Crane
“I missed not live blogging with you all last week. Thank God my Norwegian ancestors kept me from being sad about it.” M.A.Peel
Okay, so I have now seen “The Benefactor,” where Roger and Harry had throw away lines waxing nostalgic for [...]

The theme that developed quickly in the first season of Mad Men, that all the world’s a stage—particularly that part of the world that has its offices on Madison Avenue and split-level homes in Ossining, New York—and all the mad men and women merely unhappy and restless players trapped in soul-constricting roles of their own, [...]

For all of today’s hypermobility of every kind—from the ubiquitous air travel we take for granted to the iphone culture that lets us take it all with us—we are a comparatively earth-bound people. I don’t think our society’s collective thoughts and imagination fly, not the way they did at the dawn of the sixties.
The National [...]

I wasn’t expecting to join in the weekly blogfest over Mad Men, mostly because with my lack of cable, I’ll be at a certain disadvantage. As it turns out, though, AMC is
making episodes pretty quickly available on iTunes, and the chance to rejoin something I was getting a pretty big kick out of turned [...]

It is particularly tempting for me to relish the details of style and fact embedded in the non-drama that unfolds Sunday evenings as Mad Men, particularly in this new second season launch tonight. The ad boys return on Valentine’s Day, 1962 - exactly a week before my arrival in the New York suburbs of that [...]