Mad Men: Season One
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Actor: Christina Hendricks, Elisabeth Moss, January Jones, Jon Hamm, Vincent KartheiserBrand: Lions Gate
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); English (Original Language)
Format: Box set, Color, Dolby, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.78:1
Running Time: 600 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2008-07-01
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Lionsgate
Product features:
- Condition: New
- Format: DVD
- Widescreen; Box set; Color; Dolby
DVD Reviews of Mad Men: Season One
DVD Review: One of the finest series on television
Summary: 5 Stars
MAD MEN is one of those series that is almost impossible to praise too highly. It is also one of those series that puts on display the inherent superiority of television to the movies. That is a sentiment that I find offends many, but one that more and more thinking men and women are coming to embrace as television gradually turns out one amazingly intelligent series after another. Cinema is inherently limited on how much an individual movie can achieve in developing a complex narrative just as it is limited in how deeply it can explore character. The reason is obvious: a lack of time. Delving deeply into the lives of a group of characters is a luxury movies simply can't afford. The clock is ticking.
MAD MEN will, when it is finished, be a narrative of the sixties. Season One begins in 1960k, shortly before the Kennedy-Nixon election. Season Two moves almost two years ahead of that. Subsequent seasons will move the story ahead by a couple of years each time, before coming to an end at the end of the decade. The sixties was clearly the most remarkable decade of the twentieth century. The world of 1970 has more in common with today in many ways than it did to 1960. The changes in our attitudes can scarcely be assessed. At the beginning of the series women all have their place in the office as servants to the men, accept passively their roles as eye candy and objects of sexual innuendo, and aspire to no more than moving up the secretarial rank. A gay man in the office is so completely in the office that he seems oblivious to his homosexuality. But by the end of decade would come the Stonewall riots and the Second Wave of the women's movement would be in full bloom.
One of the dominant themes of the show is the contrast between the world of today and the world of "then." One of the most striking moments in Season One comes when Betty Draper's daughter runs into the living room wearing a body length plastic launderer's bag. Betty sharply upbraids her, hoping that this doesn't mean that her laundry is laying on the floor. To modern sensibility a child wearing a deadly plastic bad is shocking. Or in a late season episode Don Draper allows his completely drunk boss to leave his house with a drink "for the road." He merely smiles when he shouts, "That's my car!" as Roger drunkenly tries to find his own. A pregnant woman at a party can be seen smoking while holding a martini glass. One of my favorite MAD MEN scenes comes in Season Two, when after a picnic with his wife and kids, Don shakes the blanket they have all been sitting on, leaving the paper and trash on the ground. It all highlights some of the progress we have made in disciplining some of our more indefensible behavior.
As others have noted, the show centers on several ad executives at the Sterling-Cooper advertising firm. In particular, the film focuses on Don Draper, a brilliantly creative ad exec who has been just as inventive in recreating himself as he has been in promoting the products of the firm's clients. A serial adulterer, the child of a prostitute who died giving birth to him, and the son of an abusive father, he has had to pull himself from his humble origins to the top of his profession. All this while protecting his own dark secrets. Don Draper is a great character, perhaps the most archetypal character to have arisen since Tony Soprano. And it provided the opportunity for overnight stardom for Jon Hamm, a previously only marginally successful actor who had mainly been distinguished by a string of very small parts on various TV series and small budget movies. But it is impossible to imagine anyone more perfect for this role than Hamm and series creator Matthew Weiner agreed after seeing his audition tapes. When the network insisted that Hamm be passed over for a more established actor, Weiner declared that without Hamm he was not willing to move forward with the series. Weiner won and Hamm went on to win a Golden Globe and an Emmy nomination (which he should have won). As portrayed by Hamm, Don Draper is the complete embodiment of Thoreau's individual who lives a life of quiet desperation. Draper is a world of contradictions. At times unscrupulous, he is also capable of great magnanimity and moral rectitude. A womanizer, he yearns for the ideal home.
The cast is stuffed with great characters and wonderful performances. I absolutely detested Vincent Kartheiser as Connor on the series ANGEL, though even then I suspected it was more the way he was written than his performance. Though he isn't asked to perform acts of daring do on MAD MEN, he is exceptional as Peter Campbell. Like Don Draper he alternates from petty, self-serving moments to acts of kindness and loyalty. He is capable of being wonderfully protective of Peggy Olson, a woman with whom he has had a couple of moments of physical intimacy, though he can also behave viciously towards her. John Slattery is outstanding as Roger Sterling, the number two man in the firm and the son of the Sterling-Cooper cofounder. Robert Morse, the great Broadway musical star of the sixties (including HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS WITHOUT REALLY TRYING), plays Bertram Cooper, the head of the firm. The almost unbearably beautiful January Jones (at one point in the season much is made of her resemblance to Grace Kelly, and she is gorgeous enough to make it not a silly compliment). Not to jump ahead to Season Two, Jones performance over the two seasons as Don Draper's trophy wife Betty is noting short of brilliant. Betty is someone who detests her life as a beautiful manikin, but isn't able to achieve happiness because she doesn't know who she wants to become. She also provides many of Season One's great moments, none better than when she starts killing the carrier pigeons of her next door neighbor with an air rifle (with cigarette dangling from her mouth) after he tells her children that he will kill their dog if they don't keep him out of his yard. The gorgeous Christina Hendricks (who wears some padding to make her figure more Rubenesque and who was wonderful in the recurring role of Saffron on the Sci-fi series FIREFLY) plays Joan Holloway, the office manager.
After Don Draper, however, my favorite character on the show is Peggy Olson (Elizabeth Moss). The series actually begins with Peggy's first day as a Sterling-Cooper employee. Starting off as Don Draper's secretary, she soon shows that she has skills as a writer, and soon becomes valued as a copy writer with a sensitivity for products that appeal to women. I've told friends that I believe that by the end of the series Peggy will actually be the head of Sterling-Cooper. I think the centrality of Peggy to the show was shown partly by the show commencing with her first day there and with her unprecedented penetration of the all male hierarchy of the corporation. Viewers may notice that she gains weight over the course of the year, especially during the last half. In fact Elizabeth Moss gained no weight. All changes were the result of very sophisticated make up art and padded clothing.
MAD MEN is one of the most beautifully designed shows you'll ever hope to see. It may be surpassed by BATTLESTAR GALACTICA and PUSHING DAISIES in art design, but no show on television rivals it in clothing. The look of the show is impeccable. If you don't remember the sixties, you can relive them by watching this show.
This is a show that anyone serious about quality TV has to know well. I've watched Season One twice and plan on rewatching Season One and Two as soon as the latter has finished. MAD MEN is also an example of a new trend in television, a series that tells more or less a unified story over the course of its life. LOST and BATTLESTAR GALACTICA both are doing this as well. All are must-see shows.
Description of Mad Men: Season One
Genre: Television: Series
Rating: NR
Release Date: 1-JUL-2008
Media Type: DVD
Welcome to a world where Monday has a three drink minimum. Mad Men exists here and it's a fabulous place to visit, back before Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique really made much of an impact and before the Surgeon General put warning labels on cigarettes. It was an America on the brink of social explosion and Mad Men, which tells the story of a group of Madison Avenue advertising executives in the early 1960s, captures that surface stillness perfectly, complete with the growing tension barely contained below the surface.
The show succeeds on every level. HBO famously passed on Mad Men, created by former Sopranos executive producer and writer Matthew Weiner. AMC picked it up, and thank goodness they did. From the first episode, Season One becomes an essential, utterly addictive television- watching experience. Beautifully filmed and masterfully written, the show manages to present the period honestly but with little nostalgia, and as soon as you get over the constant smoking, drinking and treatment of women as little more than "girls" who get coffee and answer the phone, the complexity of these characters (especially the dashing Jon Hamm as Creative Director Don Draper) will leave you completely captivated. Season One features clandestine office romances, shadowy pasts, a ton of adultery, closeted homosexuality and a lot more drama that seems risqué even for 2008. But again, one of the most impressive things about Mad Men is that everything is executed with absolute class, style and elegance. And bonus for the DVD viewer: Like The Sopranos, Mad Men has a ton of little moments and hints leading up to character revelations and plot twists that make watching the episodes over and over continually rewarding. ?-Kira Canny
Stills from Mad Men (click for larger image)
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