More MAD-Ness

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, October 17, 2008 at 4:28 PM - 5 Comments

Not surprisingly after the Emmy blowout, Mad Men has been picked up for a third season. However, Lionsgate and AMC don’t have a deal yet with creator/showrunner Matt Weiner, who is holding out for more money; if things fall apart (or if he accepts a better offer from richer networks, which are undoubtedly after him now), the show would have to come back without him.

I didn’t get the sense that the show advanced much in its second season. It’s still interesting, of course, but the novelty is gone, and despite the attempts to dig more into the inner lives of the characters, I still find a lot of them kind of flat, kind of limited by the show’s pervasive distance and coolness. Mad Men and The Sopranos both present a world we’re not supposed to admire, populated by characters who are basically awful; a show like that needs to manage the very difficult trick of making us see ourselves in these characters (if we don’t, then there’s no reason to watch except to feel superior to them) without excusing them for what they do. The Sopranos usually pulled that off; I don’t see Mad Men as similarly skilful; watching it can be like visiting a museum and staring at the dinosaur skeletons — these were the monsters who once roamed our earth. The slow pace does not bother me much; I think it’s refreshing compared to the overcaffinated pacing of most current shows, and in many scenes, it only seems slow compared to other shows that go too damned fast. The problem is that I’m still not sure what the point is, exactly. I know the point is supposed to be that underneath the period trappings, this world is still our world, but I still don’t see that they really manage to pull that off. It’s brilliantly made, still, but I’m not sure how much more it is than that.

Alex Epstein has other, more specific problems with the way the “big moments” this year — the show’s attempt to match or top the spectacular BB gun sequence from season 1 — don’t feel earned.

It's a mad mad mad men world

By Andrew Potter - Tuesday, September 23, 2008 at 8:21 AM - 1 Comment

Quick, to the ObviousMobile:

Men who grow up thinking women should stay at home may be labelled “old-fashioned” – but could end up well ahead in the salary stakes. A US study, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, suggests that they will consistently out-earn more “modern-thinking” men. On average, this meant an extra $8,500 (£4,722) a year.

I take it that this result surprises absolutely nobody. My question: Is the discovery that men with old-fashioned values out earn “modern” men something close to a sociological tautology?

Breaking Is Hard To Do

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, July 25, 2008 at 3:18 PM - 0 Comments

Didn’t intend to post two Onion AV Club links in a row, but their interview with Mad Men‘s Matt Weiner addresses something I find interesting: how a guy who cut his teeth on HBO adjusts to the world of basic-cable, where you have BS&P departments and commercial breaks:

AVC: Another reality of being on AMC is that there are commercial breaks. Is the rhythm of the show influenced by anticipation of the breaks? Do you write that way?

MW: I write the show straight through. And then we find, when we’re editing, where the breaks go. You can do a lot with a commercial break—you can change days, you can suggest the passage of time. So sometimes that’s a great thing artistically, to know that’s going to be there. Obviously you’d always prefer that people see it straight through, and you don’t want them to be taken out of it by advertising, but that’s the reality of what’s paying the bills here.

AVC: There’s an art to it, though. The pilot episode of Twin Peaks, for instance, chose some really great images to put right before the breaks.

MW: I do think about it. I won’t lie. I do think about it when we finally get there. But for me, most of the time it’s a totally double-edged sword. It’s impossible for me, without getting a big wide shot of Manhattan, to convince people that it’s another day. But if we go to a commercial and we come up and people are in different clothes, you know it’s another day. The great thing is that before the first commercial, there’s a huge chunk of the show. It’s always around 20 minutes of the show without commercials, which is really helpful.

The method he describes, writing without breaks and then putting in the breaks during editing, is a time-honoured method, though it doesn’t happen much on network TV any more. TV drama pioneer Roy Huggins, creator of Maverick and many other shows, said that he believed that “a good story can break anywhere” and that he wrote without regard for where the breaks might fall; Huggins’ protégé Stephen J. Cannell, former boss of Matt Weiner’s mentor David Chase, wrote the same way. (In the pilot script of The A-Team, there are no commercial breaks indicated anywhere.) Mad Men even uses the old ’70s and ’80s method of not having clear fade-outs or fade-ins; the show just stops before a commercial break and starts again immediately after. Doing a show this way is kind of like showing a movie on commercial TV: you produce it without breaks, and then find the places where a break would be least damaging to the flow of the story. The Office, perhaps because it’s based on a commercial-free show, seems to be done like this too; it can break at almost any point that the producers want, but it doesn’t break with any great fanfare.

Other shows are written around the commercial breaks, all the way. With the huge number of commercial Continue…

Historical Inaccuracy

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, July 21, 2008 at 1:31 PM - 0 Comments

Just as an example of how historical accuracy is more important in today’s TV (especially if it’s Mad Men) than it used to be, here’s a screencap from an episode of Happy Days, back when the show was still set in the mid-’50s. The poster is for Roman Holiday, which is indeed a ’50s movie, but it says at the top that Audrey Hepburn is the star of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which didn’t come out until the early ’60s. The set decorators obviously grabbed a poster for a ’60s reissue of Roman Holiday, and nobody corrected it because it was assumed, rightly, that normal people wouldn’t notice. But you can bet that you will never see Mad Men display a movie poster mentioning a movie that didn’t exist yet, because TV today is much more nitpicky about details.