Monday, April 9, 2012

Mad Men: Mystery Date

The old rule is, if you can't think of anything nice to say ...

There have been bad episodes before but this one was worse than that. It was just television. It felt like a daytime soap. The characters didn't act in ways that surprised so much as they acted in ways that seemed to have been dreamed up just to drive plot twists.

The only question is: Has Mad Men lost it?

Maybe it's not their fault. Maybe it's the material. The period from 1959-1965 really was cool and something just went wrong in 1966. I know, this flies in the face of all the boomer mythology but there you are.

It really felt like things were going off the rails last week at the Rolling Stones show. Everything about that scene felt wrong to me. The groupie behaved more like a late 1970s-early 1980s groupie. The pounding base coming through the concrete felt more like the massive sound systems groups had in the 1960s. In those days the band couldn't even hear themselves.

Mad Men has gone from being a show that surprised us by making us look at things in new ways to one that just spits out boomer mythology.

This is a sad day.

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