Its a Mad Mad World

Mad is Back !

So Mad Man has returned to our TV airwaves after being gone for almost 2 years ! Well so far there have been two episodes and it truly has been great to have such a great series back. The primer aired last Sunday as a 2 hour TV event and to be honest it takes a while to get use to the deliberate pacing, the dialogue that is not spoken, and the sense that you really never know where this show is going.

Where is the drama ? Where are the loud arguments and explosions ?

I've come to realize that the real suspense of this show is how petty the lives of  SDCP really are when painted against the backdrop of the culture shift called the Sixtes. In the premier you have the Civil Rights Movement taking center stage within the first 5 minutes and the only thing that comes of that is how our hero's can make fun of an rival agency. You have some resolution closer toward the movement of history but you pretty much have to wait until the episode is over , nearly an hour and half later.  The suspense is driven by what huge historical changes will be ignored until they can't be ignored any longer.

Back in season 3 the Kennedy assassination came suddenly in the middle of an episode, totally unexpected. The force of this news pretty much erased all the other plots as this was too big a news for our narcissistic characters to ignore. I am not complaining about the lack of social awareness of our characters, I  find it pretty spot on really. Here we live in the post- 9/11 world and as we sit here obsessing over a TV show planing for our Easter weekends, will future generations make a television show (or whatever kind of show that have in 2062) about the early 2000s and how we weren't aware of the huge changes going on in society  like climate change, terrorism , and renewable energy ? 

Mad Men really is just a character study of individuals as they live their lives in the 1960s. Hell this show really could be about an ad agency in 2012 as long as the characters were compelling (well they are trying a realty show about a modern day ad agency , on the same network - AMC - no less). But making it in the sixties it does give it that outer world weirdness. Human stories 50 years ago, might as well have been about stories from another planet considering how different things were (technology, culture, music, etc). But human nature.. that rarely changes.