Mad Men Season 4

Another great with Peggy. Her just driving around in circles on the scooter.

Lots of people complain about Betty. Her character seems so one note, but, to me, she's so damaged by the way she was raised. The relationship she had with her father, and then Don.

Her seeing a shrink, could get really interesting, much like in the Sopranos with Tony going through therapy.

For nerds only: January Jones was cast as Emma Frost in the coming X-Men movie. I wonder if she even had to read for it.

 

Flipping through the channels when Mad Men was at commercial, and came upon January on the Hallmark Channel in "Love's Enduring Promise."

Looked quite good in 19th century frontier garb.

 

Even better than the Japanese men talking about Joan tipping over was her reaction to it. "They aren't very subtle, are they?"

Roger was written and played perfectly here. He was still the sarcastic, handle-everything-with-a-one-liner guy we know and love, but there was so much more of a bite to everything he said. I also find it interesting that Cooper is so in touch and enlightened about Eastern world, but so out of touch with the African American world.

 

I'm beginning to think both Sally and Betty were abused by Betty's father.

 

I see what a fine job Weiner and the writers are doing in showing the contrasts between the "old" and the "new." I've despised Palmer for what 3 seasons? but he really called it out exactly as it is on Sterling. Also liked Joan's measured response to Sterling going on about WWII.

 

Killed, or maimed. Called that, over a month ago. Glad to see they're reading.

 

Peggy doing circles on the scooter for some reason cracked me up for a good minute or two.
Mrs. Blankenship will not have a good ending.

 

Mrs. B is a cartoon, but a good one. Curious to see just how much penance Don is
willing to serve with her tender assistance.

 

They need to they need to write Miss Blankenship out of the script. She's becoming nails on chalkboard. The fighting with Peter over the bottle of saki was just plain dumb.

 

Well, she certainly comes across as frigid on the show.

 

I keep seeing this theory on Twitter and I think it's too "Ah-ha!" for Matt Weiner. I'm going to be really disappointed if that's the case.

Feels more to me like the point of Sally Draper's little Song of Myself is that kids discover their own sexuality at weird times, and with the 1960s culture rearing its head, the someone like Sally is going to constantly be at odds with her more conservative parents. This is/was the first decade where sex truly took place out in the open, and so here is a very literal example of that, even if it seems fucking weird to see it come from an 11-year-old.

David Chase's thesis statement of the Sopranos seemed to be that someone like Tony is who he is because of his fate of being born a Soprano, and that he was incapable of change, and that psychotherapy was, in the end, bullshit. But that doesn't appear to be Weiner's point at all with Mad Men. As we've discussed before, Mad Men is about facades, and that we all put them up and pretend to be something we aren't necessarily internally, whether that's through a marriage or advertising, and attributing Betty's monstrous parenting and child-like behavior in a marriage to molestation seems, at least to me, to provide a bit of cheap (at least from a writer's perspective) motivation for her character's horrible, unsympathetic behavior.

I feel like it's a bit more interesting if Betty is a horrible parent to Sally because her mother was a horrible parent to her, and she looks longingly at the dollhouse in one of the final scenes because she's missing a happy childhood she never had, even though she's incapable of understanding how her mother's behavior shaped her own feelings toward Sally.

Gene the Molester would feel like a cheap trick, and I think also imply some kind of moral judgment on, say, masturbating that I doubt Weiner wants to touch. (Editor's note: I see what you did there.)

A lot of kids fool around with themselves. Very few of them do so because they were molested by their grandfather.

 

No show says more with less than Mad Men. Having the nanny take Sally to her first shrink appointment? What a bitch Betty is. Narcissitic as hell.
Thought Sally looked good with short hair. The Honda stuff was interesting.
Can't say enough how well they've grown the show. Adding Price was a really good call. And I'm glad the show progresses at a rate that they don't have to recast the kids roles. Sally kills me every time.
My one quibble with the show is that Draper is still wearing a hat. By 1965, hats were well on their way out.