My grandfather worked in Manhattan during this period and he said that this show was the most accurate depiction of that time.
There are definitely more than a few times where they are really trying to tell you how different the Sixties were. The shot when they leave their trash at the picnic in season one is a little much.
you don't like that shot? feel like it's pretty iconic. show definitely gets better and better as it goes on.
fair, though it worked for me. those kinds of visual metaphors are becoming even more obvious in tv nowadays, where instead they'd have dialogue spelling it out.
thats funny to hear that, because my great uncle basically was roger sterling of his own agency in the 1960s and on and before he died in like 2010 i was at his house and i saw a bunch of mad men dvds and i asked him what it was like to watch something like that and he said he watches it because it was the most accurate portrayal of his job, what he did day to day, and life in new york at that time that hes ever seen haha
There are a few other scenes like that in season one. Sally running around with a plastic bag on her head and a part where a man slaps someone else's kid for misbehaving. It screams "weren't the 60's crazy?" The scene where they go to the Greenwich Village cafe looks like a Saturday Night Live setting. The show would have benefited from a larger budget.
None of those examples you listed occurred to me as doing too much tbh. They all felt embedded in the tone of the show. It’s been a few years though—I wonder if I’d feel differently about it now.
The picnic scene for me speaks more to the characters than the 60s setting. Maybe why it works for me.
I'm on season 6 for my first run through. This is absolutely in the conversation for best tv i've ever watched
It is a problem all period shows face and there is no easy solution. Mad Men came out in 2007 but was set in 1960 so most of your audience was not even born yet. You have to help people understand social norms over time or else you are going to have people posting online about how weird a character behaves. They put a warning before the blackface scene now even though they continually cut to Don and Pete wincing so you know just how wrong and offensive it was, even then. Deadwood takes the opposite approach. That is set much earlier to the point where no one alive even had a grandparent from that era but they make no effort to contextualize or explain things. That might be the better way but it is also alienating to the audience. I was a history major and taught history for a long time but I still had to look up a lot of things if I really wanted to fully understand anything.
S5 or 6 are my favorite. Pete and Peggy have some really cool arcs towards the end. Signal 30 and the episode they do coke are incredible.
Yeah his boyfriend killed her by throwing her overboard on a cruise and he secretly spoke Spanish. Season Six is a weird one.
Season Six has something that I really loathe and am seeing more in more in long-running shows, which is undoing a seemingly major event in the previous season because they need the cast together. Peggy leaving is such a big emotional moment but the entire merger storyline is just a way to get her back in the main action. Ted barely matters after a few seasons and then Cutler is written out halfway through season seven. It is basically the old Sterling Cooper again after a while.
Back when we had dedicated desks, yes, absolutely. Had a Creative Director always kept several liquor bottles in his drawer. I think I've had a glass of every type of liquor on the floor.
From what I remember, the weird part about her death was that we weren't really shown anything about it at all, just pretty casually told about it out of nowhere. I remember wondering if it was even legit at first, which I don't think was the writer's intent
As a Sopranos obsessive, Mad Men really feels familiar (I mean yeah shares some essential creative team) but it truly feels cut from the same cloth
Mad Men is probably the closest to The Sopranos. The Wire is more sociological and Breaking Bad is more plot-driven.