Mad Men: Season 2

Mad Men: Season 2
Series: Mad Men



Reviews

By G. Merritt

Sopranos' writer, Matthew Weiner's Mad Men series is arguably the best reason to own a television these days. Set in 1960s New York City, the show involves a group of Madison Avenue ad executives and their secretaries working, smoking, drinking, and socializing together at the Sterling Cooper advertising agency. In the show's first season, Mad Men provided viewers with a window into an American culture of Nixon-era social taboo-isms: alcoholism, sexism, racism, and consumerism, which is mainly what made Mad Men so fascinating. It's easy to see why the show won two Golden Globe awards in 2007 for Best Television Series - Drama, and Best Actor in a Television Series - Drama and the Emmy Award for Best Outstanding Drama Series. Imagine the "Mad-ness" of a bunch of complicated, alcoholic, Nixon-era, GQ ad men in starched white shirts, spending their workdays in a fog of cigarette smoke, and you'll have the basic premise of this highly-acclaimed, must-see show.

Mad Men's characters are a truly well-drawn bunch. For instance, the protagonist, Don Draper (Jon Hamm), is not only the creative director and junior partner of Sterling Cooper, he is also the illegitimate son of a prostitute, now living an assumed identity to hide his inner "whore child" from his wife and competitive Madison Avenue colleagues. Don is unhappy with his life. He drinks Jack Daniels, chain smokes Lucky Strikes, cheats on his trophy wife Betty (January Jones), and constantly dreams of escaping his life. He is known to sneak away from work to see afternoon foreign movie matinees. Betty, a former model, represents the classic '50s homemaker, but suffers from profound loneliness, sexual frustration, and dissatisfaction with her "perfect" life. (In Season One, we learned that household appliances literally give her orgasms.) With aspirations of becoming the agency's first woman copywriter, Peggy Olsen (Elisabeth Moss) was a new secretary at Sterling Cooper, who was unexpectedly confronted with an unwanted pregnancy. Italian bachelor, Salvatore Romano (Bryan Batt), is Sterling Cooper's macho art director, a homosexual afraid to come out of the closet, and equally afraid to act on his sexual impulses.

Season Two premiered on July 27, 2008 and picks up on Valentine's Day, 1962, two years after the first season during the Kennedy administration, an era marked by the growing civil rights movement, Bob Dylan, free love, increasing feminine discontent, crumbling marriages, the threat of nuclear annihilation, Leave It to Beaver, and New York poet Frank O'Hara's ever-ominous 1957 message of mortality: Meditations in an Emergency. Much of Season One's comic edge is now gone, and the tone of the show is more melancholic. While Don and Betty Draper experience marital problems, enigmatic Don experiences a full-blown existential crises while away on a business trip to sunny Los Angeles. Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser) becomes disillusioned with his own "perfect" marriage and realizes he is in love with Peggy (Moss). The series ends under the cloud of the looming Cuban Missile Crisis. Mad Men remains television at its best.

12/12/08 Update: Mad Men and Jon Hamm received Golden Globe nominations this week for Season Two of Mad Men.

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