Mad Men Season 3: The English Have Landed
By: tmhogirl (03 February 2010)
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Some dramas are laugh out funny and some are so cleverly written with such subtle humour that you can't tell exactly why they are so funny. Mad Men, the multiple Emmy and Golden Globe award winning drama falls under the latter. Take for instance, in the first episode of series 3, a Londoner newly resident in New York declares:
"We're near the UN, so there's plenty of Africans."
OK, difficult to explain out of context why this ignorant sentence is remotely funny but it resulted in my partner and I looking at each other and laughing out loud.
The third series of Mad Men started with a bang with the Ad Agency Sterling Cooper having been taken over by an English agency, with changes to the work force, dynamics and power being controlled by London, resulting in some friction. OK, that is a bit of an exaggeration on my part as nothing in Mad Men ever goes off with a bang. It is slow moving, and yet with a pace that sucks you into lapping up every single word spoken by every character.
Talking of characters, Mad Men is filled with many colourful characters, and yet somehow manages to make them all an integral part of the drama, without the sort of pointless characters that litter other dramas.
The leading male character, Don Draper, (played by the dashing Jon Hamm), the man who defines "cool" with his immaculately cut suits, complete with regular puffs of cigarettes and shorts of spirits, is happily living at home with his equally perfectly turned out wife, the heavily pregnant Betty Draper who last season retired from being a Stepford wife to throw Don out of their marital home for his failure to admit his rampant infidelities. Don is however not quite the reformed character we may be expecting and appears to be back to his brooding womanising ways.
Other characters include the now not so happily married office manager Joan Holloway who manages to ooze sexuality from every pore of her body and in my eyes at least, perhaps has the body of the perfect woman.
Set in the 60s before women liberation movement, in a world where the woman's place was firmly at home, in the kitchen, looking after the children, or at work naturally as a secretary, the timid, nervous Peggy Olsen continues to grow in confidence as she struggles to come to terms with herself having risen from Don's secretary to become a copy writer, and the only female copywriter in Sterling Cooper, much to the bemusement of her male colleagues. Peggy continues to wrestle with her sexual and professional identify and flights in her subtle ways to be taken seriously professionally, from secretaries who do not treat her with the same reverence as her male colleagues, to wanting to be taken seriously for her natural flair for her job. In her personal life, having finally gotten over the hold the weasel Pete, the married man who slept with her, discarded her at will, and renewed his interest in her with a scary mixture of menace and mental game playing, she continues to flit from one unsuitable man to another. On one such encounter, she pretends to be a secretary when she picks a man up from a bar, followed by sex at his house – naturally.
You can catch the third series of Man Men at 10pm Wednesday on BBC4
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Comments on this post:
"super slick and cleverly written and more about whats not said ."
bluesky (03 February 2010)
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"What moi? *Flutters lashes.* Yes you're right, Mad Men is indeed super slick and uber clever."
tmhogirl (05 February 2010)
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