Moot Point

1. Jon Hamm = lust. Not just the easy kind where I think he’s handsome — though he is — but the kind where it’s a little uncomfortable because his character’s also kind of a dick. This is not his wife.
2. The stuff. The stuff (TimesSelect archival article about the production design and period detail, sorry, but they will give you access if you have a functional school email address). In that article, Matthew Weiner says this: “The story is told in the details, and those details have their own life.” I love that he gets that: that the crap we surround ourselves with is not secondary to our lives, that it makes up our lives. I think it’s easier to do with a period show, because the props are interesting in and of themselves, and it’s a lot easier to be critical of the materialism of 1960 than it is to be of the materialism of right now, thanks a lot, reification. (Did I mention I’m apparently a commie now? The first phrase I actually thought of was “commodity fetishism.”)
3. The foregrounding of the political. Again, because the era is so far removed, the ways in which the characters are strongly shaped by sociopolitical forces and then-current ideologies is really, really clear in a way that I don’t think would fly if you made a contemporary show. Like, obviously people can see dominant ideologies at work in the here and now, but you have to work a lot harder to convince people that it’s not just the natural order. (See: feminism, gay rights activists, anti-poverty activists, etc. etc.) Mad Men works pretty hard to separate you from the characters — having Don be obviously sexist or anti-Semitic or whatever makes it pretty clear that you are looking at him from across a divide — and I think that is one of the points of the show.
4. How freaking gorgeous it is: for all that it is trying to be “realistic” and show how unhappy people were in 1960 — despite their ownership of all the modern conveniences — it is one of the best-looking shows on TV. The camera angles! The lighting! The way smoke lingers in the air, the way light glistens off a tumbler of whiskey. So beautiful.
5. The melodrama aspect of it. Though, as I mentioned, the show does a lot to distance you from the characters, ideologically speaking, it still manages to make the characters emotionally sympathetic. (The scene from this week’s episode? Where Peggy wipes away a tear and keeps on doing the twist?) We see them struggling to be happy and work within a set of ideologies that restrict a whole bunch of things about their lives; it is compelling, and I think really gets to the heart of what melodrama can do.

It is a love it or hate it kind of a show, but I really, really love it.