Chapters are like 4 or 5 pages per episode, many are the same reviews from way back when, others are freshly written. They wrote the book in a way where you could read the recaps without spoilers. They have footnotes that are at the back of the book for people that have finished the show.
Sterling was hilarious. First episode the exchange between him and Don when talking if they have hired anyone who is Jewish is great.
My fav Roger Sterling scene is.....well it's pretty much a tie between all of them. But I love when it's the anniversary of Pearl Harbor and he shows up to work already drunk and talking shit about "Japs"
You know Mona had a dream where I ran over the dog. She was mad at me the whole day. And I didn't hit the dog. We don't even have a dog.
One of my favorite scenes because what it leads too. I had assumed they were at dinner. When they showed up at the office i lost it.
I've reached season four in my rewatch. Ida Blakenship is my favorite secretary. "If I wanted to watch two negros (Clay vs Liston) fight I'd throw a dollar bill out my window." Also Lane Price is the best.
biggest lmao moment of the show for me was the Lane/Pete fight "because he was caught with chewing gum on his pubis"
Am I supposed to find Megan's mom more attractive than Megan? Cause she's much hotter. I can't get past Megan's teeth
I have a big thing for Megan but I'm usually in the minority. I guess I never got her little French song performance out of my head
Megan is top tier. Outside of my (everyone's) Alison Brie thing, Megan is the best looking on the show.
The rewatch is better than I imagined. You can see why it won so many awards. It's a shame it got only one acting win though.
Guess I'm wrong, thought I had seen people massively hate on Megan's looks on here before. Maybe it was in direct comparison to Betty
Want to echo these sentiments. I'm into season 4 now on a rewatch and I remember really liking Lane but his stuff later on (especially the fight with Pete in the conference room and what led to it) overshadowed some earlier stuff. I remembered how amazing his "Happy Christmas!" line was to Powell after they found out Lane had fired Don, Roger and Bert to start the new agency but I did not recall he and Don getting drunk alone in the office then going to the movies...
i'm not sure how i missed this the first time. so much history of the show i had no idea about An Oral History of Mad Men
Debuted 10 years ago tonight. Who was watching? I know I was not (I didn't get on board until season 2)
Unfortunately I wasn't on board right away. Didn't realize it was on until season 2 was about to start so I had to buy the DVD and catch up.
I caught up in time to watch live after their extended break during negotiations with AMC. So I think that means I watched the first 4 seasons on Netflix then watched the rest as it aired.
I think this is what I did. I binge watched the series and then followed along till the end. Did the same with Breaking Bad.
I'm actually curious if anyone here started from the very beginning (it at least season 1). Seems like everyone I talk to started at least at season 2 (most well after). I know I started after it won best drama. I have no idea what it's ratings were during the first season, especially the pilot.
It never got strong ratings. It mostly hovered around 1.5-2mm viewers, which is small, but it did pull in 3mm for its finale. Breaking Bad meanwhile was at about 1.5 million for its first three years, then inched up to almost 2mm on average in its 4th season before making a jump in season 5 to almost 3mm per week, and then in season 6 to about 5mm per week with a 10mm finale. Mad Men was the grandfather AMC show though, so it was never going to be cancelled for low ratings, especially not with all the awards it racked up. AMC and Weiner did argue over the final season's budget but that's about it.
just finished a rewatch of season 1. damn these characters evolved so much over the course of the show
I'm reading the book "The Hidden Persuaders"...recommend to fans of this show. Matthew Weiner had to have read it when creating the character of Don. The book was published in the 1950s and is about the psychological techniques advertisers were beginning to use instead of relying on the traditional approach of just touting the merits of their product vs competitors. This is an old essay about the book from the Atlantic if you don't want to check out the whole book: Spoiler http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/books/review/Greif-t.html The books a child sneaks off his parents’ bookshelves and surreptitiously reads ought to be sex books. “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” and “Memoirs of Hecate County” scandalized and educated earlier generations. The volume I made off with was a 75-cent paperback of “The Hidden Persuaders” by Vance Packard. It did scandalize me, completely. But it did so by exposing the secret world of advertising and brands. Published in 1957, it is now enjoying its 50th anniversary and a new edition from Ig Publishing, with an introduction by Mark Crispin Miller. I remember my own edition as small enough to hide — not that I really needed to — but packed with dynamite. It had a lurid cover illustration showing a barbed fishhook buried in a gleaming apple. Packard’s book reached into the darkest corners, not of sensuality, which I was sure I knew all about from television, but of the cynical selling in the commercials that ran between the shows. I was a child of television. Whatever appeared on the color screen of our fake burled wood cabinet TV was a miraculous transmission from a better world. My devotion to television is the only way I can account for the disillusion I suffered at the hands of Packard’s book. Packard had tried to warn Americans of a new mutation in advertising. Powerful admen were working to tap the irrational in the consumer mind, using the applied psychology and sociology supported by the government during World War II. As more goods came to supermarket shelves, advertisers decided they were no longer selling just products, but malleable brand “personalities.” Decades later, I knew the results. Of course Coke was the red wholesomeness of tradition and majority taste, and Pepsi was the younger, blue, less popular choice of a rebellious new generation! My 14-year-old self was sure of it. Vance Packard had grown up in a different world, in a Methodist farm family in Pennsylvania during the 1920s. Automobiles were still a novelty. Packard’s biographer, Daniel Horowitz, reports a family story about how his dairyman father once tried to stop the family car by shouting “Whoa!” rather than braking and crashed through the wall of his garage. Even after Packard became a sophisticated New York City magazine writer, he simmered at his Madison Avenue colleagues’ manipulation of ordinary folks, people like his childhood neighbors. His muckraking defense of traditional values with up-to-date exposés made him a household name. He had three books on the best-seller lists within four years. Packard had lived on the cusp of two eras, and what fascinated me as a teenage reader was how close in time he had been to the invention of brands that seemed as solid and permanent to me as trees and stones. Marlboro, the essence of macho, had first been a women’s cigarette, “lipstick red and ivory tipped.” Advertisers managed to push it into a male market while holding on to its previous customers through ad campaigns of “rugged, virile-looking men” (like the famous cowboy) whom, studies proved, women liked too. Packard traced how products like gasoline and detergent, so standardized and reliable in the 1950s, needed to develop “personalities” to survive. I, for one, knew I was a Mobil guy long before I ever got my learner’s permit, though I had no idea why. The bête noire of “The Hidden Persuaders” was “motivational research.” Rather than focusing on products, this “depth” research dug into the psychological weaknesses and needs of consumers. Packard wanted brands to certify purity or quality, to make an old-fashioned fact-based appeal to citizens who had price and effectiveness in mind. Scientists of motivation, on the other hand, were trying to puzzle out the reasons for impulsive and even self-destructive purchasing, then tailor images and packaging accordingly. Photo CreditIllustration by Ji Lee A lot of their research makes sense. People often answer questionnaires by giving idealized pictures of their habits rather than confessing their real weaknesses and needs. How can you know what buyers want unless you probe them more skillfully? Cake-mix makers, for example, had ruined their product by engineering too much for convenience: they told housewives to just add water and turn on the oven. Only after female focus groups revealed the pleasures and responsibilities of cake-making did food makers reformulate their products to require the cook to add eggs and milk, so the activity felt like “baking.” Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story Polling and focus groups (then called “panel reaction” and “group interviews”) seem part of what we now sometimes consider the democracy of the marketplace — at least for such benign things as recipes. But Packard saw nothing benign when the same techniques were applied to the 1956 presidential election. Presidents would be elected on “personality.” Messages would be short and focus-grouped. Conventions would be choreographed by emissaries from Hollywood. As the 2008 primaries approach, it’s disturbing to see how the novelties Packard deplored have become accepted fundamentals. For 1956, professional advertisers were hired to “swing crucial voters” in “the undecided or listless mass,” trolling for weaknesses in candidates’ images. The “switch voter,” an advertising expert explained after much study, is not a thoughtful “independent” but someone who “switches for some snotty little reason such as not liking the candidate’s wife.” We do pay more overt attention to candidates’ spouses today — not, perhaps, because of more advanced beliefs about marital partnership, but because we’ve all learned to watch the games strategists concoct to reach the “listless mass.” Does that also mean we’ve partly joined it? In any case, candidates can hardly opt out. “The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal ... is the ultimate indignity to the democratic process,” Adlai Stevenson said of political marketing. He lost. Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Book Review Be the first to see reviews, news and features in The New York Times Book Review. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. SEE SAMPLE PRIVACY POLICY OPT OUT OR CONTACT US ANYTIME The weaker parts of Packard’s book are those that overemphasize the sinister power of “depth” rather than the greater power of ubiquity. We’ve since learned that advertisers don’t need depth — not when they can saturate so many advertising spaces and opportunities. Buy enough campaign ads and you can hammer your candidate’s name home. Learn basic consumer desires and you don’t need to re-engineer the subconscious. You just need to send those unspoken desires a huge amount of spam. Spam, like direct mail, billboard advertising and the repetition of names, slogan and logos, became the real future of advertising: overwhelming volume combined with clever placement. What’s surprising is the degree to which we’ve all become sophisticates, engaging in our own Packard-like critiques of consumer culture without changing our habits. We know we buy irrationally; we just don’t care. We imagine that the “manipulators” at J. Walter Thompson or BBDO play only on the fears and hopes of desperate consumers who aren’t as “conscious” as we are (in which case it’s hard not to admire the ingenuity of the advertisers), while we ourselves are smart enough to decide when to give in. On the last page of “The Hidden Persuaders,” Packard had to acknowledge the paradox: “When irrational acts are committed knowingly they become a sort of delicious luxury.” We seem to enjoy both knowing that ads are hustling us and choosing to be hustled. This raises the question of whether consumer education and advertising criticism ever help consumers, especially the young. “Media studies” efforts that try to inoculate grade-school kids against Ronald McDonald don’t get much respect. Yet, speaking for myself, the inoculation techniques did make an impact. From the age of 5, I recall more clearly than most things a PBS children’s show’s mock commercial on behalf of water. As if something free to everybody could be sold! (This was before the age of Poland Springs.) Those 90 seconds of TV blew my 5-year-old mind, alerting me that all the other advertisements interrupting my cartoons weren’t out to help me. I could never have put that into words, but then, as the admen know, ads often teach you things you can’t quite say. Today, we have Naomi Klein’s “No Logo” and Adbusters magazine, but these seem like specially advanced therapies. Whatever its flaws, I’ll keep recommending “The Hidden Persuaders.” For me, it’s the original inoculation against manipulation, and every once in a while — perhaps especially in this political season — one needs to go back for a booster.
“When irrational acts are committed knowingly they become a sort of delicious luxury.” We seem to enjoy both knowing that ads are hustling us and choosing to be hustled. there's something to be said for both understanding what the advertiser is trying to do to you and in certain cases rewarding it
For sure. Just got done reading a part of the book where they talked about making cake mixes too easy for housewives. If the housewife didn't have to add some eggs or milk or something, they actually didn't like the product because it made them feel too useless. They also mentioned men and shaving...90%+ of men polled said if there was a product that just made their beard disappear forever without having to shave they wouldn't take it. We SAY we want to buy the product that makes things easiest...but how we ACT doesn't always match up
Anyone else on a rewatch right now? Just finished season 2. I love any time Pete gets worked up enough to let loose with a "hells bells!"
I just finished s2. Man, I was sad when Duck took Chauncey to the door and just let him go Duck proceeds to become less likeable over the course of the season though
i'm on S02E04, slow but steady rewatch. usually only watch an ep or two that i download to the ipad while traveling
I'm finding it more bingeable on my second viewing. It helps being able to keep all the minor characters and plots straight this time