> "Mad Men" always felt to me like a series created by people who weren't
> actually *there* during the time period they were portraying.
Just spent a few minutes looking things up, and found how right on my intuition
above was. Series creator Matthew Weiner was born in 1965. About half of the
writers were born *during* the 1960-1970 time period they were writing about.
The other half were born afterwards. So no one involved in the creation of the
series actually lived through the period they were writing about except as
children under five.
This explains much. The series always felt to me like "faux nostalgia," in the
same way that twenty-somethings today write articles about what it was like to
see Jimi Hendrix or Jim Morrison.
From: "TurquoiseBee [email protected] [FairfieldLife]"
<[email protected]>
To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, May 18, 2015 2:33 PM
Subject: Re: [FairfieldLife] Mad Men final episode
As I've probably mentioned before, I gave up on "Mad Men" early, after
maybe the second season. But I watched this final episode today for the heck of
it anyway, so I have to check in to disagree with your "captured the times"
comment.
The reason I stopped watching it was because I couldn't identify with any of
the characters in it. They all struck me as bourgeois wage slaves pursuing the
American consumer dream, sleepwalking through what was *otherwise* one of the
most interesting times of the twentieth century. These seriously BORING people
managed to become so immersed in their petty concerns that they missed pretty
much all of the transformations that the Sixties were really known for. Even at
the end, the closest Don Draper can get to the real action is going to Esalen
and learning to meditate (at least four years after many of us on this forum
did), finding a bit of inner peace, and then being such an uninteresting dweeb
that the only thing he can think of to do with this experience is to turn it
into a Coke commercial.
You'll have to forgive me, but as a veteran of the early Acid Trips and
Love-Ins and the Fillmore and the Avalon and as someone who by 1970 had left
the drug culture that many of the Mad Men characters are just discovering
behind, I don't really see this series as *in any way* "capturing the times."
These characters weren't in the game at all -- they were off on the sidelines
as the real action played out elsewhere. "Mad Men" always felt to me like a
series created by people who weren't actually *there* during the time period
they were portraying.
Just my opinion, having spent the period covered by the show (1960-1970) closer
to the front lines...
From: laughinggull108 <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Sent: Monday, May 18, 2015 2:04 PM
Subject: [FairfieldLife] Mad Men final episode
OK, for those that follow such things, what did you think of the final
episode of Mad Men that aired last night? Don Draper sits a pretty decent half
lotus in the closing shot of reciting OM and finding his inner self...the
series definitely captured the times! What a hoot!
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