Mad Men Season 5 in the books

Mad Men Season 5 was extremely well made.  It ended with a perfect scene, in which Don is confronted by two lone women at the bar, and the shot ends as he turns to give his response.  The central question Mad Men explores is change and whether individuals are capable of changing.  Don has clearly changed, but will his old habits and history come back to bite him.  The shots of his brother Adam, triggered by the recent suicide of his co-worker, and the nagging tooth ache, a sign of his aging, suggest that he is changing, but will he revert to all habits. 

Megan and Ginsberg really starred in this season.  Megan's character is at times grown up and at times acts younger than Sally.  It's hard to blame her based on her degenerate parents.  Ginsberg is an odd duck, although he seems to be quite adept to the copywriter position.  He achieves a modicum of success at the job, and SCD sans Price has had one of its most successful quarters.  Pete has really started to turn into a Don Draper, cheating on his wife and despising time at home with his family. 

I am excited for Season 6, this is my favorite show of all time.

Mad Men and Game of Thrones

The past couple weeks of television viewing have been simply amazing. Two of my favorite shoes on the air are in stride; Game of Thrones and Mad Men. These two shows could not be more different, but they both are spectacularly well-produced and the acting is terrific. The fact that both shows are on Sunday evenings is icing on the cake to a great weekend.

Game of Thrones has had a number of exciting new developments. King Renly is toast after dismissing the offer of his brother Stannis and his red priestess, more on her later. Mrs. Stark seems likely to offer up the Kingslayer, Jaime Lannister, in exchange for what she believes to be her two daughters. Although, unbeknownst to everyone, Arya has just been selected as Tywin Lannister’s newest assistant. Joffrey is developing into the cruelest character of the season, ordering the brutal treatment of women all around him. Cersei has taken a new lover, another relative, whodathunkit? Tyrion is just being an all around boss and is quickly becoming my favorite character. The Red Priestess birth scene of a shadow beast was the most disturbing scene of the series so far, and spells bad news for Mr. Renly Baratheon.

Mad Men’s episode was quite “trippy” in more ways than one. The most striking aspect of the show is the disjointed flow of time, that tracks the day through the eyes of three characters; Roger, Don, and Peggy. Roger takes LSD with his wife with the famous Professor Leary, and ultimately ends in their divorce. Great scene with the Stoli vodka bottle and the cigarette, I really enjoyed the woman crawling over the place. Don and Megan have another tumultuous day, involving 6 hour drives to Lake Placid and a fight that ends in Don chasing her around their Manhattan apartment. Peggy is strung out from work, and is quickly morphing into Don, only that she is a woman, and will never be able to act like Don can in this Madison Avenue world. I enjoyed the episode, and think it sets up nicely for the second half of the season, as Don realizes he needs to get his focus back at work, which was always my favorite aspect of the series.

Walking Dead Season 2 Recap, Mad Men & Game of Thrones Forthcoming

In my opining on the written word earlier this month, I mentioned how books, specifically fiction novels, were being replaced by television series.  Grantland talks about the Golden Age of television this week, claiming Mad Men to be the last series of the age.  I do not have cable, but I still manage to follow a number of quality series, and I much prefer watching them sans commercials, which are quite annoying on the AMC shows.

Walking Dead season 2 recently wrapped up, with the group leaving Hershel's farm in a state of duress.  Rick Grimes had to kill his best friend Shane and as he let out in the season finale, he felt he had to do it, even though I am sure he believed there was another option.  This signifies a change in Rick's character, and him saying that this is no longer a democracy foreshadows a much colder and crueler Rick to the one we've seen trying to push democracy and equality in spite of Shane's Machiavellian views on the world as they know it.  The group is right on the brink of discovering a large new community and Andrea has already encountered a new character, who has some serious blade skills and what appears to be two zombie pets chained to her back.  I am looking forward to season 3, and hope that the in-fighting and bickering will be outweighed by zombie killing action in the forthcoming episodes.

Mad Men is in my top three favorite shows all time, following The Wire and The Sopranos.  I really enjoy the character of Don Draper, who is really only a character created by Dick Whitman.  The fact that Don works in advertising, selling a false image, is all too ironic, considering what he did in his past life.  With the passing of the real Don's wife and Dick/Don marrying the French-Canadian secretary and a new advertising agency being formed, this season holds a lot of surprises.  Will this be the season everything is revealed and Don falls from grace?  I look forward to these well-crafted episodes and can't wait to dig into the first episode now, which just finished downloading.

Finally, Game of Thrones first season was excellent, lots of intrigue, an abnormal story twist, a broad range of excellent characters, and great production means a quality show.  I am a huge science fiction book fan, and the Game of Thrones is adopted from George Martin's book series, which are considered the best science fiction books out there, although they are very long and the plots are quite circuitous.  I look forward to Arya and Tyrion who are very unique and intriguing characters, and can't wait to see the fight between House Stark and House Lannister.

Opining on the Written Word

A recent post by TED regarding the Kindle sparked my brain to think about the future of literature  I had also discussed Amazon's forthcoming retail outlet, which had prompted me to also consider this.  I have written about books many times on this site, as they are a personal passion of mine.  I love both the literature as well as the actual experience of reading the book.  I am interested in a iPad or Kindle in the future, but this would only be for mobile reading and the ability to carry multiple books at once.  I have tried e-books in the past and always felt something was missing.

I feel my opinion is important and valuable to this discussion, because of my age.  I am 24 years old, and many of my peers do not read for pleasure at all.  Thanks to the fantastic technology that provides us 24 hour news coverage, a variety of television programming, movies, music and social media, literature lacks the exclusivity to a captive audience that it once had.  Books are a time-consuming process especially compared to other forms of media.  A movie is long if it takes 3 hours to watch, and a television show is crammed into 19 minutes (Yes Entourage, I am looking at you!).  In comparison, a book can easily take a week to digest and oftentimes is full of above average vocabulary and a lack of visuals which makes it more of a mental chore.

For all of these reasons, I believe that literature will have to adapt, and may in the short term struggle.  It is going to become a specialized market, not dissimilar to theatre, which was a major draw back in the day, opera, and a number of other leisure activities that have fallen behind the times.   The TV networks have supplanted our need for a book series with well made shows like Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and Luck.  All of these shows are intricate and sometimes command multiple viewings.  The episodes are long enough that they can be digested for a period of time and discussed on the internet and at the office.  Everything about books takes too long.  It takes too long to read the book, you can watch an episode of Breaking Bad in an hour, and a season within a month, if you are trying.  Thanks to streaming video this is possible anywhere on the globe!  It takes too long for the next book in a series to get to market and requires a lot more physical production in the printing of the book, while an episode could essentially be released to the web and available instantaneously.

My generation simply does not like to read in the universal sense that our forefathers did.  We are a now nation, with 140 character limits on Twitter, and status updates on Facebook.  Epic books can be well over 500 pages in length!  This is not to say a phenomenon like Hunger Games, Harry Potter or The Da Vinci Code can't become mainstream, but how many of your friends and family will never read the book and "just watch the movies"?