Daniel Mendelsohn suggests that "the greatest part of the audience for Mad Men is made up not, as you might have imagined at one point, by people of the generation it depicts—people who were in their twenties and thirties and forties in the 1960s, and are now in their sixties and seventies and eighties—but by viewers in their forties and early fifties today, which is to say of an age with those characters’ children. The point of identification is, in the end, not Don but Sally, not Betty but Glen: the watching, hopeful, and so often disillusioned children who would grow up to be this program’s audience, watching their younger selves watch their parents screw up." There's a lot to chew on here; you will agree or disagree, but, if you read it, you will almost certainly print it out for your commute home; it's a long one.
9
It's long, but not really offering much in the way of complex food for thought — just a LOT of words about how much he dislikes "soap opera" (that is, stories about domestic concerns and people's emotional lives), and some misplaced rage about style vs. substance that seems to come from a careless viewing of a lot of episodes in succession (maybe a little too much fast-forwarding?). And if Matthew Weiner was born in 1965, his childhood would not be contemporaneous with the children on the show; his childhood memories would be of the '70s.
Oh, I found plenty to chew on in the premise that interest in the show is more of a story than the show itself. Schadenfreude at the expense of the zeitgeist? Sign Me Up
"The writing is extremely weak, the plotting haphazard and often preposterous, the characterizations shallow and sometimes incoherent; its attitude toward the past is glib and its self-positioning in the present is unattractively smug; the acting is, almost without exception, bland and sometimes amateurish."
Oh, tell us how you really feel, Daniel. Don't hold back for fear of looking like a hipster playa-hater.
He seems to be saying we should have been happy with just The Venture Bros., which has the decency to be attractively smug.
I am not often on Mendelsohn's side, but this tallies with why I couldn't watch this show.
I was just so relieved to find out I wasn't the ONLY one.
Not here to dictate anyone's taste, but Mendelsohn seems to be watching a different show, from his descriptions. For instance, he can't seem to find the unreliable narrator in a series about advertising.
Frankly, his critique reads like the series challenges him on many levels, and he's just not up to the task of interpretation. The story won't enter the boxes or flow along the courses he finds good. Its subtleties and depths are not the ones he came for. But instead of admitting defeat, he insists the work must be substandard. Most of his comments, like the one quoted above, are mere assertions borne out by few or no examples. This is very poor form in criticism.
As with your comment below, you appear to be stating Mendelsohn's argument then denying that it is his argument. Gaslight! compounded here by an unfounded assertion about his piece.
I thought the audience for "Mad Men" was all hip New York bloggers in their late 20s/early 30s. Oh, and also me.
I think Mad Men is most fun for those of us who were children in the Sixties. We can judge everything we see there as to its accuracy and authenticity, and go "Yuh-huh" and "Nyuh-uh!" with absolute authority, and that is really all we wanted then, and now.
Name-checks of Latin and Greek authors to whom Mad Men doesn't measure up? Many.
Critical insights and/or a general sense of his getting the show? Somewhat fewer.
Mendelsohn is a smart guy. But popular culture is clearly not his glass of scotch.