Favorite Daughter and I love everything about this show. At the end of WSJ’s feature on the woman-dominated writing team, I was struck by this trilateral approach to the meaning of life: the story of our lives isn’t so much simply public versus private life, but also “private” life distinct from “secret” life. And a compelling character’s story involves all three so that the conflict that rings truest is mainly within one person between his or her three different lives. (Sort of why fairy tale wishes come in threes and Freud saw id, ego and superego? Why Eve won the academy award for Three Faces in 1957, not just two?)
To craft story lines and develop characters, the writers track three categories: each character’s work, private and secret lives. . .
Even if your own private and/or secret lives haven’t discovered the guilty pleasure of Mad Men yet, you can play this “intelligent design” game and let us see whichever parts of your life projected into that world you want, as “a suit or a skirt.”
I made a JJ but couldn’t figure out the download-to-blog trick.
UPDATE – see also On Mad Men: Drama Confronts a Dramatic Decade
Seems like everybody I know absolutely loves this show but I can’t stand it because I feel it glorifies adultery. The clothes are fabulous, though!
Interesting, I hadn’t thought of it as glorifying anything, not only not adultery, but not all the drinking and smoking either, not even the clothes! Nobody’s happy. In fact, they all seem lost and desperate to me, each in his or her little hell of insecurity as change is everywhere, both thrilling and terrifying. Isn’t that a very moral story?
And a lot like “now” which may explain why people are mad for it:
Acknowledging that it happens isn’t glorifying it.
It vaguely reminds me of the “Short History of Women” I am reading now.
It jumps around a family tree, from the Mom who was a suffragette to the current-day Wall Street daughter. I haven’t finished yet but none of them have been too happy — so far it’s all been fighting for freedoms we take for granted now and barely surviving.
Nance
Culture Kitchen’s Liza Sabater is blogging for The Root now too. (Kudos!)
She used the little design game I linked in the original post to do a Mad Men version of Oprah as culture-of-race commentary.
More Mad Men, this time from across the pond: