Customer Reviews

Mad Men - Complete Season 1 [Blu-ray]

5 star:		(83)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

Remarkable. Utterly gripping, gorgeous to look at, fabulously well scripted, impeccable acting. All the more remarkable, then, that nothing much actually happens. Sure there are individual events and half a dozen longer threads woven through the series, but the real drama is found in how the characters relate to each other and themselves. Each character is complex, multi-layered, often deeply flawed, and fascinating. So, not one for people who like plenty of action. It will, however, handsomely reward those who take delight in dialogue and character. In my opinion, simply perfect.

Buried away on BBC 4 & the midnight slot on BBC 2 it's little wonder that no one's seen this show. I was lucky enough to read a review and started to catch it from Episode 3 and I'm so glad I did. The show is brilliant. Set in a 1960's New York Ad Agency it deals with the life of the ad men, their wives, mistresses and their secretaries. The writing is so sharp you'll cut yourself, the research and detail is faultless, it's slick, cool and gripping. Each episode is a gem in it's own right, like little mini Hitchcock films, the style and look is very Rear Window. Even the open credits are a work of art and a tribute to the great Saul Bass.

Although set in the 60's it easy to relate to the men & women in the show, times have changed a lot, the men all smoke & drink in the office and think nothing of making a sexist remark to their P.A. Now these things don't get said in front of women in the office anymore, but they are still thought and said behind closed doors, so the issues they create are still very much in the work place. They just said it out loud in the 60's.

The ad men are hard driven and determined to be top dog at work and find it difficult to transfer their work personalities to home where they suddenly have to take off the suit and attend kids birthday parties or paint the fence. The wives are complex people stuck in their domesticated perfect wife routines, slowly being driven crazy by suppressing their personalities.

It's pure class all the way, forget Desperate Housewives and get watching Mad Men, it's the best thing on TV for years.

Incredibly well researched, this is a beautiful drama bubbling with a tension which really captures the era. Mad Men is overwhelmingly uncomfortable to watch for those of us who were brought up in an age defined by both political correctness and economic change - not only is this a chauvinistic, homophobic world defined by men, it is a world of capitalism, consumerism and greed. And yet it is exactly this which makes this so watchable.

The series revolves around an ad agency on Madison Avenue in the 60s, and its strength lies in the slow building of the characters who inhabit this shady world of cigarette sales and illicit office liasons. The central tenet of the series is office politics as the "Mad Men" vie for advertising sales of products which define the 60s,ranging from the first disposable diapers to the carousel slide projector. Set against a backdrop of an America on the edge, we are treated to original footage from, for example, the Kennedy/Nixon election campaign. We are left in no doubt that this is an accurate portrayal of a world which now seems so out of touch: where smoking and drinking to excess in the office is normal, where women are objectified and dismissed (pre 60s feminism at its most disquieting), where the billboard presentation of a sinister American Dream shaped by mass production is as much a facade as that presented by many of the characters to their nearest and dearest on a daily basis.

And it is this which keeps you hooked: there is a gripping sense of something disturbing lying just under the surface - as it does with so many of its characters- and we are never very sure when the explosion will happen. It is very real, very unsettling and above all, a harsh reminder that we have a long way to go before we can really leave behind the legacies of this era.

What a stunning series! The ad men of Madison Avenue portrayed here are not people one would expect to like, given their flaws and cruelties, but this is subtle television, which draws you in and makes you want to know more about them and even sympathise with their secrets and lies.

They lead lives of wantonness and drunken chauvinism which hurts all around them. It hurts to watch the submissiveness of most of the women in the series, but change is always in the air - JFK's election year haunts much of this first series - and it's that sense of impending change that makes one want, need even, to keep watching.

Mad Men is a fascinating, thoughtful and taut portrayal of how attitudes and perceptions changed in the 1960s. The production values are sumptuous, the acting and writing superb. This deserves a much better slot on the BBC when the second series is aired. In the meantime, I cannot recommend the DVDs highly enough!

This series almost, but not quite, lives up to the hype. The sets and costumes are terrific, and the subtle psychological tension gets more and more gripping as the series progresses.

Best of all is the acting: it is uniformly superb, but Jon Hamm and Vincent Kartheiser must be singled out for the exceptional depth of their portrayals, and their marvellous timing.

If anything lets "Mad Men" down, it's the heavy-handedness of some of the writing. The "it was a man's world" message is laid on with a trowel; I'm not convinced, for example, that it really was unthinkable in 1960 for a housewife to answer the telephone rather than her husband. Also, the "pointers" for characters' motivation are sometimes contrived; notably in the case of the art director Salvatore Romano, virtually whose every utterance "hints" at certain repressed desires, as though they weren't obvious from Bryan Batt's (it must be said excellent) acting.

The writing is weakest when it tries too hard to be ironic, and strongest when it addresses in sympathy the characters' secret demons and desires. The main storyline, concerning the protagonist Don Draper's mysterious past, while it may be melodramatic, is none the less moving for it.

It's not quite perfect, but this is quality TV that has the same underlying seriousness and intelligence that the best British drama (e.g. that of Dennis Potter and Alan Bleasdale) had until the mid-1990s.

Ever since I completed all 5 seasons of the brilliant TV Series 'The Wire' I have been looking to fill the gap.
I was recommended 'Mad Men' and I can safely say that my hunger for quality TV has been sated.
Mad Men is a world, (and time) apart from the no-frills look & feel of The Wire, but it is no less addictive. Each episode is like a drip-feed of entertainment that transports you to a time and place I have never been yet can somehow relate to.
You are left wanting more of the intelligent, thought provoking screenplay and cinematic visuals.
It holds a mirror up to society today and I ask myself if things really have moved on...

This is quite simply one of the best American TV series ever made (only the West Wing is better). It's set in a Madison Avenue advertising agency at the start of the 1960s, a time when gender roles were still shockingly pigeon-holed - the men are executives who behave more or less however they want and the women are either waiting to get married (secretaries) or already married (housewives). But we begin to see the first cracks appearing in the bastion of male domination and it's this feeling of being on the cusp of a new era that really draws you in. There is very little 'action' or 'drama' - the whole thing is driven by the wonderful setting, characters and script. The plots develop slowly over many episodes, revealing a world that seems alien in many ways yet was completely real just two generations ago. Fabulous stuff.

Very few series have I come across after a season or two's release and remained glued to the screen. With Mad Men season one I experienced for the first time digitally that same heightened sense of voyeuristic joy and disappointment as when the pages of a good book dwindle towards the back cover. A sly, soft focus remake of my parent's America, the same slim single breasted suits and skinny ties that my father wore, my mother's crinolines and clutch purses. Zippos and lipstick. Wing tips and tail fins. Cadillacs and Frigidaires. All the happiness that money could buy, splashed across the magazines and billboards that were nudging us to do so... And just beneath this shiny surface, the pervasive political, religious and sexual tension characteristic of a seemingly well ordered society. Fifty years on we ask ourselves, were we happy ? We sure looked it in the snap shots. Or is it that, with hindsight, we are nostalgic for what now seems a more innocent kind of social malaise ? Ignorance was Bliss...

In a TV world which is dominated by dumbed-down, reality tv, MAD MEN is something smart, fresh and seriously addictive - a character-driven show with stellar acting and writing.

It is one of the most beautifully designed shows you'll ever see. Although I was not alive during the 60s, Mad Men paints a vivid picture of them, so much so that it is hard to imagine the 60s being anything else. This is how it had to be, right?!

I have had friends say that it moves too slow, and I can see where they are coming from to a point. It doesn't have the kind of explosive violence or drama of the Sopranos, for example.

Instead it wanders along, slowly crafting its whole universe to the smallest detail, and is driven by a fantastic script and some great acting. In particular, Jon Hamm as Don Draper really excels, having being plucked somewhat from obscurity to star in this show. The whole support cast is, without exception, excellent as well.

It is also very entertaining seeing the difference in culture between then and now, - even though I don't smoke, I find myself having urges to chain smoke in the office while enjoying a nice whiskey. One great scene involves Draper's manager after quite a number of drinks stumbling out of the house, drink in hand, and going to the wrong car while Draper just laughs and corrects him.

This show definitely deserves all the accolades and awards it receives, and I would not hesitate to recommend it to any fan of good TV.

I always wanted to watch Mad Men when it was on TV but just never got around to it so I decided to buy the first series before the second one starts (on BBC on 10th February). It's very different from usual TV shows, in a positive and a slightly negative way.
While films are be roughly placed into categories of being trashy/soapy or arty/clever, most TV shows only fit into the first. Some are indeed excellent TV shows but still all the same have very soapy storylines. Mad Men curves so far away from having soapy storylines that at times, it feels slightly disjointed. And I am a big fan of TV and do like the 'soapy' storylines and the development of love interests, etc. so was slightly disappointed when some of my favourite incidents seemed to disappear from future episodes.
However, while I can admit that there are parts which I didn't exactly love, there are many part that I did. The dark and completely deadpan humour is very clever and the development and in depth study of the 'main' characters is so well accomplished. One of the most striking things is the attention to detail that the creator have paid to setting the series so well in the 1960's. It's truly a work of art.
It is a bit misunderstood and I can't promise that you'll like it but give it a chance and Mad Men might just become you favourite programme.