'Mad Men' on AMC HD - Page 6

I agree, based on today's morals, but in 1963, Marilyn types aren't suppose to have brains. They either are sexy air heads or they are plain Jane's with brains (like Peggy). You can't be both. That is what she is up against. And yeah, I fancier too! What true male wouldn't? ("I am not really BAD, I am just drawn this way!")

I don't know if "love" is the right word; "lust" may be closer to it. She has that effect on men. Just ask Cap'n Mal Reynolds.

If Joan's character is supposed to be a feminist, how do you explain her lying there after repeatedly saying "No" to her boyfriend when he wanted to have sex. Yes, different times, and I grew up in them, but a budding feminist would have kneed him in the groin, and walked out of the room!

I watched it (episode 1) twice just to make sure I didn't miss anything. I didn't get any better.

I don't see the continuity argument as compelling.

You don't understand. Her doctor boyfriend is her way out of where she is, and the way into where she wants to go. Joan is always willing to make compromises to get where she wants to be. She knows how the system works and she does what she has to do. Even that incident, as frightening as it was, was tolerable given the goal. She also realizes she's no spring chicken anymore. This may be her last shot at the kind of "respectability" she wants.

I appears she's beginning to have serious doubts that her boyfriend will end up being the 'ticket' to where she wants to go. I think we'll see more of this dissatisfaction, and that's she'll act on it.

As the child of parents who were of the Madison Avenue Lifestyle generation, I was impressed how they showed the adults dismissing Don's daughter suffering over her grandpa dying. Man, that was true. When you were a kid whatever you felt was unimportant so you should just keep it to yourself go to your room. I'm sure some parents had read Benjamin Spock's books and treated their kids as individuals with legitimate feelings but they were the exception.

Nowadays what kids feel is very important to their parents, I guess because kids can get guns more easily now.

Agreed. On a side note, she was a character in a Las Vegas rerun today, looking very endowed, and very slim. I'll stick with my original assessment that the trailer is grafted on for effect!

We have AMC HD now in Canada on Shaw, and MM was sure not HD on Sunday.
I just want to confirm that it was in HD on US broadcasters. Thanks

Yes, it was HD on Sunday. Otherwise you'd hear the outcry here.

Well except for those of us with D....

yes, D, those ba$#@*s...

i got spoiled with comcast.

Or E*

Or for that matter most cable companies.

AMC HD is actually quite rare, carriage-wise.

We Comcast subscribers feel so special!

So what did we have this week? No Joan so I'm guessing not many guys here watched it.

I loved how Pete had a good (and progressive) idea, got totally chewed out by upper management for suggesting it to a client, then the bosses decide right in front of his face that generally it's an idea worth looking at, as if they alone had just thought of it. Keep coming up with those good ideas, Pete. At this point advertisers did not yet see the advantages of advertising to specific markets other than teens and were just barely figuring out how to advertise to women.

Also African-Americans were indeed still called Negros at this time. The term "colored" was just about gone and was still used by racists or people who didn't feel like calling them anything else. The term "black" didn't come into use for a few more years. I like how the show goes for accuracy at the risk of confusing the audience since "Negro" is somewhat offensive now if not clearly associated with racism as it was in L.A. Confidential. It didn't imply racism in the early 60's.

Peggy and Pete getting a job offer from Duck. Great! Except for the Pete part. I'm guessing Peg will stay where she is out of loyalty to Don (mistake) and Pete will split expecting to be beloved by the other firm (mistake). It would be great to see the inner workings of second advertising company on the show to see how they compete for clients operate differently from Sterling-Cooper. We've only heard the names of other firms at this point.

Did you see Don acting like a parent to his daughter for about three minutes? That's as rare as Michael Scott doing actual work on the Office.

Poor Don. He has his daughter's hot teacher calling him up practically begging for a "parent/teacher" conference. Will Don be able to keep his pants zipped up with women throwing themselves at him?

Don't mean to sound like a hater, but through five episodes, this season pales in comparison to the first two. When I watched the first two seasons on Blu-Ray, I couldn't stop watching. I went on a Mad Men marathon. This season? The season premier is the only one during which I didn't turn in early, content to watch the remainder of the episode the next day or sometime during the week. Some of the critics I follow think this is an excellent season thus far, but I'm not buying it at all.

Last night's episode was the worst of the season. Mainly because I can't stand Betty and because it reminded me of all those lame-ass "Sopranos" dream sequence episodes I never enjoyed. Hope Weiner gets his fastball back soon.

I watched, but was longing for dear Joan.....


I think the lesson here is that just because an idea is good, or even great, doesn't mean you can just throw it out and expect it to be embraced. If Pete was really good at selling, and not just ideas, he would have known no company (in the '60's) would want to be known for selling to 'Negros'.


I think the opposite will happen. Pete is afraid of his own shadow, while as she herself said, this is Peggy's time, although my guess would be that once she makes the offer known she gets a raise and stays at Sterling Cooper.

I thought it was interesting that Don, for all his acceptance of alternative lifestyles, was not even open to think about Peggy's point about equal pay. I think that says something real, real interesting about Don.


Obviously, no. Remember how he absorbed the May Poll dance?

I have to agree. I hate dream sequences. What does Betty struggling in delivering a baby have to do with anything.

The lesson is that all potential good ideas are instantly the property of upper management.


No company that wants to maintain its white market anyway. Once Pete used the word "integrated" in front his clients, he was as good as dead. Integrated? Putting ads in Ebony (first published in 1945!) and Jet (first published in 1951!) with black people is one thing. Did he honestly think Admiral or any large company would go for mixed-race advertising in any publication in 1963, or was he completely desperate? Pete seems to be confused by Paul's radical beatnik ideas.


If these things happen, it will make the show very interesting. I love the business side of the show.


It was hard to tell if this came from chauvinistic beliefs or because he just had a Brit whining that they're using too much paper.

I agree with others that the dream sequence and the extended labor scenes seemed kind of pointless. Maybe they'll lead somewhere.

I don't think that was it at all. It was more about showing how completely out of touch Peggy was with the corporate world. How poorly she was timing her attempt to get a raise. I've had the same thing happen to me. At a previous employer, the owner laid off like 1/3 the staff, and cut back the budgets of every department, elliminated free coffee in the break room, etc. And right at that moment an entry level employee came up and said that now that they had to do more work, they needed a raise. And it makes you wonder if people like that go through life with blinders on.

Don't forget at&t U-verse customers... AMC HD is the one thing from Comcast that I actually miss...

Season one and two were exceptionally good, this season is just as good, but very different. Weiner and the writers could have easily repeated the same (great) formula instead I like the new off-beat nature of the show - sign of true ARTISTS.

It's probably not good form to ask for a raise by saying there's a new law that requires the company to pay you more. She wasn't even able to tell him the name of the law.

Why did Pete think Hollis watched baseball on television? Last season Hollis said after Marilyn Monroe's death that all he could think of was Joe DiMaggio. Some people (not me) can remember every detail of this show.

Also it seems that women related to the "twilight sleep" labor scenes much more than we guys, I'm guessing because giving birth now is much easier than it was back then. Many people even liked the symbolism of the dream sequence.

I also didn't know how eggs worked until last night. Turns out they are sometimes "different" when they come from a farm. In that case you really should hold them up to the light before you dump them in your hash, especially if they haven't been refrigerated.

And I'm sure there are at least five layers of symbolism between Don checking the eggs and Betty giving birth.

If it helps, remember that we Comcast people just barely get AMC in HD. Many of the artifacts are so extreme that they're funny. Even someone shutting a door will turn it into 16 pixel blocks. The double-exposed sequence looking up at the hospital ceiling tiles was a horrible mess (way too many motion vectors).

Aliens on AMC last week was a continuous scramble of blocks. No one would choose to watch that over the DVD.

Wow, no accounting for taste. Last night's show was incredibly well done. Maybe it's the attention span of Two and a half men viewers that's the problem. One of the best of the series. "Hang in there, Bets."

Quite honestly there was a part of me that wanted Betty to die during the birth, think what a curve that would throw Don.

I want more of the office! That's what grabbed me in the beginning and it's getting short shrift now. I found it fascinating how corporate culture has evolved in a relatively short time. The changes have been dramatic and greater than all the changes in the previous century. Somebody walking into an office in 1955 who was from 1855 would see little difference- other then the technology. Not so now. I miss that element of the show as of late.

In Peggy's defense, she's just essentially been offered a job by Duck, one that presumably would pay her like one of the guys.

In short, it's only her loyalty to Don that's keeping her at Sterling Cooper at this point, and were it not for the bad blood between Duck and Don I think she would have just told Don flat out she had another offer and if she didn't get a raise she was leaving.

Think about it - she's underpaid, underappreciated (witness the Patio fiasco) and at a new agency the staff won't remember that two years ago she was just a secretary.

Quite honestly after this week, it makes me wonder if both Peggy and Pete won't take Duck up on his offer.

It's not being tone deaf to the financials in the office, but rather if another offer comes along you have to do what's right for you - key people will always be key, and it's not clear that the cost-cutting has anything to do with the general economy at the time but rather it's because of penny-pinching by the new owners.



I agree though that we're missing the in-office stuff that made the show so great and we're spending far too much time on personal lives now. However I disagree with others and say that my wife and I felt this last episode was the best so far this season.

Still, I've been telling my friends that it really does feel like the "Johnny Cakes" season of The Sopranos where it seemed as if Chase had no idea how to fill the extra episodes HBO had ordered and so he was just filling airtime.

Peggy's timing wasn't off. It is possible that S-C's timing is off, i.e., economizing at a time when they're perhaps about to lose creative staff that they would prefer to keep. The reality is, in that day and age, they could offer to split the difference between what Peggy is getting now and what she could hope to get from Duck, and she'd stay at S-C. Nowadays, you'd have to beat a competing offer to get someone with an attractive job offer on the table to stay, loyalty or none, budgetary concerns or not.

That scene made me hungry! That nasty corned beef in a can used to be a guilty pleasure of mine.

i thought the betty scenes were very well done.

that birth will have long lasting effects on betty and possibly even the betty/baby relationship. those scenes gave insight in to a very difficult time for women, (childbirth) magnified by the cold sterile hospital environments of the time, multiplied by the grieving process of losing a parent. very powerful.

come on critics, didn't you feel that suffering?