9/10/2023 0 Comments January jones mad menEven though there are standout episodes, usually popping out unpredictably within seasons, rather than near the end like most other shows, Mad Men's episodes are so well balanced in terms of drama, character development and plot advancement that you feel you are witnessing interesting lives go by - extremely well costumed, photographed, written and acted lives, but fictional nonetheless.Ĭompared to most other shows, there is a refreshing under-reliance on plot twists and melodramatic acting scenes, which now seem to me like the bluntest tools in the writer's bag of tricks to keep viewers tuning in every week. The key word here, alongside consistency, is even-handedness. All the rest got a rating of either 8 or 9 (I don't believe in perfection, so 9 is as high as I go). Out of the 92 episodes in the entire series on IMDb, I have rated only two a 7. Now, after consuming all of Mad Men in a relatively short amount of time, I think it is the most consistently good TV show I have ever watched. Having in the past started to watch best-of-all-time TV shows just to drop them along the way - I'm looking at you, The Sopranos - I kept it on the back burner for a very long time. A show about advertising and corporate people did not seem very exciting to me, and I wasn't really a fan of anyone in the cast (save Elizabeth Olson). This Great-TV-Show-Avoidance-Mechanism happened to me in regards to Mad Men. Then, when you finally make the effort to watch that landmark series and realize it is every bit as good as everyone said it was, you flagellate yourself thinking why you held back for so long. Even though these shows may be indeed great, you may be familiar with a weird avoidance mechanism that usually kicks in: we may regard those landmark pieces of TV not very exciting, especially if they are a few years old - not unlike "must-read" literary classics that nobody ever reads - and thus we relegate them to the bottom of our watchlists, while we consume the latest, more exciting, and often less fulfilling offers. These are often graced by the likes of Breaking Bad, Deadwood, The Wire, The Sopranos, and, of course, Mad Men. Everyone has a back burner watchlist of TV shows considered to be the greatest.
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