I am just discovering this show, up to episode 4 of Season 1. I had read about how brilliant it is and I have to admit that I truly think so too. There seems to be a coldness to it, but I think that's a deliberate effort to portray the coldness of the era, or the lives that the characters themselves are living. I know I might get yelled at for this, but the show often reminds me of The Young and the Restless. The extremely slow pace, the interchanging focus between corporate drama and family drama, the meetings, the affairs, it all seems so reminiscent of William J. Bell. Crisp production values, great characterization, great dialogue.

I am just discovering this show, up to episode 4 of Season 1. I had read about how brilliant it is and I have to admit that I truly think so too. There seems to be a coldness to it, but I think that's a deliberate effort to portray the coldness of the era, or the lives that the characters themselves are living. I know I might get yelled at for this, but the show often reminds me of The Young and the Restless. The extremely slow pace, the interchanging focus between corporate drama and family drama, the meetings, the affairs, it all seems so reminiscent of William J. Bell. Crisp production values, great characterization, great dialogue.

IMO I was not interested in the first season at all...Too much of Peter was a complete turn off for me.

I'm mid way through the second season and I can't get enough of it. There were times in the first season where I was willing to say ,"This show is not for me."

The show reminds me of the Sopranos which premiered with lots of critical acclaim but was slow paced the first season. But with enough marathons and advertisement the show caught on for the second season and people were willing to get into it.

There were moments when I thought the show was trend following television, and I hate the idea of "trendy tv".

IMO I was not interested in the first season at all...Too much of Peter was a complete turn off for me.

Really? I actually find Peter one of the more fascinating characters of the show.

Does Season 2 remain as slow paced?

Really? I actually find Peter one of the more fascinating characters of the show.

Does Season 2 remain as slow paced?

Peter bugged me from the beginning....The character is all too familiar where I work....That guy who's not talented but talks enough game to look like he belongs. That character, that co-worker, could be you, or maybe not. Watching him from the beginning made me want to crawl out of my skin, and I only enjoyed him when Don Draper was putting him in his place.

Season Two hooks you, but it's not because of the pace. It's the balance of every character and the amount of time you get with each. I'm really invested at this point in favorite character's happiness and less watching and studying them.

I just finished watching the season 1 and 2........I don't hate the show.....but there's not enough drama for me. There were hardly any moments where I went, "Wow, that was amazing." I do like the actors and some of the characters - I didn't have a problem with that.

I'm gonna have to dump this show - no season 3 for me.

This is not that type of drama, Toups.

This is not that type of drama, Toups.

Yeah, I certainly see that now. That's why I won't be watching again.

<p><span style="font-size:19.5pt;"><font face="Verdana">Frank O'Hara provides the poetry of Mad Mens</font></span>

<span style="font-size:10.5pt;"><b><font face="Verdana">Meditations in an Emergency, particularly Mayakovsky, by 'New York' writer is literary backdrop to TV series on advertising</font></b></span>

<span style="font-size:7.5pt;"><b><font face="Tahoma">Stephen Amidon</font></b></span>

<span style="font-size:9pt;"><font face="Verdana">At the conclusion of the opening episode of Mad Men’s second season, the show’s protagonist, Don Draper, buys a book of poetry after being told by a hipster in a Greenwich Village bar that he is incapable of appreciating the writer’s work. The book is Meditations in an Emergency by Frank O’Hara. Draper reads it later that night in his suburban home, and he is captivated by a haunting stanza from the poem Mayakovsky: Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.

After inscribing the book with the simple message “Made me think of you”, the ad man slips out of the house to post it to a mystery recipient, adding yet another layer to this most complicated of television heroes.

It is no accident that the show’s creator, Matthew Weiner, chose the work of O’Hara to echo his hero’s thoughts. In addition to being the most “interesting, and modern” poet at work during the early 1960s time frame of Mad Men, O’Hara was also a writer whose voice in many ways shares the show’s peculiarly American mixture of jazzy style and quiet melancholy. Like Draper, O’Hara was also a quintessential New York phenomenon, ambitious and charismatic, his life expressing that city’s contradictory energies during an era that many view as its heyday.

Francis Russell O’Hara was born in Baltimore in 1926 and was raised in a conservative, Catholic town in Massachusetts. His father was a haberdasher who later inherited a farm, his mother was a highly strung alcoholic. After serving in the navy as a sonar operator during the second world war, O’Hara entered Harvard, where his childhood passion for music gave way to a love of visual art and poetry. He moved to New York in 1951, where he took a job selling postcards at the Museum of Modern Art, beginning a lifelong affiliation with the institution that was to see him rise to the level of senior curator by the time of his death, 15 years later.

O’Hara also began to publish his poetry and soon earned a spot at the vanguard of a generation of writers that was to become known as the New York School of Poetry. Rebelling against the constricting formalism of forebears such as Robert Frost and TS Eliot, O’Hara and peers such as John Ashbery and James Schuyler relied instead on spontaneity and vernacular in their work. They were as strongly influenced by free-form jazz improvisations and abstract painting as they were by rhymed couplets and iambic pentameter.

O’Hara led this break with tradition. His poetry was impulsive, conversational, autobiographical, occasionally surreal and often punctuated by exclamation marks. His work was also deeply sensual, frankly depicting its author’s homosexuality at a time when gay sex was a crime in many parts of the nation. His subject matter was usually culled from his immediate experience, whether it be the death of James Dean, a new painting by a friend, or an illicit men’s room encounter with a piece of rough trade. “What is happening to me, allowing for lies and exaggerations which I try to avoid, goes into poems,” he once claimed. In many ways, the quick, vivid strokes of his verse resembled the painting style of abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, whose work he championed in his day job at MoMA and as a critic for the influential journal Art News.

Nowhere was this spontaneous, sensual, unfiltered approach to poetry more apparent than when his subject matter was his adoptive city. According to Ashbery, his Harvard classmate, the “nightmares, delights and paradoxes of life in (New York City) went into Frank’s style . . . O’Hara is certainly a New York poet. The life of the city and of the millions of relationships that go to make it up hum through his poetry; a scent of garbage, patchouli and carbon monoxide drifts across it, making it the lovely, corrupt, wholesome place New York is.”

O’Hara’s poetry often has the feel of a late-night taxi ride through Manhattan in the company of a brilliant friend who is capable of pointing out the “ozone stalagmites / deposits of light” that make up the city’s skyline. In this way, he’s not unlike Draper, navigating through the city’s various strata as he struggles to find the words and imagery to describe the surging metropolis. Indeed, one of O’Hara’s greatest poems, Second Avenue, was influenced by de Kooning’s painting Woman, which was itself partially based on a model from an ad for Lucky Strike cigarettes — a product whose account Draper handles.

O’Hara the man was just as scintillating as his poetry. With his clean-cut good looks and penchant for wearing stylish suits, he could have been a young executive at Sterling Cooper. But unlike Salvatore Romano, the fictional agency’s conflicted art director, O’Hara was open about his sexuality, conducting a series of intense relationships with the young male artists and dancers who served as his muses. He was also comfortable in the hyper-macho world of the brawling, hard-drinking abstract expressionists who hung out at downtown dives such as San Remo and the Cedar Tavern.

According to his biographer, Brad Gooch, “as a public personality, O’Hara’s nervy energy, infectious excitement, love of drinking and total dedication to a life lived for art’s sake made him increasingly a mascot of an era in which wild parties seemed as creatively indispensable as they were fun”.

All the while, he was able to hold down an increasingly important job at one of the world’s most significant museums, working his way up from the front desk to a position where he was in charge of curating important retrospectives of Pollock and de Kooning. It is a testament both to O’Hara’s allure and to his love of the visual arts that he was painted in the nude more often than any other leading American author.

The last few years of O’Hara’s life were marked by increased alcoholism and writer’s block, perhaps fuelled by a sense that his day as a poet had passed, just as his abstract expressionist heroes were being supplanted by pop art figures such as Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg. O’Hara’s death, in 1966, at the age of 40, was as shocking and untimely as the traffic-wreck deaths of Pollock and Dean. While standing on a beach at Fire Island, just outside New York City, he was struck by a hot-rodding young local man. It was a sad, but somehow fitting, end for a brilliant mayfly of a poet who never really stopped selling postcards of the city he loved.

<i>Mad Men is on BBC4, Tuesdays, 10pm</i></font></span>

<span style="font-size:7.5pt;"><b><font face="Tahoma">http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/tv_and_radio/article5765938.ece</font></b></span></p>

Edited August 7, 200916 yr by Sylph

<p><span style="font-size:19.5pt;"><font face="Verdana">Mad Men passes sell-by date</font></span>

<span style="font-size:7.5pt;"><b><font face="Tahoma">AA Gill</font></b></span>

<span style="font-size:9pt;"><font face="Verdana">Have you noticed how rubbish the ads on telly are at the moment? Dull, obvious, cheap and insistent. They make our evenings look like Moldovan cable channels. Badly styled, awkwardly energetic young people stand in front of green screens, pointing at products and shouting, finishing with electric jingles that sound like a toddler’s ringtone, or a Paul Merton voiceover. There is more than a whiff of desperation about it all, and why wouldn’t there be? I blame the depression on advertising agencies — bankers merely shuffle noughts, it’s the advertisers who are supposed to sell us the idea of capitalism. Consumers are the engine that pulls the economy; advertising is the rails it runs on. Money is merely the stuff you burn. But advertising on telly now looks dim, frightened and timid. There’s no sense that the advertisements are made to be things of cultural importance or something you’d be proud to have made.

I think it all went wrong when agencies stopped using their own names on the letterhead and started calling themselves things like Granny and Spanner and Blue. In the late 1970s, I was shown a leading agency’s showreel. It was a better half-hour than you could have got in any cinema: more imagination, romance and emotion than a hospital library trolley. Advertising doesn’t merely sell you stuff, it tells you where you live. It’s the fixtures and fittings of the culture. When was the last time you saw one that made you want to see it again, or shout “Come quickly, it’s that brilliant ad!”? We’re living in depressing, discounted times.

The first series of <b>Mad Men</b> was like watching a really brilliant commercial. It was slicker than a lap dancer’s pole, smoother than a Stephen Fry introduction, as moreish as your last Rolo. It was that amazingly gratifying and rare thing, a brilliant slice of telly that didn’t remind you of half a dozen previous brilliant slices of telly. It was one of the least watched series of good television ever made in America, commissioned by a channel, AMC, that is further away on the digital menu than the destination on Captain Kirk’s log. It was, they said, made to be a loss leader, a talking point, a piece of smart brand management.

No costume drama ever re-created the atmosphere, the scent of a moment, the way Mad Men did. It just was the 1950s. They said all the women were wearing authentic foundation garments on their authentic bodies, so they’d project the posture and walk just so. And there was the constant smoking. How quickly we forgot what rooms full of people smoking look like. How elegant, how demonstrative. What an eloquent conductor’s baton a cigarette is. Best of all, Mad Men was about something risibly shallow — advertising — and simultaneously about something quite profound — the creation of the modern world. Everything worked like a really neat commercial. The casting was spot-on, the dialogue smart and spare, and underneath it was really all about sex.

Now we have the tricky sequel, the awkward second album, Mad Men series two, and we’ve moved on to the 1960s. We know we’ve moved on to the 1960s because they played Let’s Twist Again loudly over the opening credits. But it all looks much as we left it. The styling is still gay heaven. The girls still simmer and shimmer and sashay. The dialogue is still as snappy as an octopus’s garter belt. But something’s been lost, or perhaps just misplaced. It hasn’t got the same confidence. It doesn’t swagger with arrogance. It’s the curse of success. The series is watching itself in the mirror. All the men who were so lovably hateful, so compulsively watchable, have been slightly diminished. They’re doubtful. The women, however, are still majestic. The three main female characters — Joan the office manager, the unhappy hausfrau Betty Draper and the aspiring copywriter Peggy Olsen — are simply the best American ladies on a small screen at the moment. The force of them elbows the men into the wings.

The script is less about the moment, the zeitgeist and the culture, and now more about relationships and lust and secretaries. It's become like every other smart, expensive American ensemble drama about tension and conflict: still better than pretty much anything else, but also now pretty much like everything else, a big, glossy commercial that’s forgetting what it’s supposed to be advertising.

...</font> </span>

<span style="font-size:7.5pt;"><b><font face="Tahoma">http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/tv_and_radio/article5725097.ece</font></b></span></p>

Edited August 7, 200916 yr by Sylph

Production has started on Season 3 of AMC's acclaimed drama series "Mad Men" for an August premiere.

The show's season debuts have been sliding back, with the first season bowing July 19 and the second one July 27.

The network is not announcing a specific premiere date yet, but according to Internet reports, it has been eyeing early August.

Returning cast members include Golden Globe winner Jon Hamm, Elisabeth Moss, Vincent Kartheiser, January Jones, and Christina Hendricks, as well as guest star John Slattery.

Matthew Weiner is the creator/exec producer. Lionsgate TV is producing.

Jared Harris is joining AMC's drama "Mad Men" for its upcoming third season in a major recurring role.

Harris also has been added to the cast of CBS Films' untitled Crowley project for director Tom Vaughan.

In a 10-episode arc on the acclaimed period drama "Mad Men," set at the 1960s-era Sterling Cooper Advertising Agency, Harris will play Lane Pryce, the agency's financial officer.

Harris begins filming today on the Lionsgate TV-produced series, which began production on its new season Monday for an August premiere. He joins returning cast members Jon Hamm, Elisabeth Moss, Vincent Kartheiser, January Jones and Christina Hendricks and guest star John Slattery.

In the Crowley project, a medical drama starring Harrison Ford and Brendan Fraser, Harris will play a biotech executive who oversees Stonehill (Ford) and John's (Fraser) efforts to find a cure for John's children.

He begins filming on Thursday, juggling the movie and "Mad Men."

Harris, who recently appeared in "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" and in a recurring role on Fox's "Fringe," is repped by Paradigm, manager Amy Guenther and the U.K.'s Independent.

Jon Hamm: damn sexy, great actor too!

I love MAD MEN, one of the best dramas on TV currently!

Does anyone know the date of the season 3 premier?

August 16th.

August 16th.

Thanks Sylph!