Let's just say that, in regard to this season of
Pushing Daisies, I am suddenly both pleasantly surprised and surprisingly pleased. Though I haven't watched the entire series yet, just the first two or three and then the last few that are online at abc.com, I've found a suitable flavor to wash out the funky taste that the first impression had left in my mouth. Perhaps its because I know that it's been canceled after this season, but it looks like they've dropped the silliness and terrible CGI and added in a few nice twists and turns. Yeah, a lot of it is a bit too coincidental (I don't want to spoil anything, but I will say that the season's two themes are Family and Trust, and that they crop up in obvious but well-intended ways. However, if this series ends without resolving the problems with trust and happiness surrounding one Olive Snook, then I will be seriously upset. I was going to make a list called
Five Things To Love About Pushing Daisies That Are Not Lee Pace, but it would just be Olive Olive Olive Olive Olive. In fact, as great and quirky as the show is, I don't think I would like it half as much if it didn't have Kristen Chenoweth's bubble of joy bouncing around in it.
And beside that point, what happened to Digby the dog?
But since I am in the mood for list-making, here goes:
Five Things To Love About Mad Men That Are Not Don Draper And Joan Holloway
AMC's Mad Men is no longer that sleeper hit that only the cool kids talk about liking. It's the first basic cable show to take home the Best Drama Emmy, and as far as I'm concerned, it's the best show on television. Let's be fair, though, I only watch like three actual shows that are currently running,
Mad Men, Pushing Daisies, and
30 Rock. Of the three,
Mad Men is the most consistently pleasing, it has two solid seasons under its belt and a promising third one to come, it doesn't seem to have any sharks to jump, and for once I've found a drama that doesn't seem to guilt me into watching another episode.
Mad Men goes along at a steady pace, there are no chung chungs or cliffhangers. It's a mature show, that seems to show enough respect for its audience to earn its popularity. However, when you ask someone what's so great about
Mad Men, they usually come up with something like this:
Or this:
True, those are both Hot Things. And though
Mad Men could easily be balanced on the perfect chin of Don Draper or the smashing curves of Joan Holloway, they are not what makes the show great. Aside, of course, from the aforementioned pacing, writing, and plot structure (especially that surrounding Don Draper, which is safe on this side of Back Story Unbelievability), here are five things that should entice you to adore the show:
5. Roger Sterling
Where Don Draper is a womanizer and a drunk, we can forgive him. I mean, look at the guy: Don's got a face that would crumble Mt. Rushmore. Then there's his awful past, his stunted creativity....there are plenty of things about Don Draper's detached personality that would point him in the direction of philanderer. If nothing else, he does it so that he can reach out to other people, understand them, dominate them, whatever. For Don Draper, there is always something going on beneath those steely eyes.
But Roger Sterling? He is just a dirty old man. And I love him for it. Where people like Don and Pete fool around in order to feel whole or accepted, Roger Sterling does so out of privilege. He is a constant drunk, makes passes at every woman he sees, chain smokes like John Wayne, all because he is just entitled to; born into wealth that he keeps afloat by relying on Don Draper's creativity and Bert Cooper's organization. I mean, the man has a heart attack from too much horsing around with a young woman, then only three years later we see him up to the same tricks, promising to marry a 20-year old secretary once he divorces his wife. Roger is the face of the so-called Greatest Generation, but seems to hold no pride at all; a man who seems to be mostly an empty shell full of smoke and booze and lies. He is detestable at the same time as he is charming, affable an unsettling at the same time; a man who is trying hard as he can to hold on to any sort of power and privilege that he has.
4. Smoking and Drinking
Ah, to live in the good ol' days. Back when Bayer was just morphine, methanphetamines weren't bad yet, and everyone–everyone–smoked like a chimney and drank like a fish. Men, women, old, young, pregnant, all of them wander through the scenes holding highball glasses and lucy strikes. Even doctors light up while conducting an examination. Now I'm not saying that I am a drunk or that I am a serious smoker, but I can't deny that the idea of living in a time where you could add that much dramatic emphasis to yourself–inside, outside, on a train, plane, bus, office, restaurant–creates a different, almost alien atmosphere, where nothing was dangerous (this is best shown in the first episode, where the Mad Men must deal with the terrible new discovery that smoking -gasp!- causes cancer).
3. Betty Draper
A beautiful face can cover a seriously tainted self, and nowhere is that more true than the slowly awakening Betty Draper, wife of Don, former model, and Perfect Homemaker. Betty, with her Grace-Kelly looks and soft, laughing voice is a character that, doubtless, every woman in the neighborhood would envy. She seems oblivious to her husband's past and his infidelities, yet we learn that she knows all about the latter. She has nervous breakdowns fueled by her inability to accept the death of her mother, with whom she had a troubled, emotionally straining relationship. She often appears to be an oblivious mother, though much of that is likely to be a sign of the times. She talks about insipid things to her neighborhood group of mothers, and at first sight seems to be elitist, vain, and prejudiced; yet bit by bit this is worn away and we can start to read the lying tone in Betty's voice, and we start to understand that, in her quest to be the perfect looking woman and the perfect housewife, she has forgotten to be herself. This one thing that ties all of
Mad Men's characters together: they all have work personalities, which fit them into whatever niche needs filling, then there is the person beneath that, the personality that motivates them. Betty is a great example of this because, unlike the men who can leave work and go drink or mess around in order to blow off a little steam, Betty has to work full-time as Mrs. Donald Draper–which is why her breakdown is all the more sudden and self-destructive.
2. The 1960s
The Swingin' 60s or whatever you want to call them are a tough decade to record on film. Too often do writers or directors try to Forrest Gump the whole deal, having characters in Vietnam and marching in Alabama while also being involved in, say, the Space Race and the counterculture. Mad Men succeeds because it avoids stereotyping the 60s, presenting instead what seems to be a purely honest portrayal of the early years of the decade. They don't go the predictable route and create a Feminist or an African-American character who shakes things up and changes people's hearts. Even though that was happening at the time, no doubt, that doesn't mean that every company was affected by it. In the first season the Sterling-Cooper staff is assigned to work on Nixon's campaign against Kennedy, no one questions it or stands up for JFK. Salvatore, the show's main homosexual character, is closeted and seems to be insistent on staying that way, even when a young co-worker at S.C. comes out in the break room. Counter-culture of any kind is almost completely absent. The only exception is a young Bohemian artist with whom Don has an affair in the first season. Though Don meets with her friends and fellow bohos, he takes nothing from their movement, scoffing at her boyfriend's droll "Would you like to join us? We're going to get high and listen to Miles." and their insistence on pegging him as part of "the machine". He laughs at their hopeless radicalism and leaves, content to go back to his comfortable life inside the machine. Aside from the general treatment of 60s society,
Mad Men stays almost photographically true to the look of the era, down to the button. Men tend to be a little more round, and women are more curvy. Glasses are thick, hair is slick–there are no pratfalls to draw in a modern audience, Joan Holloway looks like a sex symbol despite being more curvaceous than Jessica Alba, and with good reason.
Mad Men re-creates the 1960s but doesn't re-imagine it so that it can sell out to any 21st ideal, it is what it is.
1. Pete Campbell
Pete Campbell is the perfect secondary character: at first he seems like nothing more than a piece of gum stuck on Don Draper's shoe sole, part of the secondary What Everyone Else In The Office Is Doing plotline. But then time goes on and you start to see that Pete Campbell is so much more than that, he is a wad of gum with a consciousness and a desire to do right but the immaturity to keep him from knowing how. That's Pete Campbell: he is the ultimate man-child. Not the Rogen-esque "I don't want to stop playing video games and be responsible and I like poop jokes" sort of man-child, but a more complex and sympathetic sort: Pete is a little boy in man's shoes, and he is desperately trying to get his feet to grow out enough to fit them. Out of the three main male characters–Don Draper, Roger Sterling, and himself–Pete is the only one not to have fought in a war. He is a newlywed and his infidelity with Peggy is not out of desperation like Don's or Roger's, but out of a loneliness that turns into love. Pete carries a persona of the perfect man, the slick salesman with a buttery voice, but when he speaks candidly–to his family, or to Peggy–his voice is soft and almost raspy, as though he is tired of talking. He is a bundle of male insecurities and immaturity, which is what you could say for a lot of people except that Pete, like Betty Draper, rarely has an outlet for himself. He hardly has the chance; Pete is not completely immature, much of his stuntedness comes from a lack of control. He is alway under the thumb of someone else; be it his father, mother, wife, boss, father-in-law. The only person who could have that sway over him and doesn't exploit it is Peggy, who seems to be the only person that Pete cares about. At first, of course, you hate Pete Campbell. You hate his blue suit and his slick voice, his perfect hair and boyish good looks. But then you get it: under all that façade is just a little boy who wants to be a strong and independent man, but is crushed too often by the feet of everyone in his life. His struggle, though less pronounced, is much like Betty's, and I secretly watch every episode for his sake.
