Mad Men Review: Business Yelling
October 6, 2010 by Mallory Elis
Filed under Television
Trying to make it through an entire season of Roger Sterling’s drawn-out implosion is unbelievably depressing. No wonder Don’s drinking so much these days.
Remember when you were a kid and you knew that something bad was probably about to happen? And you could maybe stop it, but more likely than not you’d just waste a lot of time in the attempt? So you just stand there and screw your face up and close your eyes and pray it’s over soon? That’s Roger. John Slattery’s face was made for failure and moral compromise.
Turns out doing a shit job with Lucky Strike has lost SCDP Lucky Strike, and the best Roger can do is feign a surprised phone call to Lee (“Thirty years? I had to hear it on the street?”) and hide out in a hotel begging Joan to come baby him. Joan knows better than to jump back on that sinking ship and ends it for good, sending Roger home to mope with his memoirs and his shiny, terrible wife.
The rest of the firm tries to keep from falling into a panic, with each member panicking in a special, unique way. Don sleeps with his secretary (seriously, who was surprised by that?), Peggy keeps sleeping with Abe, Pete has a baby. Cooper actually says “Lee Garner never took you seriously because you never took yourself seriously” to Roger, which is a line I never thought I’d hear on this show.
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Season 4, Episode 11: Chinese Wall (originally aired October 3, 2010)
Sundays at 10PM/9C, AMC
Photographs courtesy of AMC and imdbpro.
While I’ve never kept up with Mad Men consistently, it’s often seemed like a disproportionate amount of its popularity derives from being insanely cool. Which is great! But I wonder how much interest I’d have in the same writing and acting if it wasn’t delivered by beautifully disaffected people in vintage clothes. My guess is substantially less.
Season 4 is turning out to be a crapshoot. Characters are underwritten, the dialogue is wooden, the plot is predictable, the acting is substandard, episodes keep on going from bad to verse, and the sets are starting to look a little cheap. What happened? Is Weiner getting a little lazy? Has he run out of creative gas? The series is starting to resemble the emperor’s new clothes. Even Don Draper is starting to look like self parody, a cliche. It’s all getting a little tiresome.