Mad Men Season 4 recap (Simran Bhalla):
As my editor Toren once tweeted, AMC continues “KILLING IT with the serialized dramas.” Mad Men’s penultimate season drew to a close this October. It offered neither a numbing historical backdrop (such as, in previous seasons, Kennedy’s election and later assassination), nor, like last season, the thrill of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce daringly beginning afresh, riding the wave of a new cultural revolution. While it is by now redundant to note its impeccable visual style, Mad Men’s scripting remains almost painfully sharp and literate. The fourth season has more closely traced Don’s personal trajectory — downwards, except for a few, occasionally substance-induced highs — than any other. It follows the aftermath of his divorce from Betty, his struggles to hold on to any semblance of a relationship with his children, and finally, an acceptance of a slowly debilitating alcoholism. After three utterly enjoyable years of daytime highballs and drunken office parties (with the occasional lawnmower accident), Mad Men strips the art of getting wasted of all its period glamour. Don blacks out for a weekend, cheats on his girlfriend, forgets to pick up his children, and realizes his work — i.e., his worth — is suffering.
From here begins a spate of introspective voiceovers and diary entries, a little too self-conscious for Don to maintain his cool, but necessary in order not to lose it completely. He slowly enters into, shockingly, a healthy and stable relationship with Faye Miller — who isn’t, contrary to precedent, an eyelash-batting mommy figure (see: that elementary school teacher) nor an insecure or manipulative wreck (see: Betty, Bobby Barrett). Encouragingly, she is also not a teenager. However, this is Don Draper, and, as Peggy says, “Every time something good happens, something bad happens.” In this case, as in most cases with Don, the bad is rooted in a self-destructive impulse: he cheats on Faye with Megan, his latest secretary, and seeing her capability to (1) manage both his children and his administrative affairs and (2) look great in a swimsuit, decides, to everyone else’s surprise and ours, to propose to her. He phones Faye to tell her, and she responds: “I hope she knows you only like the beginnings of things.”
The rest of the season depicts other struggles to stay afloat: SCDP loses its nepotism-acquired accounts and endure the effects of Don’s ego; Roger Sterling, silver fox with the deliciously offensive wit, discovers he’s not worth more than his words; Joan’s husband is shipped off to Vietnam and her office-queen supremacy is challenged (though she still has her gravity-defying figure, so there’s that). Only Peggy, Don’s protégé, gives us hope: she’s good at her job, she’s learning how to handle insufferable men, and she goes to cool Beat parties with lesbians in the West Village. While it’s difficult to root for Don Draper, who’s something of an antihero (and I do, despite myself — but he’s played by Jon Hamm), it’s Peggy who really deserves for something good to happen, without the fallout.
The Walking Dead Season 1 (Brad Becker-Parton):
Further cementing their reputation as the “best programmers on television,” AMC recently premiered their new series, The Walking Dead. Based on the titular graphic novels by Robert Kirkland and produced by Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption), the premise is that of your typical zombie apocalypse story: if you’ve seen 28 Days Later, this is nothing new to you. A disease has wiped out most of humankind, leaving alive few survivors and hordes of flesh-hungry undeads.
What makes The Walking Dead unique is that rather than spend time watching the disease spread, it throws you into a world where the end has already come. The survivors know they are few and know what they are up against. It’s a story of surviving in a new definition of reality, rather than that of the devolution of the world as we know it.
Staying true to its graphic novel roots, the production team of the show takes full advantage of serial televisual storytelling to develop its plot. The first episode (each are an hour long), so detailed and paced so deliberately, would probably fill no more than fifteen minutes of screen time in a thematically similar movie. The Walking Dead spends time showing off its best qualities, such as the world it has created: a bleak, barren American south that has been long abandoned by thriving human civilization, captured on beautiful 16mm film. The sound design makes the silence and emptiness perfectly eerie, being so densely layered and impeccably rendered that it seems as if sounds you hear faintly are coming from miles away.
The main character, Rick Grimes, wakes up from a coma that has lasted throughout the creation of this dystopia. A former cop, he is quick to adapt to his surroundings and give himself a single-minded goal: find his wife and son. Played with understated poise by Andrew Lincoln, Rick’s brooding visage is the perfect lens from which to view this world.
In the second episode, we are introduced to what will seemingly be the ensemble cast of survivors when they save Rick in Atlanta. Unfortunately, what had been a slow-paced show reliant on visuals turned into a band of broadly drawn characters and poor dialogue. The scenes at the survivor camp were reminiscent of (this is not a compliment) the middle seasons of Lost.
Luckily, episode three was a welcome return to form, proving that the exposition-heavy second episode was a necessary evil. Characters and relationships are deepened and it’s ambiguous ending isn’t a cheap cliffhanger. Rather, it is a statement from the producers that they are committed to the pacing they set forth in the first episode, and that the stories told here do not have clean endings or easy solutions. After all, the opening scene of the series features an eight-year-old (zombie) girl getting shot between the eyes — The Walking Dead is a show that will put off some audiences because of its gore. But if it remains this masterful in its attention to detail in pacing, sound, and production design, this show could be groundbreaking.
Reel Critic - 11/18/10 - AMC Drama Roundup
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