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Originally Posted by CPHoya
I don't understand why you're required to insinuate that I'm a misogynistic drooler who approves only of sex and violence in my television if I don't esteem Soprans and Mad Men as best ever series. I think both were / are enjoyable, but outclassed by better fare (and I think Sopranos is an interesting choice if the previously described drooler mentality is a mark against a television viewer).
because this is what's at bottom of many Internet dismissals of TV characters and thus TV shows.
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In any case, Mad Men is not nearly as dense as a good novel and, more importantly, the characters are malformed compared to their incentives / are downright unbelievable in ways that reveal themselves under scrutiny. The show is a vehicle for lazy and/or slipshod historical parallels that fail to move or inform the characters and the viewers, except where overacted and questionable (Pete this season, for example, reacting to [spoiler]).
Boy, all these examples you're presenting are really making your case. A whole one.
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At least the last two full seasons have been comparatively poor as opposed to the previous seasons. The "foreshadowing," such as it is, is both heavy-handed and intentionally opaque, serving as a stand-in for cleverness in the writing and plotting of both individual episodes and entire story arcs.
'comparatively poor as opposed to the previous seasons.' Welp, you're not getting in a writer's room anytime soon. Juvenile insults aside, this doesn't really mean anything at all - I consider Mad Men's use of foreshadowing, such as it is, to be one of its worst characteristics.
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The shock value arises not from the believability of the crises facing the characters, but the contrivances of the writer's room re: how to un-boring the plot, whether it makes any sense or not. The characters are difficult to love and easy to lose. The sets trump the scenes and the hamhanded way the writers have introduced the anachronistic qualities of [spoiler - certain characters] are downright funny because futile.
This again is a lot of words about something but doesn't have very much content. The characters are difficult (read: impossible) to love but I don't think this is a mark against the show, necessarily.
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The show has lost its enthusiasm for what it is and turned into a downright boring soap opera wrapped in Matthew Weiner's overblown intellectual trappings.
/rant
And there it is, the S word finally comes out. Took you a long time to get to it. Do you know what the word soap opera connotes and how Mad Men is precisely not that? But ah I know - not enough people getting killed. I'll strawman again because the word 'soap opera' appearing in your critique is of course expected.