I was set to write something about the season finale of Mad Men--and how great the whole third season was--and then I read this post over on the Vulture section of New York Magazine dot com...which says it all better than I could ever dream of doing. Oh, sure...my eyes gloss over and I start thinking of lunch when someone brings up Freud (as they do in paragraph 5--just skip down in that 'graph to where it reads "Don is a child of the American century..." and ignore the rest of the claptrap analysis that precedes it.
Mad Men continues to amaze me. It is literally the slowest moving series on TV, and I don't just mean that on a season-by-season basis. When I watch it and I look at the clock and see I'm barely 20 minutes into it, I'm always amazed. It is so dense and thought-provoking at times, that I don't think I have the mind to fathom it, like it's beyond my personal level of reasoning. And it's not like that WTF?! feeling I sometimes get while watching Lost. It could be because I'm getting old. After all, I remember most of the stuff they talk about, like that whole JFK assassination thing in the penultimate episode (third grade, Miss Edward's class, lots of comings and goings, and the Catholic Church across the street--St. Jerome's--started ringing their bells and there was a steady parade of people bringing in flowers before we were sent home early...just in case you were going to ask "where were you?"). MM constantly makes me think, occasionally makes me cry (not as difficult as you might think) and--at least for the past 13 weeks--made me look forward to Sunday evening.
And for the record, the impossible to beat best moment of TV this year was Betty Draper (January Jones) screaming at her TV set the moment Lee Harvey Oswald was shot. I screamed too in 1963--a solitary 8-year-old sitting in front of the TV when that moment in history happened.
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