I’m mad about Mad Men

I’m a TV slave, there’s no denying it, and since the Apple TV came into the house, it’s become even worse. I don’t like to think about how much money I spend getting my TV show fix. But I like to think that all that money that I could have spent on booze and nightlife-y stuff, I spend on TV shows instead.

One of my biggest obsessions, TV show wise, is Mad Men. Season 5 just started, and I was for a bit rather upset at the timing of episode 1+2 – I’d be away in Bergen for a conference at the time. Then I realised that as long as the hotel I stayed at had a decent wifi connection, preferrably a free one, I could just download it onto my iPad. Win! This turned out to be even more of a win since I got sick just before leaving, so staying in my hotel room with Mad Men on the iPad was perfect! Except the being sick part.

Since there is a week between each episode, I’m keeping my obsession in check by rewatcing all the previous seasons. Thanks to the Easter break, I’ve plowed through season 1 in just a couple of days. Rewatching it made me think about how I first came to watch the show, a story I thought I’d share (yeah, I took three paragraphs to get to the real point of this post, SO WHAT).

I was at a course-seminar thing through my job at the university, all about marketing. I’m not really sure why I went, as I have nothing to do with marketing. It might be because I thought I could better at marketing my department? Definitely not sure. Anyway, they showed us a clip from Mad Men – from the last episode of season 1, the one where Don Draper (insert swoon here) did his presentation of The Wheel/Carousel for Kodak.

This is where I would have put the video clip from Youtube, but embedding has been removed by request. If that was you requesting, AMC, you suck. Seriously, not letting people embed and share a show that’s centered around, among other things, advertising? Sharing on the internet = free advertising for your show. I shake my head in disbelief at you.

Here’s the link instead: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2bLNkCqpuY. Not as awesome as an embedded video.

When I first saw that clip, I didn’t see any of the other trappings that might have enticed me into watching the show – namely, the 60′s setting. But the presentation of The Carousel, the feelings it apparently enlicited in the watchers – that’s what got me. I’m big on nostalgia. Very, very big. I’m hit by it almost every day, by the strangest little things. I’ll watch the snow falling outside, something that I actually despise, and suddenly feel a wave of longing for when I was a kid and the best thing that could happen was snow during the Easter holidays, because that meant skiing and sledding all day long. I’ll hear a song, and almost shed a tear for the bygone times when my mother would sing to me before bedtime.

I read a comment on one of the Youtube videos, saying how the clip plays on nostalgia twice over:

Do people get the self-reflection in this scene? Don is actually giving reason for the success of the series “Mad Men”. “Sentimental bond” with the Sixties, “nostalgia” for a classy era, “place we ache to go again” etc. Mad Men is the actual “time machine” for the viewer. This scene works so on many levels.

So there you go. Might be that my love for the show itself stems from nostalgia. Now go, watch, and let me know what you think – I’d love to have someone to talk to about this show!