Movies Daily by Zach Cannon

Considering I’m in New York and I spent all of last weekend rewatching AMC‘s Mad Men on On Demand, I decided to dedicate today’s post to the show. When Mad Men started last year, it received decent, but not stellar reviews. If you peruse its page on Metacritic, only 77% of the reviews are positive. When the DVD of Mad Men came out a few weeks ago, nobody had a single bad thing to say about the show. You can read EW’s DVD review of it here and listen to NPR’s here. Also, the inimitable Peter Travers dedicated his entire DVD column — available here — to Mad Men the day it came out — and that was the same week Point Break was released on BluRay, so there was definitely something else to talk about.

Mad Men grew slowly on critics and it did with audiences as well. In its initial run, it did alright ratings-wise, then it won two Golden Globes, got some buzz and attracted even more viewers in reruns. Now it’s available on Comcast’s On Demand and I can’t imagine it won’t get even more eyes on it before season two debuts July 27, especially since it’s on the Emmy Awards short list for Best Drama Series (the full list of nominees will be out next Tuesday) and already won a Peabody.

So why did Mad Men slowly become so popular? For the uninitiated, it’s about ad men who work at the fictional Madison Avenue ad company Sterling-Cooper in 1960. When it started, it was just beautiful and clever but the characters are so deeply drawn and so well constructed, that it took a few episodes before you could start to fully appreciate it. In the first few hours, Don Draper (played phenomenally by Jon Hamm) seems like nothing more than a dashing, intelligent, and chain-smoking womanizer who may have had a slight case of PTSD. And then, someone mistakes him on the train for Dick Whitman, he nervously carries on a conversation with the person, but doesn’t mention it again. Shortly after, a man shows up in his office, claiming to be Dick Whitman’s brother. It all leads to a dark secret about Don’s past and it was one of television’s most engaging mysteries.

But the show’s magic doesn’t just lie in Don, but also in the rest of the ensemble cast. There’s Vincent Kartheiser’s constantly emasculated Pete; the sultry Joan (Christina Hendricks), who rules over the office secretaries and looks damn good doing it; Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss), the newbie secretary who quickly becomes a junior copywriter and single mother; Don’s wife Betty (January Jones), who slowly starts to realize that her housewife role hurts her more than it makes her happy; the perfectly dry John Slattery as partner Roger Sterling; the quirky Betram Cooper (Robert Morse) as the Ayn Rand-obsessed, perpetually barefoot other-partner; and many, many other factors that make this show so great that will only make this run-on sentence more of a run-on.

Originally, I was going write a review and give a few links. But I found so many links about Mad Men on Google, that I’ll do a half-assed review and give you a thousand or so links, many of which I’ve already posted above. So, if you don’t believe me that the show is good, check out all these links and see for yourself.

A guide to the world of Mad Men New York.

A spot-on essay about the role of image in Mad Men.

A brief recap of season one to prepare you for season two.

A recent interview with Elisabeth Moss about the show.

A somewhat-recent profile about Jon Hamm.

USA Today’s preview of Season 2.

Rolling Stone’s preview of Season 2.

Entertainment Weekly’s preview of Season 2.

Some photos off AMC.com from Season 2.

Some publicity photos off AMC.com for Season 2.

A slideshow depicting how they created the ad campaign for Mad Men Season 2. I had a geek moment today when I saw the exact spot in Grand Central Station where the pictures for it were taken.

A very long (10 pages) article in The New York Times profiling Mad Men.

James Hibberd from The Hollywood Reporter dishes on the future of Mad Men and how the show could jump a few years every season for five seasons until it reaches 1969.