Discount Products and Customer Reviews
Mad Men - Season One
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 Even More Delicious On Second Viewing I'm so glad that Season 1 has finally made it to DVD. "Mad Men" is insightful and smart as well as visually stunning. I loved the series, and wanted it on DVD, but wondered if I would actually watch it once I got it. The answer is a resounding yes! Watching it again, I find that I catch little details and snippets of background dialogue that I missed on first viewing. I got it yesterday and have already watched two of the four DVD's. It's even more delicious on second viewing. I will definitely watch this again and again. I can't wait for Season 2.  Great show, deplorable DVD packaging. As with quite a few reviews I've written, this is not concerning the quality of the show itself - but rather the DVD release (which is why you are here anyway). MAD MEN comes packaged in a plastic case shaped to resemble a Zippo cigarette lighter. The discs are inserted into a piece of foam inside, along with a paper sleeve with some details on the program. This sort of packaging is similar to the DVD releases of the science fiction program Sliders - The First and Second Seasons. As anyone who has bought a season of SLIDERS can inform you, the discs can be very easily damaged by the packing - particularly if your set sees quite a bit of use. The friction between the foam insert and the discs can be harmful itself, and you'll find often as you open or close the top it will catch one of the discs. In short - this is a fragile and embarrasingly cheap design YOU are paying good money for. Evidently the public eats this sort of contrived garbage up: "Wow! It's cool 'cause it's shaped like a lighter! And the characters in MAD MEN smoke ALL the time! How do they think this stuff up?" The box claims it is "LIMITED EDITION PACKAGING", so perhaps a better release is in the future. But, for now, be warned that you may have to use extra care when removing and replacing the discs. If you're skeptical that this could be problematic, just wait until you've used your set for a year or two - I'm willing to bet you'll have discs with a multitude of surface scratches and oily fingerprints. As a footnote - the producers should take a page from HBO home video, nearly every one of their television releases are in attractive, unique packaging that actually protect the discs as well. From The Sopranos: The Complete First Season, to Rome - The Complete First Season, and on into the more recent John Adams (HBO Miniseries) - they're all top notch DVD packages.  Plop Plop Fizz Fizz AMC once again proves itself a worthy adversary to HBO and Showtime for producing a quality and highly literate television experience. Time spent viewing "Mad Men" is not a passive couch potato exercise calculated to generate a momentary knot of personal nostalgia. The experience is much more than that. Like "The Apartment," a major motion picture released in 1960 and mentioned in this series captures the very essence of big city urban 1960 culture and is utterly convincingly in ways both broad and subtle. The look and feel of the time is spot on. Some of what is defined in "Mad Men" may shock current PC culture sensibilities as relates to race and gender relations. At its core, "Mad Men" provides the viewer with a blistering and not too flattering look at ourselves and our entrenched culture of consumerism as strong today as it was nearly a half century ago. Jon Hamm leads an inspired cast of little known actors portraying reticent and mysterious Donald Draper, a highly sought after ad man and selling genius. Elisabeth Moss gets second billing as Peggy Olsen, Draper's wide-eyed new secretary. Moss's acting resume includes a stint as young Zoey Bartlett, daughter of the President in "West Wing." As for Hamm, he would make a convincing James Bond and depending upon the camera angle, ever present obscuring cigarette smoke and dim lighting proffered in any given scene, his tall, dark and handsome masculinity contains uncanny elements that are at times mildly suggestive of a young Timothy Dalton, Robert Di Niro, even Kevin Kline. Madison Avenue is reknowned for cynically packaging products or political personalities for retail sale but the consumer's ultimate acceptance is an exercise in free will that is heavily influenced by the cunning efforts of men like Draper. Whether Draper is signed on to promote cigarettes, aerosol deodorant, an upscale department store, presidential candidate or even promoting the state of Israel, he brings a cold and calculating hard edged view of the world to the table. It may be true that the incessant cigarette smoking and hard drinking during regular business hours by almost all of the brilliantly defined characters in "Mad Men" is no longer de rigueur, the compulsion towards self-destruction has not changed one whit. No one defines that trait better than gifted actor John Slattery who plays Draper's boss, Roger Sterling. As a partner in the adveristing agency, Sterling is at once a likeable fellow and yet morally repugnant. Slattery pulls off the character effortlessly. The secondary male characters in "Mad Men" are well acquainted with feelings of ennui. Many in Drapers's staff for the most part married yet openly pursue self-gratifying liaisons with willing female co-workers with feminine agendas of their own. Some things have not changed one whit in all these years, even as the unadjusted price for a gallon of gas was around 30 cents in 1960 and tops $4.00 a gallon today. The prices for virtually all commodities may have changed over the years but rest assured, people and their inate capacity to be gulled has not. You'd think we'd know better by now. That is the essential genius and overarching message contained within "Mad Men." The successful ad man accepts as an article of faith that the pitch and ultimate message should always contain or vaguely suggest a measure of happiness or bliss associated with the product whether that product be packaged in pill form, a breakfast cereal, an enhancement to health or desirabilty, the only goal is to convince the consumer to open up the pocketbook and buy into the come hither promise of "new and different." Simply put, "Mad Men" is brilliantly crafted TV that unabashedly drives that message home.  The show's brilliant, the packaging? Not so much. The show itself is fabulous. And I'm pretty sure most of the people hitting this page would agree. Otherwise, why else would you be here? You've seen the show, you love it, and you just want to know whether or not to buy the DVD. Yes, you totally should. Because the show's brilliant, and therefore you should support it. The packaging is horrendous. It looks awesome. Zippo lighter shooting out flames. The flames are the problem though. You have to be really careful taking the discs out (set up stadium style) as you're going to get your fingerprints all over them. And you have to be super careful closing the box, as the way it's set up, you end up scratching the discs. | |||||||||
