Mad about Mad Men

I am currently three episodes away from finishing the Mad Men first season dvd and I can't wait to get to the two season two episodes I already have waiting for me on my DVR. It is such a fantastic series that I can't help but mention this show to everyone I know (I already have one of my co-workers hooked). It has been a while (well at least since the start of summer) since I have watched a series that is so character based that I had almost forgotten how much fun it can be to watch the quirks and nuances of each character unfold and grow. What is so wonderful about Mad Men is that there are so many well-developed characters that each one is intriguing in their own right. While Jon Hamm's amazingly portrayed, Don Draper, and his office cohorts are the show's main focus, I can't help but think that it is the women of Mad Men's shockingly sexist world that are the most complex and intriguing of the show. 

Betty Draper is the Edie Falco to Jon Hamm's Tony Soprano if you want to make the comparison to the HBO series Mad Men's creator Matthew Weiner got his his chops from (and clearly continues to influence him, am I the only one who saw the parallels in Betty's pigeon hunting to Tony's ducks? and that's just the tip of the iceberg in parallels). Betty is just a ticking time bomb, one dinner party away from implosion and I can't wait for that moment. The show's other exceptional leading ladies include Elizabeth Moss, as the mousy Peggy, and Christina Hendricks, as the voluptuous Joan. Both characters could easily be pegged as one-dimensional representations of the opposing ends of the 60s single white working girl spectrum, but it quickly becomes apparent that they are so much more than that. As season one ties together it is obvious that both women are deeper than they let on, particularly Peggy, whom I still can't quite figure out, seemingly so naive yet the only female worker bee who seems to have aspirations beyond answering phones and filing her nails all day.

I highly recommend checking out this fantastic series if you haven't already, just make sure you have the bar fully stocked as the copious amounts of whiskey being ingested will leave you craving more than just the next episode. I mean seriously, how did anyone get any work done in the 60s? It's a wonder they were not all either belligerent or passed out by lunch time.