Mad Men: Season One |  | Actors: Jon Hamm, Elisabeth Moss, Vincent Kartheiser, January Jones, Christina Hendricks
Studio: Lionsgate
Category: DVD
List Price: $39.98
Buy New: $20.05
as of 9/10/2010 12:01 CDT details
You Save: $19.93 (50%)
New (48) Used (24) from $18.33
Seller: mediaplanet
Rating:  313 reviews
Sales Rank: 64
Format: Widescreen, Box set, Color, Dolby
Language: English (Original Language)
Rating: Unrated
Region: 1
Discs: 4
Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1
Running Time: 600 Minutes
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.4 x 5.6 x 1
MPN: 031398229384
UPC: 031398229384
EAN: 0031398229384
ASIN: B000YABIQ6
Theatrical Release Date: July 19, 2007
Publication Date: 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
| |
| Similar Items:
| |
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Follows the lives of the workers at a 1960's New York advertising agency.
Amazon.com
Welcome to a world where Monday has a three drink minimum. Mad Men exists here and it's a fabulous place to visit, back before Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique really made much of an impact and before the Surgeon General put warning labels on cigarettes. It was an America on the brink of social explosion and Mad Men, which tells the story of a group of Madison Avenue advertising executives in the early 1960s, captures that surface stillness perfectly, complete with the growing tension barely contained below the surface. The show succeeds on every level. HBO famously passed on Mad Men, created by former Sopranos executive producer and writer Matthew Weiner. AMC picked it up, and thank goodness they did. From the first episode, Season One becomes an essential, utterly addictive television- watching experience. Beautifully filmed and masterfully written, the show manages to present the period honestly but with little nostalgia, and as soon as you get over the constant smoking, drinking and treatment of women as little more than "girls" who get coffee and answer the phone, the complexity of these characters (especially the dashing Jon Hamm as Creative Director Don Draper) will leave you completely captivated. Season One features clandestine office romances, shadowy pasts, a ton of adultery, closeted homosexuality and a lot more drama that seems risqué even for 2008. But again, one of the most impressive things about Mad Men is that everything is executed with absolute class, style and elegance. And bonus for the DVD viewer: Like The Sopranos, Mad Men has a ton of little moments and hints leading up to character revelations and plot twists that make watching the episodes over and over continually rewarding. –-Kira Canny
Stills from Mad Men (click for larger image)
|
| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 313
 Surprisingly Good August 30, 2010
James D. Crabtree (Fort Leavenworth, Kansas)
I never watched this program before I got this set on DVD. I have to say that I am very pleased with it, although this isn't the kind of show I normally like. The opening scene of the first episode really served to hook me.
The program is set in the early 1960s in Sterling Cooper, an advertising agency on Madison Avenue. The lead character is Don Draper, an executive and idea man who works at the agency. He has issues, as we find out further and further along in the series. Indeed, is he even who he says he is?
The acting, writing and direction is excellent. I look forward to seeing more shows in this series.
Captivating! August 29, 2010
P. G Price (Vermilion, OH USA)
Having seen the "Madmen Marathon" episodes this July leading up to season four, I had to see the rest! I am so glad I did. The characterizations, the sets, the costumes, the behavior chronicles the 60's to a T. The acting is superb. The plots are intricate, fascinating and I just can't get enough of Mad Men!
 Too Weird to Embrace August 22, 2010
M. Burns (Maryland)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Upon hearing all the hype about their new (4th) season and all the awards, I checked out Season One at the library to try and follow it from the beginning.
As there is a dearth of good drama on tv, I wanted to become a fan, but each episode left me with an empty, dissatisfied feeling, which I blame on the writing.
Many of the sub-plots are simply preposterous, e.g., the lead character stealing the identity of his dead G.I. colleague - right, like he's going to come back to his platoon suddenly claiming to be the other guy (and that he himself died), and no one will be the wiser. Absurd!
Most all of the major characters are non-sympathetic, so that you're not rooting for anyone, they're all bad (or vapid) people. The Pete Campbell character I can hardly stand to look at. Only a few peripheral characters seem to be relatively decent.
I realize normal people don't make complelling television, but it's a too cynical view of the business world; you've got to have some balance. Some of the scenes are just too over the top: morally revolting (Roger Sterling and his ingénue playthings) and even cruel (Don Draper's treatment of his sympathetic half-brother).
Second Season? Not interested.
 want to watch more soon! August 20, 2010
new to mad men
great and captivating series. definitely worth a watch even if for no other reason than understanding everyone's conversations!
check it out :)
WASPs Repellant August 19, 2010
J. E. Barnes (Bayridge, Brooklyn, New York)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
Kevin McDonald's 'The Culture of Critique: an Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements' (1998, 2002) describes how "Jewish intellectuals initiated and advanced a number of important intellectual movements during the 20th century." McDonald argues that "these movements are an attempt to alter Western societies in a manner that would neutralize or end anti-Semitism and enhance the prospects for Jewish group continuity either in overt or in a semi-cryptic manner. Several of these Jewish movements (e.g., the shift in immigration policy favoring non-European peoples) have attempted to weaken the power of their perceived competitors--the European peoples who early in the 20 century had assumed a dominant position not only in their traditional homelands in Europe, but also in the United States, Canada, and Australia...Ultimately, the movements are viewed as an expression of a group evolutionary strategy by Jews in their competition for social, political, and cultural dominance with non-Jews."
AMC's 'Mad Men' Season One (2007) and its subsequent seasons are of such exceptional quality that the program practically sets a new standard for television excellence--a very surprising thing to find on American television, whether network or cable, in 2010.
Creator, writer, and director Matthew Weiner's 'Mad Men' is about many things, but it's primarily about the end of an era in American history, an era seen by many as one of America's 'Golden Ages,' and one which was culturally, socially, and financially dominated by White Anglo-Saxon Protestants--WASPs.
WASPs dominate 'Mad Men,' and while the program is superficially sympathetic to its WASP characters some of the time, the viewer can't help notice how married advertising executive Don Draper's Jewish mistress, department store owner Rachel Menken, eventually makes the 'right' choice of rejecting Draper and wedding a respectable Jewish man.
Elsewhere in the show, the Jews that infrequently flit across the screen (potential clients representing the State of Israel tourism bureau, etc.) are depicted in largely agreeable, if stoic, terms.
Beneath its always intelligent, amber-hued surface, 'Man Men' is certainly a hard, even an ugly, critique of High WASP culture: though the Drapers and most of the other characters are educated, socially prominent, poised, witty, attractive, and talented, they are also routinely adulterous, alcoholic, and believe women are capable of being nothing more than sex objects, housewives, or over-the-hill matrons worth divorcing.
One account executive is so drunk in the midday office that when he urinates in his trousers, the accident has to be pointed out to him by coworkers. Another character allows his eight year-old granddaughter to drive an automobile through Tarrytown's suburban streets. Ad agency partner Roger Sterling enthusiastically performs Stephen Foster songs in blackface at his palatial Long Island estate, sexually propositions Don's wife the moment Don steps out of the room, and unquestioningly assumes that the models used in agency campaigns will have sexual intercourse with him.
A handsome young doctor rapes his newlywed wife on the floor of her office; one presumably loopy secretary runs over and amputates her boss's foot with a riding mower. The ad executives smoke marijuana and consort with drug dealers, have their secretaries sit on their laps while doing their typing, and open and steal mail not addressed to them. Account Executive Peter Campbell attempts to blackmail Draper to force a promotion. A comedian, who has everything to lose and nothing to gain in his action, insults the overweight wife of his sponsor. The Sterling Cooper staff believe Nixon is a natural to win the presidency over Kennedy.
When Don's beautiful wife, Betty, pushes him in an explosion of frustration, Don shoves her back with at least equal force. When the Draper family enjoys a picnic on a pristine Hudson River Valley hillside, they blithely leave a small mountain of garbage behind them; Don casually throws his beer bottles in the bushes. Don fires his male art director for refusing the sexual advances of an important client, also male. When Don discovers one of his mistresses has been discussing him with her friends, he forces her arms behind her, ties her to the bed--and leaves her there. Don rejects his sibling, Adam, so completely that Adam hangs himself.
And most tellingly, handsome, dapper, capable Don Draper is not the educated gentleman of the upper class he pretends to be; he's the illegitimate son of a prostitute who died in childbirth who was then abusively raised by 'backward' Pennsylvania farmers.
Don is an unconscious misogynist, a compulsive liar, a philanderer, a drunken driver, a sociopath, and a complete fake in almost every sense. His true background is in used cars. Don is false. Though typically presented in show's deceptively glamorous light, Don is one of Elliot's 'Hollow Men,' empty and stuffed with straw.
Much of 'Mad Men' is rooted in 'hard' fact (Don Draper is based around legendary ad man Draper Daniels, for example), and appears to accurately reflect history; however, it is WASPs, and by extension, all European Americans who come in for Weiner's and his fellow writers' continuous spleen (copy writer Peggy Olson, for instance, is Catholic and from a lower middle class Brooklyn background). Black and Hispanic characters are few and relegated far to the sidelines.
Though the show is very entertaining, and brilliantly written and produced, the excessive critique of European American culture is unfair to its subject, insofar as Jews, Blacks, and Hispanics are almost completely exempted from it.
Viewers will be hard-pressed to imagine a show with a similar show of teeth being made by Protestants about Jews; the outcry against it would be tremendous, and cries of anti-Semitism would flood the media landscape.
Watch and enjoy 'Mad Men'; but by all means watch it critically, as it deserves to be watched, and do not overlook what the show fairly celebrates: the Fall of the American Anglo, which the opening credits dramatize quite literally.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 313
|
|
|
