Word: mads
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Nostalgia. It's delicate. But potent." It's November 1960, and ad writer Don Draper (Jon Hamm), in the first-season finale of Mad Men, is pitching a room of Kodak executives on a campaign for their new slide projector. He's loaded the carousel with his family pictures, a poignant gesture because of what we know about him: not only does he cheat on his wife--prolifically--but he also hides his true identity from her and the rest of the world. Born Dick Whitman and orphaned as a boy, he went to Korea, swiped the dog tags...
Nostalgia is tricky for TV, which tends to render it as camp, sap or clichéd commentary. Mad Men could have been another index item in the boomer-centric '60s-history textbook that includes We Didn't Start the Fire and The Wonder Years. The New Frontier. The social upheaval. The same old times a-changin' again...
...fact, it's something very different, and beautiful. It's true that Mad Men, which with FX's Damages is the first basic-cable drama to have been nominated for a Best Drama Emmy, is deliciously curated, from the omnipresent cigarettes to the rocket-cone brassieres (and casual sexism) to the cool modernist sets. But the subtle, deliberately paced drama has a wider sense of history. Don is not defined by his time. He's an American archetype of self-reinvention: a Gatsby or a Huck Finn, who lights out for the territory but cannot escape from himself...
...like her mother, the author is too polite to shout, and too honest to fake it. The story of Lena and Gail can be measured in privilege and recognition; what remains incalculable is the withholding tax that both women are still paying for their lives. BOX: Excerpt ''Lena was mad about her husband. As a high school dropout addicted to the movies, she saw him as the rather unlikely combination of her three favorite stars: Noel Coward, Leslie Howard, and George Raft. Unfortunately, Louis was somewhat less sophisticated than Lena's idols. He had, for example, old- fashioned ideas about...
...planned to share about nine minutes of its 17 1/2-hour coverage with its competitors; now the network estimates it will share about 16 minutes. CBS, NBC and CNN seem satisfied, though at least one executive still believes that ABC has overplayed its role in the ceremony. ''I was mad last October when I saw that ABC was calling it an 'ABC exclusive,' '' says Ed Turner, executive vice president of CNN. ''I haven't stopped being mad...