Hacker Cinema
Mad Men
2007 · TV series · 7 seasons
Created by Matthew Weiner
Set in 1960-1970 New York, this sexy, stylized and provocative drama follows the lives of the ruthlessly competitive men and women of Madison Avenue advertising.
75 positive10 negative3 mixed139 neutralfrom 227 commenters
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248 comments on Hacker News
> Career UX/UI folks will defend them, and this just feels like they smoked too much of their own shenanigans.
Of course, people are a part of the problem, never said they weren't. But when you ask how did Bobby from marketing commit murder, it's pertinent if he used a crowbar or a glock. Sure, neither are "evil" on their own, and I'm not saying that bootstrap is bad.
It's just the footgun that made it that much more likely...
If you want a "why" for the human side of the equation, well I'm not a marketing guy, the TV show Mad Men seems to offer an interesting perspective as to what makes a marketing department "good", vs just another latte drinking "vibe" shop. My hypothesis being, I have a strong suspicion certain parts of that culture no longer exist, and have mostly been replaced with number-seeking.
> it makes me think about how people engage with movies and television - as passive, plot-and-character driven consumption (eg I hope Walter White survives) with no critical analysis of how and why the writers added ABC thematic element (eg Walter White as a motif of a toxically masculine narcissist with specialized knowledge as a larger critique how mass media tends to valorize their male leads in the same vein as many other prestige shows at the time like Mad Men), and the larger, downstream sociocultural impact that piece of media has on how people see the world (eg people who now have the Heisenberg tattoo, unironically)
That's not the only smart-person way to read that show. And even if a character has flaws, or even if it's an outright villain, people can still like the character. If I tattoo Scar on me from the Lion King, does it mean I didn't understand that he's not a positive character? I can still think he's cool. I'm sure people also put Darth Vader tattoos on them. Also you're using phrases of political ideology that one doesn't have to subscribe to in order to enjoy the series.
Corporations want a reproducible formula that can scale. Creating movies (and TV) is an inherently creative process. The people who end up running these businesses hate that but creativity doesn't scale. This is why reputation and track record is so important in getting any project greenlit. So the likes of Steven Spielberg, James Cameron or Christopher Nolan have a lot of freedom. They can't quite make what they want. A studio still has to bankroll the project and they may not like it. This is how Francis Ford Coppola ended up self-funding Megalopolis and, well, the studios were right to pass, let's be reeal.
This is also why we get so many sequeals, remarks and reboots. It's a property with a proven track record. That's so much easier to get greenlit.
The other thing that happens is that corporations (including studios) can only increase profits by cutting costs and raising prices. And this last one has basically killed the ecosystem upon which movies (and TV) depend. Let me explain.
Once upon a time, LA was relativvely cheap to live in. This allowed people to live there and work on getting their break while working flexible, often service jobs. Waittressing, hosting, that sort of thing. It could be anything, really. But it has to be flexible enough to take time off to go to auditions and jobs and whatnot. It is very difficult to make a full-time career out of working in this industry. If you're an actor and you, say, get a principal guest role on a TV series you might make $1000-2000/day but you only end up working 1-2 days on that every 3 months. You can't live on that. Recently there was a piece on the actor who played Sam in Lord of the Rings having to sell his house even though he made $250k for the 3 movies. That was over several years.
This isn't just for acting. Lighting, camera work, production, direction, editing, writing, special effects, costumes, etc etc etc.
What sustained people were residuals and the relatively low cost of living. Residuals for TV basically got killed by streaming. A lot of movie projects became unsustainable when the VHS/DVD/Blu-ray revenue pipeline dried up. Matt Damon spoke about this.
But the other thing streaming killed was the network TV pipeline. A bunch of screenplays would be written (and sold). I'm talking hundreds. A handful of those would be made into pilots. These days that's maybe 10-15 per year. Previously it was 50-100+. A certain number of those went to a half then full series order of 22+ episodes. Getting one job could sustain you for the year.
Streaming came along. The residuals went away. Those 22 episode seasons became 8-12 episode seasons every 2-3 years if you're lucky. There was no syndication money anymore. Working people in the industry relied upon residuals in dry spells to make a living. And suddenly you needed 2-3 jobs a year instead of 1 and that's really difficult to get and, even if you get it, to schedule so they don't conflict.
And then obviously ticket sales in movie theaters were in decline and fell off a cliff with the pandemic. Starting in the 2000s you had the shift to save costs to places like Atlanta, Vancouver and Toronto. Productions started chasing tax credits all over the world and would immediatley leave when they ended.
Let me elaborate on just one example: writing. To get into this field you generally would start as a production assistant ("PA"). This would generally be an unpaid position initially (an "internship"). At some point if you didn't screw up, you might start getting paid. Then you'd be the assistant to a writer. This would give you experience in a writers room. Hopefully whoever you worked for would give you feedback and teach you things. The next step would be to get a staff writer job. Back in the day you'd get paid for 22 episodes. You'd be on set for filming and you'd learn production. Most producers came from a writing background. Eventually, this career would lead you to being a showrunner. Think Shonda Rhimes or Vince Gilligan or Matthew Weiner. Weiner in particular learned his craft and earned street cred as a staff writer on The Sopranos and he tried to sell Mad Men to HBO.
Now what happens if you get hired to write 8 episodes instead of 22 so you'd getting one-third of the pay. Your job is over before shooting starts so none of these young writers are getting experience to become producers and ultimately showrunners.
It's a bit like how some companies stop hiring juniors and just overwork seniors with the threat of layoffs. Well, those seniors used to be juniors. Don't hire and train juniors and eventually there won't be any seniors. Same thing.
I guess the short version is: streaming killed Hollywood.
you thought the business model is any different in the 20th century? I recommend you watch the TV series Mad Men
"contemporary fiction" is an industry/academic term for a genre of literature, but not widely used in the TV world. I think they meant "contemporary fiction" in the sense of the production of the fiction is contemporary. As in the TV show is contemporary in its creation, but the setting is historical. I don't think that redefines contemporary outside of... contemporary usage and definition.
It makes the most sense in context, and the discussion is about a TV show and not literature.
Different nitpick: Mad Men first aired in 2007. Is an 18 year old show that stopped production more than a decade ago contemporary?
You do realize Mad Men is a TV show made for our modern sensibilities right?
Mad Men isn’t a documentary. Contemporary work culture influenced its creators, so you’re likely seeing a reflection of that when you watch the show.
personally, I started re-watching Mad Men JUST because of these errors!
I love audio commentary, behind the scenes, and other looks behind the veil. I would love the ability to see more of unedited, 'raw', or 'mistakes' in older tv shows. Hell, I would even pay for it.
Whats really interesting to me is that no one 'decided' what's worthy of inclusion like they do with behind the scenes stuff
I'm just keying off this thing you wrote:
For example, the suicide was very poorly handled. It was used as vehicle for discussing open source vs proprietary code. But you could have easily done that without the death [...]
It's totally fine if we're not making any productive progress in this part of the thread. It's art, it's all subjective, we can just disagree. I think the interpersonal dramas in HACF are as earned as they are in any series; certainly, I'd put every season of HACF several notches above Six Feet Under Season 4 and its Scooby-Doo finale.
At the same time, I don't think there's any kind of important broader theme or message or ideas in HACF; the A-tier of prestige dramas have that --- The Wire, Mad Men, Better Call Saul. Mad Men and The Americans are I think the best comparands; both period shows with high-concept settings, both bigger idea/theme shows than HACF.
This is the best show I’ve seen since Game of Thrones. It’s so unique and mind expanding.
The problem with the modern data driven approach to TV production is that it optimizes for the shows that are just good enough to get people to keep their subscriptions, and the truly visionary stuff gets cancelled.
The best shows always take a while to build up popularity because they’re so new that people aren’t willing to give them a chance at first. Breaking Bad and Mad Men didn’t become popular until season 2 or 3. TV execs have no vision anymore, it’s all run by hill climbing algorithms that look for the nearest maximum now.
The golden age of TV is behind us now. It’s just yet another example of enshittification.
This description of the word "diet" is overly simplistic and marketing centric. A diet is just the schedule (list) of foods consumed, as in "I have a terrible diet" or in "pandas exist on a diet of bamboo shoots and leaves". This term is overloaded in areas like the weight-loss industry to refer to voluntary limited intake, but it's still a diet as in an enumerated schedule of specific foods. "Going on a diet" is often used in the context of specific health goals as distinct from the normal "diet".
There's an episode of Mad Men where they are coming up with pitches for weight loss products and losing weight is referred to as "reducing", a term from before the word "diet" was used as you've described.
> It took television about 50 years to hit stride and go beyond film, but it got there. Shows like The Wire, The Sopranos, and Mad Men achieved something not replaceable by the movie or the novel.
Can you elaborate on the differences between television and film? Especially considering the examples you cite. I'd agree that live broadcasting is a considerable departure from a film as a medium. Still, the shows you reference are very cinematic - longer, sure, but for me, they are as close to a film experience as possible.
> Speaking of the effects of technology on individuals and society as a whole, Marshall McLuhan wrote that every augmentation is also an amputation.
Nice to see this because I drafted something about LLM and humans riffing on exactly the same McLuhan argument. Here it is:
A large language model (LLM) is a new medium. Just like its predecessors—hypertext, television, film, radio, newspapers, books, speech—it is of obvious importance to the initiated. Just like its predecessors, the content of this new medium is its predecessors.
> “The content of writing is speech, just as the content of the written word is the content of print.” — McLuhan
The LLMs have swallowed webpages, books, newspapers, and journals—some X exabytes were combined into GPT-4 over a few months of training. The results are startling. Each new medium has a period of embarrassment, like a kid that’s gotten into his mother’s closet and is wearing her finest drawers as a hat. Nascent television borrowed from film and newspapers in an initially clumsy way, struggling to digest its parents and find its own language. It took television about 50 years to hit stride and go beyond film, but it got there. Shows like The Wire, The Sopranos, and Mad Men achieved something not replaceable by the movie or the novel. It’s yet hard to say what exactly the medium of LLMs exactly is, but after five years I think it’s clear that they are not books, they are not print, or speech, but something new, something unto themselves.
We must understand them. McLuhan subtitled his seminal work of media literacy “the extensions of man”, and probably the second most important idea in the book—besides the classic “medium is the message”—is that mediums are not additive to human society, but replacing, antipruritic, atrophying, prosthetic. With my Airpods in my ears I can hear the voices of those thousands of miles away, those asleep, those dead. But I do not hear the birds on my street. Only two years or so into my daily relationship with the medium of LLMs I still don’t understand what I’m dealing with, how I’m being extended, how I’m being alienated, and changed. But we’ve been here before, McLuhan and others have certainly given us the tools to work this out.
My completely unscientific impression is that other services are making the effort to produce high-quality films and series, including Apple TV+ (Slow Horses, Silo, For All Mankind, Foundation, etc.), Max/HBO (Barry, Curb Your Enthusiasm, GoT, The Last of Us, etc.), FX (Shogun, The Bear, The Old Man, Fargo, etc.), and AMC (Better Call Saul, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Night Manager, etc.). Whatever you think of the quality of shows in those services, they at least show genuine effort to make things that don't suck.
Semiconductors and software have created enormous amounts of value for the companies that own them, but the Fed usually thinks in macroeconomic terms. For the macro economy, the effect of technical development on overall corporate profits is much more muted. Creative destruction destroys old industries as much as it creates new ones. For example, there's a TV show "Mad Men" about the dominance of Madison Avenue advertising firms; Google and Facebook have completely destroyed this industry. Berkshire Hathaway annual reports from the 1970s and 1980s used to say that the local newspaper for each major metro area was a natural monopoly and reliable source of corporate profits; now, this industry has been reliably commoditized by the Internet.
Of course, the creative destroyers in question would much rather focus on the "creation of value" narrative, because it avoids attracting attention (and competition or regulation) from the industries that they're about to destroy. So there are pretty significant information distortions in the popular narrative.
Interest rates and corporate taxes have the property that they affect the whole market, which makes them much more useful to the Fed. If you bought NVidia in 2022 or Apple in 1998, congrats, you made a good investing call. But if you bought the S&P 500 in 2009 and are congratulating yourself on your 600% returns over the decade, you should know that most of that is because of low interest rates, and if the low interest rate environment unwinds, so will your stock portfolio.
People seem to enjoy that we've been enhancing dead celebrities by digitally digging them up and making them dance for us on stage, so why not? Beyond that, why stop at colorization? Maybe there's other artistic decisions we could enhance. Like we could change the plots of existing movies to reflect our more sophisticated modern experiences. Let's regenerate Mad Men but everyone has smart phones, and make the USO scene in Apocalypse Now an Ariana Grande show.
You're lucky, I find something like <2% enjoyable to actually give real attention to. For that reason I watch basically 0 TV or movies anymore.
And feels like the less I watch, the less I can watch anything without immediately being annoyed at cheese, cheapness, and mostly just plain unrealistic characters or dialogue (which really and truly is 99% it seems like of shows).
I need either high art or a slice of life. Ghibli or Satoshi Kon for anime, stuff like Kubrick in film, or Mad Men for TV. Mad Men especially was my turning point where after that show I couldn't stomach much else.
Call me elitist. I watch lower quality YouTube stuff much more easily (at low attention), but once you're trying to sign me up for 30 minutes or more I just give up.
Tried watching the 3 Body Problem on Netflix and in just the first scenes (cultural revolution + the scientists convo on God) were so full of cringe. I kept it on as background a bit but petered out after a few episodes.
Reminds me of that episode of Mad Men where Lucky Strike drops SCDP as their advertising agency. Hope they have their Don Draper
I think the thing I really miss is that episodes still had to work on a standalone basis. If you look at an episode of Mad Men or Breaking Bad, they still had a structure to them with an arc and multiple storylines in an episode. You had to be satisfied with a single episode for a whole week.
A single episode of The Mandalorian may literally have nothing happening and no memorable moments and only exists to be consumed between two other episodes.
I find most streaming shows subpar, I don’t even bother any more and just watch old series I’ve never seen like Mad Men or Beeaking bad or cheers.
We multicam sitcom is kind of awful in this regard, but at least usually it’s funny.
I think for many Netflix streaming shows it’s something with the cinematography, framing, and use of extras. I know in older movies you would get a variety of shots (through a window outside, or across a crowded room as character approaches, swooping in from above, etc) I think a lot of Netflix shows become framing shot, then “headshot to headshot” without much diversity of perspective. The also use less extra I think. I’m not sure but I think that is a factor.
The price range really varies. But just for the sake of giving an example: Mad Men season 1 is just $4.99 on Apple TV. Some newer shows on Prime can easily cost $4-5 per episode.
You're missing my point. There should be a law against it. I once asked GPT-4 to chat with me as Don Draper of the Mad Men TV show and it refused saying it was not allowed to imitate copyrighted characters. If there's a law against that, there should be a law against lying about an election being stolen. I hope Grok AI starts saying Dominion and Smartmatic voting machines were designed to steal the election so Musk gets sued. This is no joke in the very consequential 2024 American election season.
This reminds me that the Alamo Drafthouse used to have a program called “TV at the Alamo” and it was brilliant.
It was $5 to reserve a seat, and that $5 went towards food and drink purchases. They would show the previous week’s episode while the current episode was airing, strip out the ads and then project the current week’s episode. I watched Mad Men and Breaking Bad this way.
TV: I’m loving the series Reservation Dogs right now (not to be confused with Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs). It’s about some kids living on a Reservation in Oklahoma. It feels like a mix of the vibes of Freaks and Geeks and Northern Exposure, with lots of magical realism. Seems to be critically acclaimed but I don’t see a lot of buzz about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservoir_Dogs
Similarly, Atlanta was fantastic, challenging, and seemed to throw something completely different at you in every episode. I think Hiro Murai is going to be one of the great filmmakers of his generation.
I guess it’s a stretch to call it underrated because it was overwhelmingly critically acclaimed, but I feel it belongs to be talked about alongside the all-time greats when anecdotally I don’t hear much about it. For example, I’ve heard several casual references to Mad Men in the past few months, whereas I have never heard anyone mention Atlanta except when I have brought it up. Could just be my perception that’s off, though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta_(TV_series)
An example of where the show's writers just really missed the mark...
I wanted to like "A League of Their Own" -- I loved the movie. But I can't watch the TV show.
It seems like they have spent a lot to make the world feel like it's WW2-era. Except when anyone speaks. All the dialogue and idioms seem pulled from the present.
And, for me, it doesn't seem intentional. It just seems sloppy. And that makes it impossible for me to get lost in the story. Like it feels like all the actors know it's 2023.
Like, "Mad Men" was a great period piece. "Halt and Catch Fire" was also a great period piece. And even "A Knights Tale" was a good sort of modern spin on "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court"... where even though it's set back in time, the actors portrayed a more modern spin on antiquity.
But "A League of Their Own" seems to unintentionally shift back and forth. It just feels weird. Hard for me to watch. I can only guess the dialogue gets improvised (I can see this being the case given the casting choices), or the writers don't have a shared style guide for consistency, or the story editor (or whatever role) is pressed for time.
> I'm just imagining these "ghost AI artists" who publish catalogues of music using the audible likeness of more prolific artists.
Possibly so, but who is the market for such a catalogue? I don’t see how the artist is going to lose out.
I’m reminded, though, if the episode of Mad Men where they want to get the Beatles as the soundtrack to an ad, but on finding out that the Beatles won’t do it they try to get some music that sounds similar to the Beatles. Maybe that’s the market.
This is a big problem I have with modern movies; they're unable or unwilling to simply show, they need to show and tell. It doesn't matter the theme, even wholly unpolitical themes are far too often explicitly laid out, multiple times, with blunt dialogue exposition to the audience who are presumed to only be half-watching the movie.
The smart writing (and smart audiences) have all moved to TV. The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, True Detective, Better Call Saul. These are the shows that respect their audience's intelligence.
The movie business has turned into Disneyland with guns.
I’m surprised by the association that Americans make between suburbs and cars. Sure, it’s common there, but it wasn’t always, and it’s not outside of the USA.
Take something as far back as New York in the 60s depicted in _Mad Men_: Don Draper commutes by train. He lives a little away from the station, but that’s hardly something a well-timed local bus couldn’t easily bridge.
Many people still do today. It’s the same thing in most capitals where I’ve lived, and those big enough to be featured in movies. Suburbanites commute to London, Paris, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Chicago, Tokyo, Moscow, Delhi, Peking, Shanghai, and every large China city by local train. I know places where people don’t, but I can’t think of a single place where that’s not a nightmare.
This painting was prominently featured in several episodes of "Mad Men".
Definitely try to power through Mad Men, I tried to watch it a few times when I was younger but never got past season 3, whereas season 4 is where the real heart and message of it shows through, and the character development reaches new peaks. Really does seem like a show that resonates more when you are older.
Mad Men does start to dip for a bit somewhere around season 5 imo, but once they get on track for the ending it picks back up and they stick the landing.
Haven't finished Mad Men, so I couldn't speak to it. Though I am planning to because it's become a lot more interesting to me as I've grown older compared to when it was new.
As for Game of Thrones, it doesn't fit into my list because the quality of the writing really nosedived, starting in season 5 to my mind, though seasons 6 and 7 is where it took a turn for the drastically worse. And season 8 was a disaster. So it's exactly in the opposite group that's too long to exhaustively list.
for those who don't use twitter:
"Always carry a flask of whiskey in case of snakebite, and furthermore always carry a small snake." -- W. C. Fields
About six months ago, I stopped drinking alcohol. I feel much better, and I’m mad as hell about it.
I never really drank through my 20s and 30s, but grew to really enjoy whiskey through my 40s, coincident with “Mad Men”, and roughly a thousand academic studies that proved that alcohol is actually good for you. Win/win!
I had read that the sure sign of an alcoholic is someone who drinks at night, by himself, at home, so I decided to only drink at night, by myself, at home.
I was even scurrilously quoted as saying “the perfect day is 10 hours of caffeine followed by 4 hours of alcohol”, which I did indeed say, and which is still indeed true.
Unfortunately, in recent years, it’s become clear that most or all — probably all — of the scientific studies on the benefits of alcohol are fake, the scientists unwitting or witting victims of selection effects. As Michael Crichton says, “wet streets cause rain”, or rather wet streets don’t cause rain. It turns out that sick people often don’t drink, or subjects just lie to researchers about their consumption outright. There go the studies.
It is now pretty definitively clear that no amount of alcohol is good for you. Andrew Huberman recently summed this conclusion up on his podcast; the topic made me so enraged I never listened to the episode, but I did read the notes.
Andrew says “the best amount of alcohol to drink is no alcohol” — imagine someone who both hates and loves humanity that much.
Since I stopped drinking, I feel much better. I don’t need as much sleep, but my sleep is better. I’m more alert through the day. I’m cogent and focused at all times. I have more energy when I exercise, and it’s easier to control my diet.
It’s great, and I am super mad about it.
I feel like the color has drained out of my evenings[]. Spending time with people is still fun, but now it’s hard to sit still and watch a movie or read a book and unwind at the end of a hard day. I’m more prone to just work until bedtime. Grump grump grump.
Frankly, I don’t know what Elon is doing farting around with cars and rockets and Twitter, why doesn’t he solve THIS problem[*].
And one of these days, I am going to get deeply, seriously, hammered.
But not today!
[] A lot of people I know are substituting cannabis or hallucinogens for alcohol. I’m not, I won’t touch any of those things — a topic for another time.
[*] I’ve been trying all the alcohol free whiskeys, wine, and beer. So far, no luck on the whiskeys. For wine, Sovi is pretty good. For beer, there are quite a few good choices; I’ve become partial to Hopwtr, which is zero calorie hop-flavored sparkling water. I’m still not drinking either at breakfast, though I am tempted.
So we're just going to pretend that Season 5 of The Wire never happened? Because that story sure stuck out like a sore thumb.
My point is, all shows have their ups and downs. Sopranos/BB/Wire were great and definitely kickstarted the golden age of television, but Mad Men just hits differently and I think I now know why: the visual richness and spectacular screenwriting/character development.
Well it’s a feminist show or at least change in womens role in society is a large theme (hence the name). I think it might come across preachy if one expects a more nuanced show.
If you look it against films from the era like The Apartment (which is like styleguide to mad men) or All that heaven allows, similar themes and characters were displayed already then as sign of the times.
It’s also a really off-kilter episode, of the kind in which Mad Men would occasionally indulge with varying degrees of success.
I enjoyed all the Kubrick references, but didn’t find it paid off the strangeness well.
> Mad Men's popularity hinged on style over substance
To the contrary, all of the fan base at the time hinged on character developments! Married Pete got Peggy pregnant in the first episode, was anything ever going to come of that? would Don ever stoop so low as to make a pass at Joan? would Roger and Joan's series-long tryst blow up their respective relationships? etc etc
A lot of it is left un-shown, as each season jumps ahead in time. You slowly figure out what happened during those jumps by inference. I thought it was great.
I watched the full series in like 2016 for the first time and decided to read the AV Club’s excellent contemporary reviews after each episode to engage a bit more with the show. Highly recommend. Here’s S02E01: https://www.avclub.com/mad-men-for-those-who-think-young-1798204710
Those reviews often clued me into the nice little period touches the show does. It’s also fun to read all the guesswork people were doing to figure out where the show was going next. The comments are great. (Note they didn’t review all of season 1 at the time, but revisited it in 2013 with some light spoilers of the full story)
Recently someone gave me this book called "Difficult Men" by Brett Martin. Nope wasnt about mass shootings. It was about the protagonists created in the most popular TV shows in the US and the minds of the writers behind them. So Sopranos, Mad Men, Dexter, Breaking Bad, The Wire, Deadwood, Six Feet Under etc etc. Its a super impressive and ever expanding list of writing. But the common thread is dysfunction. They are all coping badly with whatever situation they are thrown into or run into. And the costs and consequences keep building up and nothing ends too happily.
While reading it I was feeling, this too is a sort of mass attack on the minds of people. Cause its a hope and faith killer. The message is always - here is some entertaining and mesmerizing hypocrisy your small chimp brain hasn't imagined and guess what? Whatever move you make you loose. After reading that book, I see that same message in stand up comedy, in the news media, in tech and business news etc. Probably exacerbated since social media finds and amplifies such things. But I feel the messaging and signaling underneath really needs to be different.
The lack of smoking is something to ponder. It's always so glaring to me when TV shows that take place in the '80s and '90s show almost no one smoking, when in fact if you went into any public place, probably 30-50% (or more, if it's eg a pub) would be smoking, including in people's homes, offices and so forth. I wonder if the huge and realistic amounts of smoking seen in shows like Mad Men will be edited out one day.
Came here to say the same thing, I graduated in '99 with an ECE degree when movies like Fight Club and The Matrix came out and the future was so bright we had to wear shades, right into the Dot Bomb of 2000/2001. People might have forgotten or be to young today to remember that most tech innovation stopped from then until around 2007 when the iPhone came out. Facebook was around 2004-5 ish but the PHP ecosystem it was built on was anemic until Lumen/Laravel took off after 2011. It's hard to get a job as an engineer when all companies were thinking about was outsourcing.
Those years created such trauma for me and set me back so far financially that I didn't recover or pay off my student loans (meaning I had no disposable income whatsoever) until I was 40. I can say with confidence that those experiences all but ruined my career, and many others in Gen X. We didn't get promoted, or trusted to manage others, or even have children. It's like we never existed, especially the tail end, the "Elder" Millennials like me. All we hear about now is the success of billionaires - the Tony Starks of the world, but I'm with the losers - I'm Ivan Vanko.
Thankfully the situation today is nothing like the Dot Bomb or the Housing Bubble collapsing in 2008. Nobody can find employees right now. And with the arrival of AI, even the most prescient geeks have absolutely no idea what's going to happen in the next decade. The years effectively go 1999,2000...2023 with 2 lost decades in between. The only innovation has been in GPUs, Moore's law effectively halted in 2007 when R&D started going to reducing cost and power consumption. That may change with RISC-V and the open sourcing/democratization of hardware. So for the first time in a _very_ long time, I'm actually cautiously optimistic about the future.
To get to the point: I'd recommend rejecting most job hunting advice. Stop thinking about what you need to do, or what others expect you to do. Remember that being alive and kicking is what matters. You can survive on next to nothing. The world doesn't come to an end just because you lose your job or run out of money.
Instead, picture a business owner's goals. They just want you to solve their problem, and hopefully be able to pay you. So start with the fundamentals: shows like Mad Men. Learn how to listen and communicate. Don't assume that the person you're talking with has any more of a clue than you do. They may be interviewing 100 people because none of them emphasize how much they are there for their employer. If you're solid, and dedicated, and show up, that can do more for your career than credentials. Just be on the level, is what I'm saying.
One pitfall to watch for is settling. I made the mistake of moving furniture for the first 3 years out of school to support my struggling shareware business. I came out of that job a different person than when I went in. It built my intestinal fortitude but destroyed my psyche. But I've fallen back on it when I needed money. Donating plasma works too. And stuff like Bacon is the Uber of handyman work. It's important to know you can do that stuff to subsist, so that you aren't desperate when you go to an interview. It's all dating, basically.
> I'm astounded that this article doesn't mention what to me seems like a no-brainer: We're in the golden age of television.
I disagree, the golden age of television was the late 90s to early 2010s, from the start of the Sopranos, to the last episode of Breaking Bad. I can’t name a series in the last 10 years that is on par with Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Deadwood, or The Wire.
Streaming services killed quality television, House of Cards was the beginning of the end.
I have the benefit of never having heard of Pinsky nor having seen one episode of “Mad Men”, so I experienced the article as containing a few insights that resonated well with me, as I’ve observed the same things, at least in the US.
I thought it was clear that the professor did pronounce Pokémon correctly, thereby confirming his coolness.
The point about the military, I assumed, was that rank is a proxy for age in civilian life, and indicates experience within the uniformed world.
The professor gave the talk, presumably, in order to educate or enlighten the privileged brats who should have (I say this with no trace of irony) shut up and learned rather than protesting.
What a bizarre mish-mash of arguments. We open with an appeal to Dr. Drew "Celebrity Rehab" Pinsky, who has spent the last 20 years beclowning himself at every opportunity. Then on to Mad Men, a show whose thru-line over 7 seasons was the pathology of the deferential culture this article is talking about. Then a doctor who points out the fascinating new observation that people want to seem younger (a topic Mad Men visits every other episode). Then: this just in: grandparents come up with stupid alternative names for "grandparent"!. A professor gives a talk at a university and is met with protests: why does he care what young protesters think? Under-investigated corollary: why did he bother giving a talk to a bunch of youths in the first place? A governor informs a crowd of young citizens that they will need to deal with the decisions made by seniors today (what with mortality and all). Then, the military, a system where deference is definitely organized by age and not, you know, a formal hierarchy of ranks. Nope: oldest person in the room wins, that's what I always hear! Continuing, only one of this person's teachers knew what a Pokemon was, and they didn't pronounce it right. Those were the good old days! Older adults these days are too reluctant to assert authority. You know, besides determining the outcome of almost every election.
There's no need for Henderson to debate me on any of this; I'm 46 years old, roughly 10 years his senior, and hereby do assert my authority. Take notes, kid.
Besides Don Draper being a fictional character that the author is using as a foil, I can't imagine the type of person who would watch season 1 of Mad Men and think that Don Draper is a well-adjusted adult man who people should emulate.
> In the second episode of Mad Men, Roger Sterling walks into Don Draper's office and says, “I can never get used to the fact that most of the time it looks like you're doing nothing.”
glad I finally binged the show during one of my 'springboard' periods :)
Wow, never knew that! Also never heard that song before it was at the end of an episode of “Mad Men,” but it’s pretty great.
>As an example, Mad Men, especially because it's set in the 1960s will probably still be watched in the 2060s.
Why ? The only old TV shows I see being popular long term is era defining shows you watch for nostalgia (eg. Seinfeld, Friends). Maybe some real classics like Sopranos that everyone was watching at the time.
Shows like Mad Men ? I really don't see it. And more importantly this LOTR show - how many people are even watching Game of Thrones now and how much interest will it generate in the future ? Unless this LOTR show is somehow groundbreaking with visuals (and it's a lot harder to do now then back when they did the films because the bar was so low back then) - I doubt it's a valuable long term play.
> Even with the rebate, how can they hope to recoup the investment? Merch? DVD Sales? Increasing sign ups to Prime? I have a doubt the profits from that will help them earn money to cover up the remaining 300 million or so they have still invested.
Probably all of the above plus it's a long term move.
Amazon needs to build up a strong catalog and marquee TV shows are long term attractions. As an example, Mad Men, especially because it's set in the 1960s will probably still be watched in the 2060s. Game of Thrones would have been the exact thing but D&D completely tore it apart in the last 2 seasons.
It's from "Mad Men" the TV show about a US advertising agency, initially on Madison Avenue in New York (hence "Mad Men" from both "Mad[ison avenue]" and "Ad[vertising]"). Don Draper the show's main protagonist dismissed the "I feel bad for you" comment by a minor character this way. Because Don is the protagonist the audience knows how they're expected to feel about that.
Strange just reading this I connected my two favourite film clips:
Mad Men, Carousel pitch: https://youtu.be/suRDUFpsHus
And the Carousel scene from Logan’s Run: https://youtu.be/viWT4JWWfTg
Forty is the new thirty…
I don't watch stuff unless it has ended and is reccomended by someone who watches shows I generally enjoy. Here's my pitch for the golden age of TV, though most of these are from a few years back. Most on HBO.
The Wire
The Sopranos
Generation Kill
The Deuce
Treme
Show me a Hero
Luck
The Expanse
Sillicon Valley (not actually that funny but like a documentary of our field)
Mad Men
Breaking Bad was released by AMC, which was mostly airing theatrical movies. They had little original programming prior to Breaking Bad (and Mad Men one year before). Additionally, HBO and TNT, two TV networks with more experience than AMC, turned down the idea.
“Worth the cringe”, ha ha. That sounds like a slogan Don Draper would save the day with in an episode of Mad Men.
The first episode of Mad Men alludes to Bernays work. They are trying to come up with a new campaign for Lucky Strike and he rejects an idea to base the campaign off of Freud’s research.
Although "Mad Men" isn't a documentary it does show how easy it was to board a plane in the early 60's. It agrees with what the adults said was the reason hijacking was so easy then.
Mad Men is a fictional TV show set in the 1950s. "Big Pharma" sending doctors to resorts is now illegal in the US under the Sunshine Act.
Oh please. Ever watched Mad Men, or any other tv/film that shows the wining and dining of prospective clients by a sales person/team? Every time a sales person spends money on a prospective client is written off as an expense, so the gov't is pretty much condoning it.
There are tons of stories of big pharma sending doctors to lavish resorts in the guise of a "conference". Ever heard of payola? The music business has been based on bribes. Why would you think of the film business being different? Hell, the states are involved just as much with tax incentives to entice productions to use their state/cities as location for that production.
You're being quite cynical trying to wrap any person with knowledge of these payout schemes as being involved/complicit.
Google could log which sites have a paywall, and put an icon next to search result that you might need to pay money to access the article. I could also let google know which sites I subscribe to and if I have a WSJ subscription, it could rank those articles a little higher to similar results on sites I don't have a subscription to. For example, something similar happens when you google TV shows, e.g. https://www.google.com/search?q=mad+men
There is a panel on the right hand side showing which streaming services stream the show. I can tell google which ones I have and it will improve the recommendations based on that.
Another anecdote: an undergraduate at a top university I knew, with publications, leadership positions, and strong research experience at the time, was also into reality television, and specifically avoided dramas/prestige television (e.g. Mad Men, Breaking Bad).
In addition to not requiring thinking, I remember he also mentioned that it's harder to get "hooked" and end up binge-watching episodes.
The perspective is plausible to me. I do feel more drained or emotionally spent absorbing intense television series, or even accomplished for understanding them, when I could've spent that on real work. That said, I do think low-quality media affects the way I think and write in a negative way (by contrast, when I spend a lot of time absorbed with high-quality writing, it actually does positively affect my speech and writing for the next few days).
All the stuff from before you were born is curated for you by society. It's pre-filtered, the cruft has been removed and for the first few years of your life you have no control over the filter.
Then, as agency is attained, you get increasing exposure to the great unfiltered, and you find hidden treasure and trash and you learn what you actually like and dislike - in preparation for the filter you apply to your own children - which helps to define you, to yourself.
Then you get a job, partner, mortgage / rent, kids, and, just the requirements to being able to afford all that goes with that, removes the time required for 'agency' and so you're locked in a fairly tight decade-era of culture for the rest of your life unless you actively choose otherwise; seeking out the alternative, following rabbit holes, opening yourself to the full spectrum of colour that is within surprisingly easy reach, following threads that your natural tendency for the easy path would be to drop.
Most of my favourite music that I listen to now is recent. My old favourites are from when I hadn't heard my new favourites. Some of my new favourites are contextual around life stages and activities I hadn't reached or participated in earlier.
I missed Mad Men, tried to start it a couple of years ago, realised it's 92 hour-long episodes, and worked out that I didn't have the enthusiasm for it after getting through a few episodes because the combination of my friend-base and entertainment value I was getting from it didn't add up to being worth 92 hours of my time.
Recently watched Berserk upon the recommendation of a work colleague. Worth it.
Squid game, worth it. For me anyway.
Live action Cowboy Bebop, enjoying it a couple of episodes in, will continue.
Know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em. But first, you gotta know yourself.
Listen to music you don't like to better calibrate what you do like. Watch the occasional blockbuster movie to help your appreciation for real film.
Can't see, hear, taste, or do it all, find your own channel but make sure to rub up against the edges regularly enough to determine if you need to change channels but didn't realise it yet.
Culture is about stories from which life lessons are learnt, and there are a lot more TV shows, movies, and songs than there are life lessons, so as long as you check those edges occasionally, you'll be pretty well covered.
The Wire destroyed and rebuilt my view of the world, and work, and government, and leadership and morality. The song King Kong as covered by Tom Waits recalibrated my musical brain (which was already uniquely calibrated by Mr. Bungle in the late 90's), The Mighty Boosh and Rick and Morty have been journeys into imagination like I never dreamed.
No. There's not too much culture.
One of my favourite examples of this is an episode of Mad Men (mild spoiler) where at the start of an episode one of the accounts guys is riding a ride-on lawn mower through the office (new client), and at the end of the episode a drunk secretary is using it to run over someone's foot.
*edit: spelling
I mean, there's an episode of Mad Men where a doctor comes in and shoots everyone up with "vitamins", implied to be some stimulant/amphetamine. Not sure how accurate that is.
Just for whatever this is worth to you, and I know you probably already know this, but networks rejected Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead, South Park, Mad Men, and, I think most infamously, Stranger Things.
There's nothing wrong with that --- perhaps the networks involved should have rejected those shows! You pick one, you gotta turn down another one. But having more venues specialized in a specific type of show means that, for instance, when BET passes on your thing, it can still find a home somewhere else.
I don't know anything about these particular shows. But look at the first couple episodes of Broad City --- not the extremely successful TV show, but the low budget web series that started it all. I'm inclined not to dismiss things based solely on production quality relative to what's on FX.
The rest of these points are probably well taken!
HBO had been doing it for a few years, with shows like The Wire and Deadwood. But Breaking Bad helped bring it to a wider audience, since AMC is basic cable rather than premium. (AMC had launched into that a year before with Mad Men, which was similarly TV as good film.)
Amazing book, written by a former Madison Avenue employee (the subject of "Mad Men")
I think someone should make a movie or TV series out of this, it'd be the perfect parody of Mad Men in particular and our messed up hyper-corporate dystopia in general
It's weird to realize that there's a huge difference in how people who read HN understood "digital buying" and how the rest of the world did.
I have bought many movies and TV shows from the iTunes store. I did so knowing that it was not a true purchase in the sense of buying a DVD, or a videotape, or a book, or even in the sense of buying music from the iTunes store (which has been DRM-free since 2009). But I did it anyway, because the transaction still offered a net positive value for me:
- Very long term (but clearly not perpetual) rights to watch the thing; - Very high convenience (easily available on my Apple devices without dealing with files or sync); - Very much easier/simpler than resorting to, shall we say, nontraditional means of media procurement.
But, again, we knew what was happening. Apple could turn heel and invalidate these purchases on their whim, or the whim of the rightsholder. I still made the deal, and still feel fine about it, because I knew that going in. Normal humans tend not to understand this.
(We also have a very minimal cable package. We did the math and realized that it was cheaper to, say, buy season passes of the mid-tier cable shows we wanted to see than it was to pay for the channels in question. If you watch a LOT of those shows, this math doesn't work, but for us and things like Mad Men, it definitely did. Our cable bill is $50 a month lower than it would be if we had those channels, so we could absolutely justify "buying" the show on iTunes -- even if we had no plans to watch it more than once.)
It’s the framing of “it’s okay to ...” that bothers me. I mean, who says it isn’t?
I wouldn’t have that issue if the title were “why you should ...”
Edit: furthermore, there were times and places where “just taking a walk” was taboo. (See the Ray Bradbury short story [1] or the Mad Men episode where they freak out at the woman who says she does it.) So I chafe at the false implication that we’re in such an era, if the author isn’t going to back up such a claim.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pedestrian
Honestly, I read the entire first season as a self aware meta-commentary on how the show was supposed to take Mad Men's place in the AMC lineup but was merely a shallow facsimile.
In addition, I see Mad Men's episode "The Monolith", about a computer being installed in the office, as a comment on the (at that point) upcoming Halt and Catch Fire series.
Dang. This is one I can speak to. Back around 2008 or so I was at a friend's college dorm and we spent an entire day watching a Mad Men marathon on AMC. This was long before binge watching, when an actor was either in movies, on HBO, or on bleh cable, so it felt like a cultural shift to me that we were all so enamored by this show. When I got home I typed in /r/television to see if maybe this was something others were talking about, but I discovered it was an abandoned subreddit full of soap opera gossip. So I messaged the user that created it, who eventually came around and saw my message, and he let me take it over. He didn't leave the subreddit so he was always top in the hierarchy, but I personally took full ownership. I spent years designing and enforcing rules discouraging things like downvotes, requiring people to submit the source instead of blogspam/clickbait, disallowing memes/image posts, banning any form of hate speech, etc. This was _not_ the norm on Reddit at the time. This was the era of /r/pics. Most passerbys hated it, it really didn't even follow the whole idea of Reddit as a whole, but the ones that stayed were awesome and it seriously just grew and grew and grew. Critics like Alan Sepinwall were practically gods there and guided a lot of the discussion throughout those years, and the AV Club was largely ignored.
I ended up taking a little hiatus from the Internet and left some mods I trusted in control, and when I went back after a few months I discovered the original mod had let Reddit take it over and install their own team to make it a default subreddit. Why wouldn't they? Now, it is what it is. Still, I look at it and know I designed that logo, I wrote the rules that have been repurposed and are buried in some wiki that nobody reads, and I wrote the stylesheet for the sidebar. Oh well.
Season 1 of Mad Men starts in 1960,not the 50's.
Hard disagree.
First of all, most streaming shows are 10 episodes per season, 12 at most.
But as for the number of seasons, what's amazing about television is how deep and intimate your knowledge of the characters becomes. The kind of emotional depth and resonance you get with characters in the 4th and 5th season of a show is simply unparalleled -- we know their life histories, and the smallest of scenes can shake us with the amount of meaning they convey.
If you think of Mad Men or The Sopranos or The Americans or Breaking Bad -- my god, each season is better than the last because it's like they approach infinite richness. The last seasons get to levels none of the first seasons were able to.
Also, it's a huge rarity for shows to make it to 7–9 seasons. The ones that do are because they're hugely popular and people want to watch them. If Game of Thrones had still had books to work off of, I think pretty much everybody would have loved 3 or 4 more seasons.
It's easy to blame web developers. All too often they are using overengineered hacks to implement bizarre requirements from UX and product managers who don't and won't understand the web but absolutely must see their vision take form (reminds me of the Mad Men quote: "we employ more frustrated artists than the Third Reich").
Pretty sure he did the Mad Men season 7 graphic, which was fucking awesome.
Edit: https://images.amcnetworks.com/blogs.amctv.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/mm7-key-art-796.jpg
> Overall, 86% of the total 655 movies included at least 1 alcohol scene, with a range of 0 to 617 and a mean of 68 (SD = 87) occurrences per movie.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4035596/
If we take this mean and use a movie average length of 1.5 hour it was actually 10x worst than my estimation.
Yes you are right it is probably better to take the median.
I think it would be pretty easy for a ML pose algorithm to scan the whole Amazon Prime + Netflix archive for a real answer. Especially series like Mad Men are over the top in conditioning for alcohol and cigarette use. I started noticing when I quit smoking how much this was.
It's like the episode of Mad Men where the kids are playing spaceman: https://youtu.be/2XbCWmY0eqY
A fictional advertising firm from the television series "Mad Men." A "great" place for heterosexual men in suits to work, a not-so-great place for anyone else.
Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce is the name of a fictional advertising agency in the TV series "Mad Men", in case anyone is confused by this confusion
> Nobody here watched Mad Men I guess.
I have seen a few episodes but I feel very weird about taking anything from it other than entertainment. Problem is if you are already subject matter expert, you can distinguish the information from the entertainment but you already know the information so it might be a refresher at best. For example, doctors and other medical professionals watching House, MD or Grey's Anatomy might be able to relate with some of the things when the show has some basis on reality and laugh at things when they are off base. Similarly, people in marketing/advertising business might be able to tell what is what but from the outside, I can't tell the difference between information and entertainment.
There’s a Mad Men episode where someone asks Don Draper if “all this stuff actually works” and Draper says, “who knows?” (paraphrasing).
Like many, I learned of Bernays through Adam Curtis’ documentary, “The Century of the Self.” But many years later, I wonder — where’s the evidence that Bernays ideas were actually effective? I love Curtis films, and I think there’s a lot of great ideas in them — but it’s also easy to be hypnotized by them and forget to be critical.
Anyway, would be interested if anyone’s found any research that makes a compelling case that Bernays’ ideas actually work, and that he wasn’t just a really good salesman for his own services.
Mad Men was on basic cable, so even though it had those adult themes, it didn’t make them explicit (for example, one plot line was that a character traded sex for a business deal — but the episode didn’t show the sex scene).
There were scattered F-bombs that were censored from the original broadcast; the version available on Netflix (or for purchase on home video) restore them.
In a real historical piece, if they tried to make everything slavishly right any show would be unwatchable, because there would be too much that the audience couldn’t understand. The audience would be constantly distracted by details like un-filmably dark building interiors, ugly missing teeth, infants being given broken-winged songbirds as disposable toys to play with, crush, and throw away, and Marie Antoinette relieving herself on the floor at Versailles. Despite its hundreds of bathrooms, one of Versailles’ marks of luxury was that the staff removed human feces from the hallways regularly, sometimes as often as twice a day, and always more than once a week. We cannot make an accurate movie of this – it will please no one. The makers of the TV series Mad Men recognized how much an accurate depiction of the past freaks viewers out – the sexual politics, the lack of seat belts and eco-consciousness, the way grown-ups treat kids. They focused just enough on this discomfort to make it the heart of a powerful and successful show, but there even an accurate depiction of attitudes from a few decades ago makes all the characters feel like scary aliens. Go back further and you will have complete incomprehensibility.
This perfectly explains why I like reading historical and anthropological writing alongside historical fiction and science fiction. People have already in other times and places been aliens more remote from 20th century middle class Americans than any rubber-forehead creature Star Trek ever showed.
It also explains why rubber forehead aliens are a lot more popular than really weird (in belief or biology) aliens [1]. Most people prefer palette-swapped adventure stories over the dauntingly weird aliens that I love. And that's fine! People enjoy seeing those adventures and the writers and actors enjoy having an audience and pay checks. (I generally prefer familiar-sounding music of certain types over anything labeled avant-garde or experimental. My appetite for novelty is not unlimited either.)
[1] Apart from the ease and affordability of costuming a human actor vs. depicting, say, a feathered amphibious octopus creature.
This argument reads just like Mad Men's Pete Campbell pitch from Episode 1.
"You're going to die anyway, die with us!" https://vimeo.com/123757690
For me, I've realized that 80% of media is not worth my time. Unless it's something that is 'can't miss' like Martin Scorsese's movie that is debuting on Netflix or Planet Earth II, I can skip it. I use my family's Netflix account, I don't have my own.
I've tried to keep up with the Marvel universe but it's next to impossible at this point. All my favorite shows (Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Sopranos, Game of Thrones) are completed now too. I go to the movies once or twice a year now, at most.
What I've found in looking at historical financial comparisons in the past is that they are inherently unstable / inexact as you get further and further back.
Fifty years ago, even, things fall apart a little. At one point in an early Mad Men episode, some reference is made to whether or not Draper is making $40,000 a year. A basic inflation calculator puts this at about $342K today, but the implication in the show (and in other reading) suggests it likely involved much more purchasing power than $342K implies.
Going back 100 or 200 years, and the economics drift. Prices for goods and for services change relative to each other, so straight-up purchasing power comparisons are hard to establish.
Today, we probably wouldn't parse a $2M inheritance as set-for-life (maybe?), but clearly the implication is that Cosette was, right?
All that is a long way of saying that we can really only know that Darcy was rich, and enjoyed a very healthy income assuming his source assets were protected and working. His friend, less so, but still solidly a member of the correct class.
I've said it before but I agree - Netflix sure adds a lot of original content, but I've yet to see a true masterpiece deserving its place among The Wie, The Sopranos or Mad Men and lately I'm starting to think that Netflxi is entirely fine with producing good enough content which adds and retains subscribers while never really stading out. Of course it's entirely reasonable to do so if it's a successful approach, but I can't say I like it and I don't think it leads to exceptional, high prestige content. If HBO produced their content mostly according to numbers while neglecting artistic considerations The Wire would have been done after Season 1.
Furthermroe, did you see the other discussion about Netfli/Hollywood recently here on HN? [0]
From the article:
> Netflix now routinely ends shows after their second season, even when they’re still popular. Netflix has learned that the first two seasons of a show are key to bringing in subscribers—but the third and later seasons don’t do much to retain or win new subscribers.
> Ending a show after the second season saves money, because showrunners who oversee production tend to negotiate a boost in pay after two years.
Propably a financially sound approach, but I doubt I'll stay a subscriber much longer if that's the direction they are heading.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20403587
The Alamo Drafthouse used to do this in Austin, except it was the AMC dramas “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad.” It was free - $5 to save a seat that then went towards concessions - but the networks threatened legal action on the basis that it skewed viewership numbers or some such.
What was really clever about it was that Drafthouse was playing the previous week’s episode without commercials while the new one aired, then edited out the commercials for the current week’s episode and played it right after.
Those were good times.
Arm-Chair Social Science (NB): I think that binge-watchable media when binge-watched does affect the viewer, you become part of the cast of characters as a social group - or perhaps your mind thinks so. I think that then makes the viewer susceptible to ideas in the show, like drinking when watching Mad Men.
Generally in Australia, environmental initiatives are welcomed. We have sorted waste bins, banned plastic bags, banned single use straws, and recently coffee cups have been a source of attention. I don't have any figures, but every person I work with has a reusable coffee cup. Keep Cups [1] are a very popular option. Unfortunately a portion of the population resist any sort of change, which is rather natural I guess. Change is hard and the youth in this country are typically setting a good example.
A documentary called The War On Waste [2] had a very convincing show on Coffee Cups. This has had a decent impact on the population from my perspective.
The mindset change is probably worth while if this thread is anything to go by. I was rather surprised that there are so many negative comments in this thread. There has been an obvious and substantial shift towards being mindful of your impact on the environment in Australia which is very welcoming.
This scene from Mad Men (57sec) [3] shows how previous habits are no longer acceptable behaviour.
[1] https://keepcup.com/
[2] https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/the-chasers-craig-reucassel-busts-huge-coffee-myth-in-war-on-waste-20170223-gujkph.html
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDIvzDGBLWU
I'm not saying there is no value in fiction. Does Mad Men belong in the same conversation as 1984 though? I don't think so.
Does any TV show deserve to stand next to the greats of literature? I'm not convinced. The closest I can get to a TV show that felt it paid off the time investment with saying something worthwhile is probably The Wire. There's probably a handful of films that I can say the same for.
For any activity I think it can be useful to look back and ask if it was time well spent. For me personally I can answer yes for many ways I spend my time. That includes some fiction. It includes very little TV. Maybe there was actually some hidden value but I'd rather spend time on things I don't feel ambiguous about the value of.
Planet Earth is an example of the medium used well I think - amazing footage of reality that would be very expensive, time consuming and difficult to observe first hand, presented with fairly light editorializing.
I personally haven't got the same value from TV fiction. Mad Men is good example - I watched it because it was widely praised and I got somewhat caught up in wanting to know what happened next but in retrospect I really don't feel I got anything much out of it and I would like those hours of my life back. I feel the same about almost everything I watched while I had a Netflix subscription.
I've got nothing against pure entertainment. I've found Game of Thrones entertaining and will likely watch the final season with my fiancé. I continue to watch the occasional popcorn movie at the cinema. There's very little TV and only a few movies that feel they rise beyond entertainment to something like literature however.
If you get value out of TV and movies I've got no problem with that. As someone who used to watch a lot of both and now feels that was largely a waste of my time though I just no longer see much value there.
I could name far more!
Cosmos? Planet Earth? Or what about the myriad of documentaries you can find? Or shows about history?
I suppose this also depends on if you think fiction betters you as a person (I don't think the medium you receive it in matters all that much; so I don't think you need to read a thick russian novel). If you don't; I guess I just fundamentally disagree with you, and in a way, I almost feel sad on your behalf. Almost all of human morals and values, not to mention deep life lessons, have historically been taught through fiction. If you do, then obviously there's a lot of EXCELLENT fiction on TV, shows like Breaking Bad, or Mad Men. Or recent shows like Barry. Those shows rival even large novels in the amount of time it takes to consume them and what they can say, and they even have the advantage of being able to take advantage of music and filmography to set moods and make points that books cannot (books of course also have their own set of advantage, I'm not trashing them)
I think this goes to show how much of an impact HBO had on television.
There isn't an argument quite like this outside of maybe NBC's 90s sitcoms, arguing about Seinfeld/Friends/Frasier or AMC's late-aughts Mad Men/Breaking Bad/Walking Dead.
Last year I had the privilege of watching two really great documentaries:
Connections - James Burke
Century of the Self
It's hard to judge the lasting impact both these docs will have on me, but boy, I can't even remember how I used to think before watching them. Watching Century of the Self and the AMC show Mad Men right after was also a very interesting contrast.
Interesting, guess there's more truth to fiction than I suspected. There was an episode of Mad Men where a major character and his wife take LSD during counseling.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_Away_Places_(Mad_Men)
Over the coming decades, my bet would be on
- Stanford to produce the ruling class of America, and for
- Harvard to produce the ruling class of Mad Men season 1
(just based on the criteria in the article)
If you look closely enough you can see a clear trend regarding Netflix's content strategy. They will continue to make movies like Bird Box, B-style movies and "cult classics" that they can draw big numbers to via their reach and marketing.
Oscar contenders like Roma and Beast of No Nation (a bit early for it's time if you ask me).
Partnerships with foreign content makers to act as an international distributor (BBC produced, Golden Globe Winner, The Bodyguard for example).
Top quality original TV: The Crown for example, fueled by contracts with big name show-runners and writers to produce them (Shonda Rhymes).
And finally, high value syndication targets (Friends, Mad Men, The Office).
Netflix's content allocation seems pretty clear, the next few years will be optimization at the margins.
Of all the shows you mentioned the only ones I have watched is, OITB (left it at after watching S04 I think), Master of None (both the seasons), I realise that its a drama that leans toward being a rom-com but I do not watch rom-coms at all. Kudos to Mindhunter, indeed that was entertaining and right in my ballpark. Liked House of cards till the time Spacey was there, S06 disappointed me. Season 1 of Making a Murderer was outstanding, season 2 didn't catch my interest. Also the last comedy I watched end-to-end I think was Entourage (which was produced by HBO), The Office (US) and Parks And Recreation, not surprisingly Netflix doesn't stream any of these in my region, Prime Video does the last two and Hotstar streams Entourage.
These are good shows not great ones like The Wire, The Sopranos, Mad Men, BB, Six Feet Under you know about the stuff that critics rave about etc. I don't care if Birdbox was watched by all of Netflix's subscribers, thats precisely the sort of thing that I don't watch the majority of the time, you watch that thing once and you forget that you ever watched it again. I'm now on probably my sixth or seventh rewatch of The Wire, that should tell you something about my viewing habits and why Netflix's content just doesn't work for me. I don't expect a network to consistenly churn out shows like that but at least some of the shows should be somewhere close to that level which HBO continues to do with The Deuce, Succession, True Detective(I know they fucked the dog on S02) etc.
Also you have the time to watch ALL of that, I don't. I work in tech too, I have an hour on weekdays and maybe 2-3 on weekends for leisure, so its only natural that I would be picky about what I watch, the absolute best, currently that would mean shows like The Americans, Escape from Dannemora and shows from the past like Halt and Catch Fire(from AMC), Six feet under, Deadwood which not surpisingly were also made by HBO. Netflix doesn't stream any of that.
I also don't understand how you think AMC won't exist, are they going to be insolvent ? Doesn't look like it, they have a cash-cow in The Walking Dead(I only watched till S06 then got bored) They got two of the best TV shows I liked BB and BCS, BCS is gonna kill it in the next season. They also produced The Terror, a brilliant mini-series which Netflix didn't stream as well and again Prime Video did. As a viewer I don't care about Netflix's subscriber numbers or HBO's lack thereof, I want to watch content I like which sadly Netflix doesn't produce on a consistent basis, this is entirely subjective and I realise that I might be one of the edge-cases in all the millenials when I say Netflix don't tickly my fancy.
I'm not biased towards HBO, hell HBO doesn't even stream in my country, I'm incredibly picky about what I watch since I'm short on time, Netflix churns out a LOT of shows, its only natural that some of them turn out to be brilliant and some of them indeed are, but the rest, like 90% of the shows are just average, they don't work for me, I simply do not have the time to watch them.
In that sense, Netflix is like the Y-Combinator of producing original content. You produce(invest in) hundreds of TV shows(startups) and hope one of them makes it big (becomes a unicorn) and the rest of them, well they would be probably cease to exist after some time.
Mad Men didn't even have an audience when it aired (<2 million viewers most episodes), and airs on a network that likely won't exist in 5-6 years (or at least won't be producing new content), so it's not super clear to me what your point is about those shows as evidence of how a network grows. The way a network grows is by producing content people want to watch, whether that's disposable content made to last a minute or content made to last the test of time. HBO isn't growing because people are subscribing to watch Sopranos re-runs.
Past reporting suggests churn in most subscription content services is very low, so your Netflix cancellation may be unusual. I'd also add that exclusive content is one part of the story, but there's also a lot of licensed content that's very good on Netflix as on other services.
But for what it is worth, I would rank the following Netflix originals to be "top tier" within their genre -- some of these genres lend themselves more to rewatching than others, and some are closer to my taste than others, some held up in quality through their run more than others, so in a sense I am ranking shows based on their peak quality --
Orange is the New Black; Bloodline; Stranger Things; The Crown; Gilmore Girls AYITL; The OA; A Series of Unfortunate Events; Mindhunter; The Haunting of Hill House; Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt; Master of None; Love; Lady Dynamite; Santa Clarita Diet; GLOW; American Vandal; Maniac; Bojack Horseman; F is for Family; Disenchantment; Hilda; Dark; The Rain; Elite; Chef's Table; Making a Murderer; Shot in the Dark; Wormwood; Wild Wild Country; Salt Fat Acid Heat; Queer Eye; The Curious Creations of Christine McConnell; My Next Guest Needs No Introduction; Lilyhammer; Terrace House; Alias Grace; The End of the Fucking World; Collateral; Wanderlust; Longmire; Black Mirror; Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.
In addition to these, the following shows are Netflix originals in my region, indicating that although someone else initially funded them, Netflix bought them for exclusive distribution here, and also meet the above requirements:
Babylon Berlin; Bodyguard; Casé; Crashing; Cuckoo; Derry Girls; The Great British Baking Show; Happy!; Happy Valley; The Investigator; Peaky Blinders; River.
I have pretty broad taste in TV and watch a lot of TV while I am programming or running data analysis, so maybe the breadth of stuff I include here is surprising to most. But to the extent your post is a useful anecdote about how Netflix has no great shows, I'm responding to your challenge to "Name one show" that would meet that criteria.
(These are TV shows only, not films. I haven't really liked many Netflix original films although there are a few I would say are great, like Okja and Roma)
The podcast goes more in depth. There is preparation before the trip specifically to address any 'bad trips' and the guides are there to calm you down in case that happens.
As side note, this reminds me of the episode of Mad Men where Roger takes LSD [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_Away_Places_(Mad_Men)
I probably should have been more specific. As with all things, even in the original article, there are both examples of both leading and trailing examples of culture. However, you asked for a specific example. For that, I refer to when I was living in Australia around 2009. What I distinctly remembered, and which still sticks in my mind was male/female interactions and cultural expectations.
In particular, what is “acceptable” in the work place. refer to societal norms as it comes to what is “acceptable” in the work. I recall a situation where a “secretary” was spoken to in such a way that I thought I was in a “Mad Men” episode. She was put down/treated such that if it had been in the US, would have been grounds for a sexual harassment lawsuit.
What was worse, this seemed to be the “norm” and nothing out of the ordinary. I even recalling talking to a female colleague and her intimadating that this was “par for the course”.
Another cultural difference, which I suspect is remedied by now, mostly had to do with availability of technology. Talking with/being around students and young professionals, at least at the time. It was very obvious that they had less exposure to information through the Internet. This wasn’t due to lack of interest, but more lack of infrastructure. It cost 10X to get the same technologies we took for granted in the US. Also, some things simply would not be available at any price. I really hope it has changed since then, but those are my memories.
All that said, Australia remains one of my favorite places in the world. I have often thought of moving back.
This always perplexed me. With Mad Men and Breaking Bad too, people idolized the main characters, which is interesting not only because they are bad people but because they are deeply unhappy, too.
There's something extremely surface-level about people's takeaways from film characters. They want a certain level of panache that the characters can muster, but they ignore that even the characters themselves are miserable.
Mad Men is a whole TV series devoted to this hypothesis.
GP specifically mentioned movies, but I don't know that a good story would work with the pacing short-circuited like that (eg: comedic timing in a show like Archer, or the myriad pregnant pauses in Mad Men and the Wire). I'll give it a try, though.
We are more and more nostalgic about everything. But I don't see how people can think TV shows were better in the 70s, 80s or even 90s. Since 2000 we live in the golden age of TV shows. We got The Wire, the Sopranos, Mad Men, the Shield, (Game of thrones?, Westworld?) and a ton of original concepts. I tend to think that nowadays there is more originality and risk taking in TV shows than in the movie industry.
This summer, I watch Twin Peaks The Return, some episodes are the weirdest things I have seen on a mainstream TV channel. I am amazed it was allowed to air at prime time.
Nostalgia can be about idealized versions of the past that one never experienced oneself though. When I was a teen there was a very popular TV show about the 1950s called "Happy Days" that was popular even among us teens who had no experience of the actual 1950s. Similarly, more recently, "Mad Men" about the 1960s.
So I collect telephones.
I'll often catch stuff like this when watching period-set movies or TV shows.
Mad Men deserves credit though - in six years they made one mistake - they had a set with a modular plug in it at Don's house (and it wasn't even a modular plug, it was an insert that could be replaced with a modular one on a G-Type handset).
Great show with great scripts, characters, and actors who portrayed them. I'd didn't care for season 2 when I was watching it but came around to really liking it when I'd finished the series. My favorite part, though, was the Hampsterdam scenes. It was as close as we get to actually legalizing drugs. I just can't call it best show ever when comparing against The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and Mad Men. They're all in the top 4.
I'm amazed how many people on HN complain about the content on Netflix. Especially compared to any other streaming service, such as Amazon or Hulu, they continue to provide much higher-end content for my dollar, as well as a (far) superior UI experience.
For me, the stand-up specials like Dave Chapelle and Louis CK alone are huge and welcome additions, never mind the many, very good lesser known comedy specials on there.
Their agreement with Dreamworks has only helped, allowing me to enjoy surprisingly good films like Zootopia.
Even great cable channels like FX (The Americans, Legion) and AMC (Mad Men, Better Call Saul) are not available for any reasonable price as standalone cable packages, so I'm not sure what the comparison is in terms of quality. HBO at 15/month?
But even HBO shows are hit-or-miss. And while their movie selection is generally pretty great, I still find myself not watching it all that much.
It seems to me that Netflix provides a pretty high level of content at their price point.
I really hope they don't lose focus on the quality of their original content.
I understand that not everything Netflix does is tailored to me, particularly due to Netflix' growing, increasingly mainstream audience, diverse and varying preferences, more ground to cover, etc.
However lately Netflix' content simply seems to lack substance to me. It feels as if it's just the superficial result of throwing a promising combination of those very specific tags/categories the services is famous for onto the assembly line and ending up with a show or film that, while ticking all the boxes and not being bad at all, is still pretty far off the masterpieces of the medium. I'm not sure if classics like The Wire, The Sopranos or Mad Men could have been created with such a formulaic approach and I'm missing shows of that caliber on Netflix. Maybe the service should offer brillant content creators the freedom and opportunity to do the shows they want to do, instead of dictating the theme and framework.
As bad as bundling is, it also has historically subsidized smaller channels that sometimes come up with innovative programming that would otherwise never happen.
Everyone passed on Mad Men except this little movie-rerun channel called AMC. Would Walking Dead have happened without it?
If you're picking up Breaking Bad right now, you'd watch it on Netflix. The only reason you'd watch it on TV is if you're catching it the first time it's airing. I only joined on the last season so I don't have much context, but everyone I knew in college would wait for it to air and immediately torrent the commercial-free episode. For something huge like the ending I know some people that hosted small viewing parties to watch it live, but many were fine with waiting.
Also, Breaking Bad ended in 2013, and Mad Men in 2015. That list only has two entries. Maybe not literally everything on live cable TV is trash, but I think it highlights that there's a clear decline.
>TV just isn't a priority because the vast majority of it is pure trash.
>TV had it's heyday
I can tell you don't watch much TV. It's never been better. We're in a golden age of TV, it's just not on ESPN. There have recently been a lot of extremely high quality, hour long dramas, which basically amount to a movie every week. Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Game of Thrones, The Wire, arguably Westworld, to name a few.
Sorry to comment again, but you mentioned "six home runs in a row" – there's also a Christmas special called "White Christmas" – if you haven't seen it already, is also one of the better episodes, starring the main guy from Mad Men (Jo(h?)n Hamm?)
There are a lot of insightful comments here, I'll respond to a few:
> It's part of a wave of populist nationalism that we can recognize in many countries.
True, HRC too makes many, many appeals to populist sentiments. Hers is less of a "National Greatness" populism, mainly because Trump has cornered the market for that in this election.
Trump has appealed to all the people who buy American cars because they are American or who think that eating a burrito will give them diarrhea (and assume that all people who routinely eat burritos must be plagued by it constantly), etc. etc.
I see this as less of a threat because frankly most of those people are simply old, and they are dying off rapidly. HRC and Obama support gay marriage today because enough of them died off to make homophobia a losing political position.
In the next four years, many more will die off, and that element of society that idealizes 1950s America will be much smaller. Though there is a younger generation that is sympathetic to the 1950s narrative... The television show Mad Men has been hugely popular, and its protagonist is essentially a more handsome Donald Trump. He grabs women and kisses them, he's erratic, he's loud, he's a womanizer, a self-saboteur. This television show captured the imagination of millennials because Don Draper is unlike most young men today. It's that same virility and unapologetic machismo that has led Trump voters to rally behind him. How can we go from being a society that loves Don Draper to a society that hates Don Trump? I don't think it's possible, and I think Trump's ideas will be around for a while even in the younger generation, albeit with a different spokesperson. This is why focusing on the surface layer of Trump is a mistake and why we should be addressing the deeper themes that are going to be alive and well no matter what happens in November.
We'd previously had a lot of presidents who tried to embody the cowboy aesthetic. GWB, born in Connecticut, talked about how much he loves "cold beer and barbecue", owns a ranch, etc. Chris Matthews claims that the winner is always the one the American people can picture squinting into a sunset.
> tens of millions of people who will cast a vote, in effect, for American Fascism
Totally agree, I believe a vote for Trump or HRC counts as this.
> Trump will spend four years running a campaign against the legitimacy of the 2016 election, and will probably have little trouble capturing the nomination in 2020.
TV news is now predominantly entertainment. This is a problem that goes deeper than Trump. It seems natural that an entertainment industry guy like Trump would want to get in on it now that there's zero need for any journalistic merit.
Wow, this article could have be written by 12 year old after seeing too many episodes of Mad Men...
And this guy worked for Google and Uber?
Dialogue is now a playing field of TV series. In Mad Men, for example, all they do is talk all the time. Breaking Bad, House of Cards, Girls and other similar shows are very dialogue-heavy. Add to that what most established mainstream film directors (Fincher, Soderbergh etc) say about TV series: "Feature-length films are not relevant and TV is where most of the development happens in this sector of art" (something I personally don't think is true) and you get the drift.
The networks commission projects from studios. The networks are a delivery and financing mechanism; the studios are the actual content creators. Broadcast-focused networks are rightly being disrupted by internet-focused distributors, but the real substance is the studios.
House of Cards was created by Media Rights Capital, which has a portfolio of "legacy" TV and film projects [0].
Orange is the New Black was created by Lionsgate, which also did Mad Men [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Rights_Capital#Television_projects
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lionsgate#Television
Netflix-originated content is absolutely produced by the legacy TV industry, it's just purchased for distribution by a company specializing in a different method of distribution.
See the glorification of the advertising industry in a popular TV show "Mad Men"
I'm not sure it's an ... axiomatic ( meaning just made up out of whole cloth ) assumption that doing meaningful things for other people is part of a path to happiness.
It may have the advantage of being true.
It does not mean that it's the only condition for happiness ( it is necessary but not sufficient ) , but I know of no good assault on this idea. Adam Smith's "to be loved and to be lovely" exists, and is deeply imbedded.
The advertising/media industrial complex problem is much more profound. But in order to propagate criticisms of it you'd sort of need the advertising/media industrial complex to get those ideas out. Still, Adam Curtis documentaries exist, the work of Marshall MacLuhan and Vance Packard and others exist.
Of these, Adam Curtis seems to have taken the thing on most directly. And it was very funny watching "Mad Men" pull its punches.
> they have a decent selection of British TV (ironically they have more BBC shows than BBC's own streaming service).
> Their selection of popular/well known movies has been decreasing over time though, as they've been losing some of those licences. But there's enough of them that it's good enough for "I want to watch some movie, let's see what's on Netflix".
Not sure I agree with either. They have some old UK TV, but not that much. BBC offers almost no archive tv on iPlayer, so that's not much of a comparison! And I had to spend a significant amount of time trying to find any film I wanted to watch. My impression of the services was a bit like renting access to 10-15 box sets (Mad Men, Breaking Bad, some BBC Dickens adaptations, etc), and about 50 randomly selected, vaguely entertaining films. I had it for about 4 months before running out of anything I wanted to watch.
It depends where you are. In the UK, their selection of TV is much more limited than the US - for example we don't have your example of Mad Men. Their original shows are very good though, and they have a decent selection of British TV (ironically they have more BBC shows than BBC's own streaming service).
Their selection of popular/well known movies has been decreasing over time though, as they've been losing some of those licences. But there's enough of them that it's good enough for "I want to watch some movie, let's see what's on Netflix".
Most people relate Netflix to 'movies'. I have been an on - off customer of Netflix and thoughts of leaving it often crosses my mind.
But the only thing which keeps me on it are the TV shows, seasons and seasons of it. I'm currently watching Mad Men , that's 6+ seasons I want to watch. I love the luxury of just catching up on a 30-45 min TV show while I'm multitasking, eating, playing PS4 etc.
I think Netflix or competitors who want loyal customers ,expanding library of TV shows should be their prominent strategy. I would suggest - giving out free episodes for every season, atleast 2 and see the signups go up.
From season 5 they switched to ARRI Alexa cameras and added grain in post to emulate the film look. So you proved yourself right here, nobody did really spot the difference (and every season of Mad Men looked fantastic).
Mad Men (TV series) was shot on film, it looks very nice.
But I suppose it could also have been shot digitally and nobody would have spotted the difference. Maybe.
Mad Men feels like a sort of different case to me, because it's a show that very deliberately works on both levels. The episodes are self-contained enough that they work even if you haven't seen the whole series, but there are a lot of subtleties and dramatic ironies that you can only catch if you've seen the whole thing. It's hard to achieve that balance; my guess is that in the future most shows will aim one way or the other.
It really does because it sort of treats each season as a story.
Game of Thrones works sort of the same way.The first several episodes are clearly just setting the plot up, which I find boring. There is no pay off. It's actually pretty terrible to watch week to week.
But shows like Mad Men or the Leftovers really require an episode by episode approach. They each have a story to tell. The seasons and series have arcs, but each episode is also story line.
I've been getting into opera over the last few years - the way I think of it, as my tastes in fiction and television have gone more toward the epic (Game of Thrones, Mad Men, etc) I've hungered for bigger/deeper musical experiences.
A list created in 2001 naturally misses some amazing resources. Robert Greenberg's epic "How to Listen to and Understand Opera" is a wonderful, approachable primer to the subject and is a steal for 1 Audible credit (about $15 on the cheapest plan).
Amazon Prime video has a solid collection of free video - I happily paid $25 for the version of Cosi Fon Tutte they have freely available - and you can practically find the entire operatic repertoire on YouTube. The Met Opera has a well reviewed streaming service - http://www.metopera.org/Season/On-Demand/Learn-More/.
And this is lame, but even the best Blu-Ray performance/recording can't match the experience of live opera yet. I'm actually fascinated to see if VR narrows the gap, but there's currently not anything like feeling the performers' presence, hearing the unique acoustics of a world class hall. And opera crowds, while usually greying, often add a lot to the experience - there's something about sharing the experience, like being at a movie on opening weekend.
The article quotes Denver's district attorney as saying that this familial DNA searching is especially good for "cold cases where the victims are women or children". Women or children. We're searching through databases of innocent people's DNA, finding potentially damaging false positives, all because we need to keep women and children safe. Has this guy been binge watching Mad Men?
It's sort of all of the above. Netflix et al increases the availability of backlog TV shows. Networks abandoned quality tv because lowest common denominator won the highest ratings.
Then cable saw the benefits of high quality niche programming. HBO started it. But FX and AMC showed you could make real money on regular cable with prestige shows like mad men, breaking bad and the shield.
It feels like a 'Mad Men' episode
"They have three main tasks. The first is to buy breakfast for the programmers [...] Secondly they are there to chat and interact [... ]Finally, they are there to play ping-pong with the programmers [...]
That's almost the opposite of a professional work place. Reminds me of the Mad Men episodes that depict 1960s office atmosphere were most assistants just used their jobs as a past time until getting married. At least Mad Men included a couple of strong female characters, but lots of others were were shown as being hired for beauty and typewriter writing.
> I can barely turn a corner anymore without being accused of objectifying women somehow. Every movie I want to watch, every video game I want to play, everything "objectifies" women somehow now, as long as it has any hint of sexuality and male demographic. > So you haven't come across and/or recognized that yet. Good for you, you're living in an ideal future and I someday hope to join you there.
Not at all.
A huge amount of mainstream media and art is aimed towards men, marketed to men, designed to titillate men, and involves objectification of women. To be completely honest: I don't think that completely removes it of any artistic merit (or fun factor for video games) or that it means you shouldn't be allowed to enjoy it.
Similarly, I firmly would defend a woman's right to enjoy (the small, percentage wise, and often looked down upon, culturally) pieces of media which are marketed to women, aimed at women, designed to titillate women, and involve objectification of male characters.
I honestly believe that people should be allowed to enjoy the media that they enjoy as long as it isn't harming other people, as long as they are willing to do some critical thinking about what enjoying it means. If you have done some critical thinking about what your enjoying of media that objectifies women says about you, your sexuality, and etc., and are comfortable with that, then who am I to stand in your way? If, however, you believe that all media should be that way, I'd have a bone to pick. If you don't believe that all media should be that way, then perhaps you should consider sampling other forms of media (including those aimed at women! Some romance novels can be /quite/ fun: I'd personally recommend Eloisa James, as her novels are accessible, adult without being particularly pornographic, and quite intelligent, and have quite interesting female leads) or pushing for media that is more accessible for people who aren't you. If it seems like 'absolutely everything' you want to consume involves objectification of women, then perhaps your taste in media leans towards the kind of mainstream media that doesn't include well rounded female characters, and perhaps those desires would be worth delving into and examining critically.
My root point is, though, that asking for well rounded, realistic female characters in what people are marketing as the primary pieces of an art form is totally reasonable, just as it would be reasonable for me to demand art or media that doesn't only portray "tall dark handsome men who're bad boys with a streak of gold" male characters. The problem is when two dimensional characters who are comparable in depth and characterization to the male leads of some romance novels are the only or the primary examples of female protagonists, or trumpeted as beacons of equality.
> Sure, it's primarily women that fight those initiatives, but they're not acting in their capacity as a feminist. They took that hat off first.
Women, even women who identify as feminists, do not always act completely in accordance with the principles they espouse. It may surprise you to learn that religious people, democrats, republicans, libertarians, etc. also fall victim to this. I don't know the details of the things you're referencing, but tbh it sounds like a bunch of college students behaved as a mob. That kind of thing is never alright.
> Feminists say that fictional women (Barbie et. al) are representative of women as a whole, and should be treated as such. If this is the case, then a fictional female character has the right to be represented as a complete character, sexuality and all. If you're telling me it's otherwise, then why does a fictional female character's sexuality even merit discussion?
Barbie, as a product, is marketed as an ideal that all (or most) (white?) women should push towards. If there was a good, interesting range of complete portrayals of fictional women in mainstream film, television, and video games at all, then one or two or even a genre of uniform female characters wouldn't be a problem for me (or, indeed, I think most feminists--do you hear many women decrying the two dimensional female characters in grocery store spy novels, which I'd claim are probably the male equivalent of romance novels? I certainly haven't heard a lot of uproar over that.), just as a genre or piece with flat male characters wouldn't be a problem! It is when all or most representations of women in all or most media are two dimensional and unrealistic (and this is being called 'progress') that there is a problem. Unfortunately, that's largely also the current state of affairs! There has been a lot of great movement towards interesting/nonstandard female leads in recent television (Interestingly, I'd say that Mad Men comes to mind as a very strong example of this, despite its period setting.) and I think that trend is moving into movies as well, so hopefully this state of affairs won't last forever.
> https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/11/06/we-should-stop-putting-women-in-jail-for-anything/
That's an interesting argument, although to be completely honest it seems kind of ridiculous. Replace "women" with "people" in that article and aside from needing to fix the statistics RE: violent crime, you have a pretty standard (if slightly overwrought) argument against imprisoning most nonviolent offenders--which isn't completely beyond the pale and something I could get behind.
> http://metronews.ca/news/ottawa/1000093/protesters-shut-down-u-of-o-professors-mens-rights-talk/
College students are dumb. They always have been, they probably always will be. The funny thing is, they almost certainly have legitimate complaints about the campus culture, society, and the world, but they're likely behaving in such a juvenile fashion because they feel like it's one of the few ways they /can/ affect change. Judging every anti-war protester by the actions of the Weathermen would also paint a pretty bad picture of anti-war protest.
Mad Men's Kodak presentation in season one is one of the best pitches I've seen. If you haven't seen it, and even if you haven't watched the show, you should.
https://youtu.be/suRDUFpsHus
> It also gives a reasonable argument as to why subsidizing channels we don't watch benefits TV viewers as a whole.
This is something a lot of people don't really think about.
For example, Breaking Bad, while a critical success, was never a popular show until its final episodes. It and Mad Men mostly existed as a way to keep their parent network, AMC, in a more popular cable tier, so that it could continue taking in carriage fees.
See Mad Men, Season 4, Episode 12, "Blowing Smoke".
And then a serious question:
What does it cost CVS to leave the Chamber of Commerce? The CoC is a conservative lobbying group. CVS already operates a 4:1 Republican-leaning lobbying operation. Were there any material benefits to CVS to remain affiliated with the CoC?
Relax. Take a break. Watch Mad Men. Specifically this episode http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1484414/?ref_=ttep_ep13
I did - the full quote is:
Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
I feel the same way about Breaking Bad and Mad Men - the last few episodes are painful.
I was just listening to NPR this morning, and the announcer said they were going to talk about last night's Mad Men finale- and if I was concerned about spoilers, I should turn the radio off.
That's the level of concern that our society places on potentially ruining the ending of a TV show. For some reason when we apply the same principle to being respectful to people who don't want to relive a trauma they themselves lived, it's ridiculous.
Like a lot of people have said, modern shows are very much into the everyman male lead. Bryan Cranston's character in Malcolm in the Middle, Ed O'Neill's Al Bundy, Tim Taylor playing, once again, the affable rough-though-bumbling dad.
The thing is these are all prime-time sitcoms and comedies.
There's just as many popular shows where this isn't the case. Dramas rarely have this sort of soft, incorrigible-but-loveable archetype.
I'm not super-current on my media, but Game of Thrones, Boardwalk Empire, Walking Dead, Mad Men... most everything on HBO, Showtime, AMC, and FX run with strong, deep, emotionally complex male characters who grow and discover themselves, alongside the female characters.
And the male characters in these dramas are, on the whole, much more identifiable and aspirational.
> Entertainment, in such a busy world, should be available at the leisure of the viewer, not some game rigged to keep interest over a time.
Well, it can't be. It has to be made first. No matter what, there will always be some kind of a delay in when you can watch the next X of Y, simply because we haven't invented time travel yet.
And I absolutely agree that the broadcast model -- where you see the thing only if you're at your TV at the right time -- is a thing of the past, but there's no reason that means serialization (which is what I think you mean by linear) should go away.
> I think because of binging, better quality content is being created that is more complete and movie like.
I won't argue, by any stretch, that scripted serialized storytelling (non-film) hasn't gotten markedly better over the last few years, but this kicked off long before Netflix dumped an entire season of HoC into your lap and can largely be credited to the shows that really raised the bar, like The Wire, The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, etc. All of those were serialized. Netflix is a johnny come lately to this trend.
And there is actually value in having time to digest what you just watched. You're more likely to think critically about it and less likely to just swallow it as some giant mass of stuff. The social aspect of being in sync with other people -- even people you just met -- can mean finding new ways to think about the story that you didn't have before.
All the netflix model does is make it so our episodes of TV are impossibly long, and their impact on popular culture much much less. People absolutely talk more about shows they're actively watching during a season.
And Nancy Sinatra in "You Only Live Twice":
You only live twice Or so it seems One life for yourself And one for your dreams
Its use in the last episode of Mad Men -- where Don is watching a fired colleague contemplate the life not lived -- was brilliant.
I wonder if this is in part due to the transition to open plan offices. It's hardly a great depiction of reality but the TV show Mad Men shows people regularly sleeping/napping in their office. The lack of privacy in modern offices is probably a prohibiting factor to napping.
"Listen to me, get out of here and move forward. This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened." -Don Draper, Mad Men, Season 2 Episode 5.
Software's pseudo-meritocracy is especially tricky to navigate. It's hard for everyone; it's even harder for women and minorities.
First, asking for "a raise" is generally going to lead to failure, and complicate the relationship if not done properly. It sounds like you're asking to get more money for the same work, and that'll leave anyone cold: especially a middle-manager. An owner can (in theory) recognize your value and say, "yeah, that number sounds about right" but, if you're asking a middle manager for a raise, you're asking him to sit in a bunch of meetings and argue with assholes on your behalf.
You're better off to ask for a promotion. But there are two problems with that.
The first is that companies often give promotions (whether a title bump, or actual increase of scope) in lieu of raises. "We don't have money in the budget, but we'll certainly let you take on more responsibility if you can get your regular work done". Of course, "if you can get your regular work done" is code for, "we'll give you absolutely no support, and you won't be able to delegate what's on your plate, so we're really just giving you permission to do higher-level work." Of course, these phony promotions eventually lead a person to take the external mobility option.
The second issue is that asking for a promotion is often taken as more confrontational than asking for a raise. You're implying, to your boss, that he missed something. You're questioning his evaluation of you. Companies think of themselves as perfect meritocracies and you make enemies if you challenge that perception. And if you do so while acting on your own behalf, you look like an entitled jerk.
The most effective way to get promoted (and, possibly, to get raises) is to take on more responsibility without asking, hope that it's noticed and, if not, to ask for formal promotion. (You should usually present this, to your manager, as "We both know that titles are silly, but I've been doing a lot of work with other departments, and having that credibility makes them more willing to take my work and my needs seriously." Make it about the benefit to him, not you.) However, taking on responsibility is risky as hell because it usually means you're intruding coveted turf. (This isn't just "big company politics"; you see it in tiny startups, as well. Mad Men is set in small companies and, after Season 3, in a startup.) Sometimes this pays off, but often it backfires and leads to demotion ("allow me to clarify what is your job and what is not your job") or termination. For reasons that are probably cultural, it's clueless white men who are most eager to take on that risk. Hence, they get promotions and raises faster, but also (presumably) get fired more often.
I actually was thinking this, because of a Mad Men episode[1] and came here to mention it.
Overall I like the logo, but the idea of something akin to the Hobo Code in particular is pretty brilliant IMHO. It's a very Don Draper idea :)
1: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1097128/
The company I work for occupies a chunk of spare rooms in a law office. I have my own 100 sqft. office, natural light, decent view. It is really convenient. I can have remote people come in and work with me for the day when necessary, there is plenty of room. Never having to listen to other people talk on the phone is beautiful. I can stretch my legs without it turning into a parade. Impossible for someone to surprise me or loom over me. I think my ideal office is Don Draper's in Mad Men Season 1, this is the closest I've come. Not looking forward to leaving this arrangement, especially since my earning power is effectively proportional to my ability to concentrate.
http://midcenturymodernist.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/Mad-Men-Drapers-Office-1.jpg
Yeah, those are all true. It's also not an open and shut case for films either - if a director consistently made films with antisemitic attitudes, questions would probably be asked about that director. Similarly, people have in the past questioned Quentin Tarantino's very frequent use of the word 'nigger' - though I personally think it's a stylistic choice than a racist one.
At the same time, no one is suggesting Matthew Weiner is a mysoginist because of his portrayal of men and women in Mad Men.
It's so cute! Look at it! It's even got a happy face! It's totally not a life-threatening robot of doom!
And it promotes family talking time! Just like fast food restaurants in recent episodes of Mad Men!
Sorry. It really is a slick ad for a neat product, I just can't resist noticing how they position it.
I use wikipedia for this: List_of_Your_Favourite_Show_episodes always works:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mad_men_episodes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_South_Park_episodes
and there are usually links to individual episodes pages.
There absolutely is a reason why it's expensive. In fact, I could easily make a case that as a society we'd be better off if more money was invested in creating quality content.
Believe it or not, the subscription costs usually only cover the delivery and printing fees. Historically, subscription revenue has never been a real profit center because it's always been the best interest of a publication to build a larger circulation to increase ad rates.
Now, the internet has brought certain efficiencies to what it costs to distribute content. But it hasn't necessarily impacted what it costs to create quality content. With ad rates being lower online than they are in really any other medium, ad revenue isn't supporting the creation of quality content like it used to.
While Game of Thrones exists on a no commercial network, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and many more of your favorite cable television shows rely on both ad revenue and subscription revenue to exist. HBO has a cost north of $15 per month depending on your cable network, whereas AMC (which runs commercials) costs about 27 cents in your bundled cable package which is about 2% of the cost of HBO. That's a colossal difference and yes, advertisers, are subsidizing that dramatic cost differential.
As a former ESL teacher, I think TV can be helpful but it's better to be very selective about which shows you watch. Pick shows that have a lot of dialogue in English.
Older TV shows tend to be more dialogue-centric. If you have the TV Land channel, I'd suggest: MASH, All in the Family, I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, The Dick Van Dyke Show, &c.
Contemporary shows that would be good for this purpose might be: Modern Family, NCIS, Mad Men, Big Bang Theory, Parks and Recreation, Arrested Development, Parenthood (advanced: lots of simultaneous talking).
Someone who doesn't know much about LEDs might come away thinking that these are extra special LEDs, much better than the normal LEDs they're used to, without the marketing team having to say anything that can possibly be challenged. Marketing mindset!
(Se also the Mad Men episode where they come up with the new slogan for Lucky Strike cigarettes)
The other and much worse part is that in some situations the choice of words that you present as (as it indeed is) such a trivial matter can have very nontrivial consequences.
Not calling a black person a "nigger" may merely be a trivial moral fashion to you, perhaps, but language has been a very much non-trivial tool of fear and oppression for a long time. That's a fact.
For black people, it matters that a newspaper can't be taken seriously if it uses "nigger" as a descriptor. For women, it matters that men can't walk around at a hackathon calling them "baby" and "sweetie" like it's a Mad Men episode. Surely it's obvious why.
It's OK to disagree with that, but the burden of proof is on you. And linking to http://paulgraham.com/say.html doesn't cut it.
There is baby and there is bathwater in this discussion and it's decidedly not useful to conflate them, which is exactly what glib dismissals of the whole thing as "political correctness" do.
I want to believe you're on to something here, but how do you "tease" a show like "Mad Men" at low cost? The best tease for that show would be something like the incredible "Carousel" pitch from the end of Season 1[1], and indeed, a link to that from reddit was how I finally decided to check the show out a couple of years in. But that arose organically, after a ton of money had been spent on script, casting, production...
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suRDUFpsHus
I didn't finish either. The idea of using culture as a battleground for class struggle is admittedly tempting, but ultimately it just means more ways for the non-creative to tell the creative how to do their jobs. If Mad Men had to be politically correct for the current time, it wouldn't be worth watching.
Well, have you watched Mad Men? That's approximately what $50k in 1960 got you. Most people would probably describe Donald Draper as wealthy in the show. He started at $45k in season one if I remember correctly.
> While its an unscientific poll, I have found it hard to find anyone I know that watches television who doesn’t love at least one of their hits: Breaking Bad, Walking Dead, and Mad Men.
One of those shows has only a few episodes left, while another has one season remaining.
Also, AMC doesn't produce Mad Men or Breaking Bad.
I really dont agree.
Breaking Bad and Mad Men are ending shortly.
Walking dead seems to be tapering off fans, turning from less of a zombie show to more of a drama ( each episode is 95% talk, 5% zombies ).
The fact is, both breaking bad and mad men would make the price of AMC unrealistically high. If Netflix did want to buy them, they should wait until the season after when both shows are no longer on and get it for a song.
A much more astute purchase would be HBO/Cinemax/Shotime
I bet I could read a script and tell you if it's shit or not. Why do you even need a pilot? And the funny thing is, good shows get watched. There's a huge market for quality television. Just look at what Mad Men, House of Cards, Game of Thrones, etc have done for their networks. Is it really that there aren't enough writers coming out of Harvard who can write a Mad Men script? Do we only have writers who can write shitty sitcoms? I doubt it. Or is Mad Men that expensive to produce? Watch one some time. Most shows take place in two locations and are all dialog. They could almost be plays. But for some reason NBC, CBS, and FOX only buy shows with a laugh track or a panel of judges. I don't get it at all.
Sorry, only those first two sentences are an actual reply. I got carried away...
$1million is a low/mid budget TV series I think Amanda Tapping's Sanctuary show had that sort of budget and they had tax breaks on top of that
Mad men is several million per episode. A cheapish movie is 30-40 Million.
That's 33 cents for ALL of AMC, not just Breaking Bad. That's mad men, he'll on wheels, walking dead and the old movies. And they sell discs. And the sell in iTunes. And they get paid by Netflix, hulu, and amazon.
I hope it continues to work out, I tend to enjoy just about all of their original content and they seem to be hungry enough to not just do the lowest common denominator thing. Probably not as big as hbo but give them some time.
When people tell the story of great content they tend to focus on the very high points. "Breaking Bad" is much better than "Dexter". Even "Mad Men" which isn't as good as "Breaking Bad" is much better than "Dexter", which is arguable the best show on Showtime. Aiming for decent content isn't as meaningful as actually getting that content. Starz and Showtime have failed to get anything approaching HBO or AMC.
You can change your approach but you can't change your taste and if whoever is making content decisions at Starz or Showtime continues to have their jobs then it will not get them very far.
You see it now with the results of Microsoft copying Apple's strategy. Microsoft is doing the same thing that Apple did but since they're out of their element it's not going well. They would have been better off just being a boring company that made a great Office product and an increasingly 3rd party hardware partner friendly operating system. In the same way it would have been better for Showtime to just show movies that no one wants to see but pay for the opportunity to not watch.
Sports is just one part of overall package that explains why I no longer subscribe to satellite or cable: I don't feel I'm getting good value for my money. Summarizing what started out as a much longer paragraph, we were paying $80/month for a lot of crap, crap we would never care to watch. Buried in that $80/month somewhere was ESPN.
AMC, however, continues to get our money. _Breaking Bad_ and _Mad Men_ are two shows that I just pre-pay for the seasons as soon as iTunes makes them available. I don't even know how much a season costs because I don't care; take my money, damn it. And we get episodes the day after they air. (_Walking Dead_, OTOH...meh, two season of that was enough.) TNT and _Falling Skies_, same thing: take my money. _House of Cards_ and _Arrested Development_ were enough to get me to come back to Netflix. I've got money, and a fair amount of it; I'm willing to pay for good programming.
But what I won't do is pay a bunch of money for reality shows and ESPN. I don't want to hear sob stories about how it's just not financially feasible to do it any other way. Figure out a way, because I can live just fine with the TV I've got, or none at all. And if I'm just not the kind of TV customer anyone wants, I'm fine with that, too.
I'm the exact mirror of you; I couldn't care less about Breaking Bad or Mad Men, the only thing I ever watch on cable TV is sports. This is how the bundled model works -- you pay a % of your bill for ESPN, I pay a % of my bill for AMC, and we get both. The %s are determined by the providers and networks playing chicken with each other over how many subscribers would leave if a network weren't included in a package.
A la carte proponents seem to have a particular bee in their bonnets for sports, but it seems to me that that's the kind of content most likely to survive a cablepocalypse -- it has the most value in being viewed live. In your iTunes model for AMC, producing high-quality shows like Breaking Bad or Mad Men suddenly takes on movie-like risk.
I can't agree that cable tv quality has gone down recently. Game of Thrones, Mad Men, Breaking Bad? This stuff is not only the highest quality TV we've probably ever seen but higher quality than film as well.
True, especially since Mad Men ends up on Netflix a few months later.
It's even worse with movies; most you can't rent, and buying them costs as much or more than buying DVD's or Blurays (if you impulse buy on sale, which I always did).
AMC is a terrible example for this, because their shows are available on iTunes a la carte right now. I have 'cut the cord' and still get new Mad Men episodes thanks to iTunes. I can directly support the show--not even the network--that I like. That is the cord-cutting ideal. Consumers don't give a shit about networks and their profits, we want the content we like at a reasonable price in a timely fashion.
Please note, I'm not defending the speech, just the right to say it.
Well, there was an episode of Mad Men this season where Betty suggests her husband rape the teenager staying in the same house. Sure it was shocking, but I don't recall people asking AMC to censor the episode.
I've also seen worse much worse jokes posted on reddit. Perhaps because it's an image macro that people are getting upset.
Ever see the episode of South Park where San Francisco is overrun with smug? You think Trey Parker is secretly just afraid that he loves to smell his own farts? I mean this is textbook logical fallacy. Just because some groups of people react to internal fear (e.g. Homophobes) by lashing out against those that have the characteristics they fear they have, does not mean that any time people are critical of other people its because they harbor secret fears.
The problem isn't that people individually are making photosharing sites. That's way cooler than 90% what people do. But so is being an advertising exec like Don Draper in Mad Men. Very cool job that many people would love to have. But Don Draper doesn't tell himself every morning that he's changing the world. This is of course something you see on Wall Street too. "I'm changing the world by securitizing these income streams." And how do tech folks react to that?
Also, people love to complain, about everything. Try writing a new GUI toolkit and prepare yourself for the barage of complaints from people asking why you didn't just contribute to GTK.
If you don't care enough to skip a couple of episodes of Mad Men and warm up your brain before you come in, you aren't interested in working here.
Maybe it's regional, but third site here is another B.S. site that tries to get you to install their custom "downloader", etc.
It is hardly a common practice, and such sites usually operate on the edges of criminality, with all that such entails (scamware, trojans, etc. There is no honor among thieves and all). Now there are a lot of very ignorant people who think it's great, completely oblivious to the fact that they've completely compromised their PC.
Which really is the point. You can talk about how "easy" it is if you have all the time in the world to filter and find appropriate sites between take downs, and avoid all of the bullshit that comes along with them. I'd rather just watch it on HBO, and have zero troubles with that. The other guy referred to a show that you can buy an iTunes season pass, which is how I watched the last season of Mad Men. Zero risk or hassle, and episodes appear after one ten second purchase. Time is money.
>We live in a world of government-granted monopolies given to companies like HBO.
I don't even know how to respond to this... last I checked cable and Satellite companies don't force HBO on you. And while cable companies held a semi-monopoly before Satellites, that market got disrupted like 30 years ago. Let it go.
>You are claiming, with no justification, that in the absence of copyright there would be no profit available for people who make entertainment.
Not completely. I'm claiming there wouldn't be enough profit to support the current proliferation or high budget entertainment options. I highly doubt shows like Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Downtown Abbey, etc. would have gotten the funding they needed through crowdsourcing. You typically need a large studio with deep pockets to take on a project of that size. And most of them rely on ad revenue during broadcast, something that would likely diminish if there was no copyright and any TV studio was allowed to rebroadcast with different ads/no ads. Or if people were allowed to video tape it, copy it w/ no ads, and resell it.
Let's take a look at that simple example of yours. So who pays for the pilot episode to be produced? The T.V. studio? And after they air it then what? Hope enough people liked it to both pay for the production costs and a decent profit as well as fund the next episode? And you think that's a sustainable model??
If systems like you mention would be profitable why aren't there non-copyrighted entertainment options raking in the money right now? The internet has been around for awhile. There's nothing stopping people from releasing high quality non-copyrighted content and making money from it. What's the hold up? Government Monopolies??
Why I don't see lots of other industries that are male dominated bothered by the fact that they don't have a "diversity"
Sure you do. Often the industries tackled this years ago, and is a acknoledged problem.
Just picture the TV show Mad Men, set in the 1960s USA. The advertising industry moved from being male dominated then to a better now. How do you think that happened?
Only to a limited degree. Yes, there were soaps and other serials that had long-running narrative arcs, but not with the kind of sophistication contemporary writers are using.
Let's call it the 'Post-Buffy' school of thought, where character nuance, motivation, back-story, plot and sub-plot are all delivered with a kind of attention to detail formerly only used by novelists. There may be a few examples from the 60's -- The Prisoner comes to mind -- but even that can't really touch the narrative layers we've seen in the last decade: The Wire, Lost, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Battlestar Galactica, Game of Thrones (TV as novel if there ever was one), Six Feet Under, Dexter, Band of Brothers, and so forth. These aren't just books, they're novels.
This I think is partially the result of the ability of viewers to sit down and spend concentrated time with a series when they come out on DVD. The first time my wife and I did this was maybe 10 years ago with Buffy and Angel, and it was the most fun I'd ever had with television. This was a new experience. We'd lose 4 or 5 hours late on a Friday just chaining one after another, like the Battlestar Galactica skit on Portlandia.
What I think Netflix is doing, and probably what it has massive amounts of data to back up (I watched Buffy through Netflix, come to think of it), is that this new type of viewer engagement -- long sessions of series "gorging" -- has completely transformed the way we experience television. I think this is why they released the House of Cards episodes all at once. This is also probably why they're not releasing viewing numbers -- the new experience context of contemporary viewers has very little to do with the old Nielsen ratings arc, and would be a poor measure of the show's success, from Netflix' own point of view.
I don't like TBBT for the same reasons I don't like shows such as Mad Men: they say very little about their subject matter. A friend of mine tried to explain Mad Men by reminding me, "that was the way it was back then." I really don't need to be reminded of that. I'm not nostalgic for all of the sexism, racism, and I'm not really fond of the advertising industry. In a similar manner friends who explain TBBT to me need to remind me, "that's how things are." Geeks are infantile, weird, and still fun to laugh at. Nothing has changed since elementary school then at least.
I might enjoy the show more if its mocking and condescending overtones were at least met by one self-aware character. At least then there would be the chance for satire. Instead it's just a laugh track of predictable tropes: geek says something geeky about math or science that is completely disproportionate to the current, mundane situation. Normal character rolls their eyes. Audience laughs. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. Add a dose of the usual, "normal," sexism once in a while and laugh at how "geeks," shrivel like flowers when faced with the objectification of their, "desires." Ha, ha.
The show is hardly any different than any other sitcom on television.
> the Hollywood/TV crooks
What a load of crap. Hollywood/TV doesn't have a lot of leverage because they're crooks. They have a lot of leverage because they sell a non-fungible product. People don't just want to watch a show about advertisers with a lot of sexist banter--they want to watch Mad Men. They don't to watch a movie with some random hot guy, they want a movie with Channing Tatum.
It's the same market dynamic that makes Apple and Louis Vuitton what they are except even more extreme. LV sells purses and so does Kate Spade and so there is competition there. But only Warner Brothers sells Lord of the Rings, and other swords and sorcery movies aren't fungible with LOTR.
Interesting, I, like you, didn't get to Mad Men until very late since it seemed like a mundane concept. Of course I was converted by word of mouth cajoling and one episode did the trick. I guess Netflix hopes for the same kind of thing here
To steal an idea from and in the spirit of pg's "What You Can't Say" essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
We might look at smug, entitled "aristos" in a period French Revolution film, or look at slave owners in a pre-Civil War period piece and think ourselves better. We might look at those characters treating the urban poor like dirt or see a smug and shortsighted slave owner talking about the music of black slaves as if it were a primitive sign of their inferiority -- and shake our heads and feel smart knowing what we know as 21st century persons. But in the spirit of "What You Can't Say" let me say that there is just as much shortsighted abusive smarminess, smug superiority, and shallow judgment of people by their superficial features in our day as in those times past. And yes, this includes the West Coast, the Bay Area, and no small part of the startup scene.
Remember that the historical persons such that characters mentioned above were based on thought of themselves as cultured, enlightened, and sensitive, much as many of today's knowledge workers do. Remember also that many of them were utterly blind to their own shallow judgements and earnestly thought of themselves as winners in a meritocracy, as many persons do today. Now note that only a minority of such individuals were actually as enlightened as they thought they were.
And lastly, there are those among you who have or will overcome the blindness of your own subculture and time, but remember that only very rarely does this come without some form of shock, surprise, or pain.
EDIT: Another instance where we can relate some media to the subject -- the powerful executives portrayed in Mad Men equated sounding like a top-tier university white male with "sounding professional." They equated looking like one of them with "looking professional." Just as much of that goes on today as did back then, it's just that the styles have changed.
'Century of the Self' is indeed amazing (as is everything else by Adam Curtis) and can be found for free here: http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-century-of-the-self/
It's not specifically about American conditioning though... it starts with Freud (Austria, then UK), wanders off to Edward Bernays (Austria, the US), talks about the US PR/Advertising industry for a while (totally fascinating to bear in mind while watching 'Mad Men' IMHO) and then ends up with Tony Blair (UK) via Bill Clinton.
Thanks for the Showtime documentary pointer - will look that up.
In Europe it's SKY that screens GOT. It's unwatchable because there is a long commercial break about every 10 minutes. Just recently I bought series 1-5 (65 episodes) of mad men for €55. I won't watch GOT again until I get it on a box set.
Why this product? Nostalgia. Why only Instagram? Because it's good product alignment. Instagram also sells Nostalgia and has a huge user base.
If you haven't seen it before, take a moment to watch this clip from an American television show called Mad Men. It's a show about a group of people working at Madison Avenue (in New York City) advertising firms in the 1960's.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suRDUFpsHus
I felt pretty moved the first time I saw that clip. I still feel moved when I watch it. For a moment, I wanted a slide projector. All of the people I know who also watch the show felt it was a master stroke. Nostalgia is a powerful selling force.
T21 -> T41p -> T61p -> x220. I think it's safe to say I'm brand loyal.
I've always felt that Thinkpads look cooler with a beat up the case. I'll never own a sleeve or protector. They don't require one.
I have a hard time saying that about any of my other electronics.
As a side, I've just flown from LAX -> Sydney -> Perth on a single charge using the Slice battery and standard 6 cell. Took out season 5 of Mad Men in 720p in the process.
As someone who has lived in the US, AU & the EU in a few places I'd have to say this article is great. It's something you wind up doing if you live in other places.
America is #1 in quite a few things, such as software, just try naming non-US software companies that matter, it's an interesting exercise. Also the US highway system is excellent, the US's culture of entrepreneurship is also awesome. The best US colleges are the best in the world. US computer games, TV shows (Breaking Bad/Mad Men/Louie/The Sopranos etc) and other things are great from the US.
But in many things the rest of the rest world laughs at the US. US High School education, for instance, is not well regarded. The US health care system is regarded as scary and pretty poor.
There are even other countries that are really good at seeing things overseas and copying. Australia, for instance, got a points based immigration system from Canada, Universal Saving for retirement from Singapore and looked around the world for ways to reform the Australian Reserve Bank.
There is a quote from a Mad Men episode: "Not every ballerina can grow up to be the prima ballerina"
It feels relevant.
I might suggest that either you have already watched a lot of movies or your definition of interesting is rather narrow. I have hundreds of films in my instant queue. The number of critically acclaimed TV shows is pretty large, too. Have you seen all of Mad Men? Battlestar Galactica? Breaking Bad? Arrested Development or Louie? It would take a while just to get through those. There are, of course, many more. Lots of documentaries and smaller films you might not yet have heard of, but that you might like a lot.
It's hard for me to understand why anybody would think there's nothing interesting to see there.
The show hit a major slump somewhere around season 2-3, and I almost quit it. It picks up from that and turns into one of the most amazing shows after that. But it feels like a serious slog at one point regardless.
It's also a testament to how great the writing for the show is now that no one is pointing out how poorly written Walt's background and motivations were initially. People - myself included - just don't care, because there is so much else going on.
Give it a shot. So many great shows require you to give them the benefit of the doubt at one point. I think I watched the Mad Men pilot three times, and it finally clicked, and now I couldn't be more thrilled that I am following the best TV show ever to air on television.
Mad Men, Breaking Bad are. The new episodes are released right away. 4 seasons of Mad Men are on Netflix, 3 seasons of Breaking Bad are. I can't speak for FX and AMC's other shows.
HBO turned-down Mad Men. In the recent past Thrones, Veep and Girls have all debuted to critical acclaim and ratings success.
Anecdotally, from what I've read, show runners love HBO.
Anybody who thinks HBO is at risk either isn't paying attention to it, or just has tastes outside the mainstream. They have among best original content -- scripted shows, comedy specials, 'reality' shows, documentaries, and movies -- on television today. And have. For the last 15 years.
Talent will go where they are given money and freedom, so it's quite possible for Netflix to compete with HBO etc if they provide enough money and enough freedom.
Having said that, Netflix having 5 or 6 top-notch shows is no real threat to HBO, no more than AMC already having 3 or 4 top-notch shows is.
As long as HBO has their handful of shows people want to see, they don't care if a few other distribution channels also have shows people want to see. It doesn't hurt them, not even a little. A case could be made that it even helps a bit in terms of raising the prestige of the medium. There's a definite sense right now that the real gems of Hollywood are on television rather than in the cinema. It's a golden age, of sorts.
There are other factors as well, such as Mad Men sucking up AMC's money from other shows, that limit the threats the other networks can pose to them.
HBO should never have released a consumer-facing streaming service. They should've simply allowed viewers to access HBO programs through their service provider's streaming service.
These apps just highlight how unnecessary the service provider is for the delivery of HBO content. Sure, the numbers might not make sense for HBO but they're still going to have to spend the next ten years explaining to customers why they need to pay $100/month, subscribing to a full suite of TV channels, just to watch Game of Thrones on their iPad.
Meanwhile, AMC is making TV that's just as good with a business model that embraces cort-cutters. As streaming becomes more mainstream, HBO is going to have to keep explaining why you can watch Mad Men in iTunes the day after it airs but you have to wait almost a year to stream an episode of Game of Thrones (legally). And their reasons aren't going to satisfy anyone except execs at Time Warner and the service providers.
Streaming isn't going away. How long can a content brand stand against its viewers in the age of rampant piracy? I have a feeling we're about to find out.
> Some may believe that the ethical choice is just to not watch that TV show.
Here's my dilemma: I don't own a TV, I can't be bothered to even try to download, let alone watch. I tried with The Wire, it became a suffering labor to t trough it, no matter how interesting. Mad Men? Good luck. I have no time.
> When is Game of Thrones on Aussie TV? I would pay $5 to download each episode legit, if I could.
Not at all, unfortunately. Even shows like Mad Men are a year behind[1] at best. If you're even remotely interested in these shows, the huge delay--and eventual risk of spoilers--is incredibly frustrating.
I'd love to be able to buy a season pass on iTunes or subscribe to an IPTV channel/service if it mean I could watch these shows on the "same day" (i.e. within 24 hours) as US viewers.
[1]: http://www.sbs.com.au/shows/madmen/
The thing that bothers me most about this is I credit HBO for leading the charge with innovative content that as a whole brought TV to a much higher level. They took big chances even when it wasn't profitable to do so.
I've had a serious love affair with the network beginning with Dream On, The Larry Sanders Show, then moving on to Oz (yeah it was a 'male' soap opera I guess :), Sopranos, 6 Feet Under, Deadwood - which I didn't particularly _love_, but highly respected, and most of all The Wire (best thing to ever grace the screen IMO - they lost $$ on it throughout its run)... and then I killed my cable sub and haven't seen anything of their's since.
Now Mad Men and Breaking Bad are my two favorite shows, they're both on AMC, and I can easily purchase each season on iTunes HD for just north of $30. Every episode is available hours after they originally air. I'd pay twice that much.
Of course, the problem is HBO is just too tightly coupled to big cable. They're one of the main attractions, and as such the kickbacks they get are tied to contracts that prevent them from wresting their content to any great degree. Until this model changes, their A content won't see the light of day, and more draconian measures are likely to be put in place to thwart piracy. It's not HBO itself per-see, but HBO as a proxy for big cable; as a defense mechanism to prop up a flailing business model.
I did something similar with TV watching. I'm always lamenting the fact that I don't read enough, don't do enough coding side projects, etc. So with the exception of new Mad Men and Community episodes [0], I've cut out TV.
So now whenever I want to watch TV, I just think "what's something else I could do?" Mostly I've filled that time with exercise and reading: a net positive.
[0] On Amazon Instant and Hulu, respectively
When you walk into the living room to watch Mad Men, the TV should know it and adjust the in-screen Twitter feed accordingly. It should hear you laughing at Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia and provide suggestions to other shows people laughed at who laughed at the same joke.
That sounds awful. The issue at hand when compared to video games is that television and film are not interactive- people have tried time and time again to make them so, but I honestly think that is a mistake. I don't want to read instant Twitter reactions to Don Draper's latest verbal beat-down of Peggy, I want to watch it. There is nothing wrong with television and film being a one-way experience.
It could come from Apple, but my money is on a startup.
I doubt it, simply because television is an extremely expensive medium. The existing players make it more expensive than it should be, but creating TV shows will always cost a lot. That's why the moves by the likes of Netflix into original programming are particularly fascinating.
I agree, the topic _is_ silly, because most US workers are 'at-will' and can be fired at any time, for any reason. Many people don't know this or don't believe this. Unless you re under specific contract, or live in a few states with employment rights, your boss may fire you just because they didn't like how you type on the keyboard.
Recently, I was watching an episode of Mad Men with a friend, and one of the characters abruptly fired one of their employees. My fried was aghast and was glad that 'that behavior couldn't happen today.' Well - it can and does happen today.
Last year I worked for a start-up owned by a friend. Before coming on-board, I had agreed verbally on an equity sharing deal. I didn't put anything in writing because I trusted the guy; I knew him for years. The red flag was that he kept waiting for a certain 'favorable legislation to be enacted' before splitting up the corporation. Well, when business started picking up, I reminded him emphatically about the equity, and then I was abruptly fired. Naively, I was shocked that it could happen like that. But, every attorney I called said I was out of luck.
Anyway, the point is that employers can probably ask you to do anything they want, that isn't explicitly denied by law. So, it makes sense that they may fire you for not sharing passwords.
Yes hackathons etc. are male dominated. No-one's saying they aren't.
The question is should they be this way, and if they should not be, what can we do to make things the way we want them to be like.
Things can be funny and sexist at the same time. Humour doesn't exclude any and all behaviour that someone wants it to. Sometimes the fact that it's funny is the sexist part, as in, the fact that 'humour' is used an excuse can be a symptom of sexism. It would be rare and mostly unacceptable for a bigwig businessman to do a black face show (à la an episode of Mad Men) and then claim "hey I was only being funny".
A thing might be funny for some people (e.g. straight male hackers), and be off-putting for others. If the others are the people who you think should be participating more (e.g. women hackers), then you might have found the reason why the world isn't the way we want it to be (i.e. this might be why hackathons are male dominated).
Louis CK is popular in the same way that a band like Arcade Fire is popular. Arcade Fire sells lots of albums and is highly respected by other musicians, but the band isn't as well known among most of America as a top 40 staple like Rihanna.
This represents sort of a "high" pop-culture, which would include popular indie music acts like Arcade Fire, TV shows like Mad Men and Breaking Bad, and comedians like Louis CK and Jim Gaffigan.
There's been a few of these types of posts about movies here. Went looking and found this one with some interestingly creative tv show episodes.
Almost every episode of Mad Men also has a neat creative bit to it when you watch those folks copywrite. Any other tv shows/episodes you've enjoyed along these lines?
Yes, yes, yes. Jeremy keep up the good work. The only way to learn about stereotyping and big brother bigotry is to expose it. Too much great talent is sitting on the sidelines waiting to be called into the show, in every profession. Watch an episode of Mad Men then ask yourself has it really changed. Hint: Santorum on women in combat
Can we please please stop being hypersensitive about "sexist language", which pronoun to use, etc and leave this to English majors. The words "boy" and "girl" are usually used for endearment, as they are here. Many female hacker groups have the word "girl"are in their title. Of course these terms terms have been used in a deragotary sense until recently, e.g. watch any episode of Mad Men. That doesn't mean that they should ne banned.
I think it was less based on the actual Mad Men tv show, and more based on vague cultural ideas about what the 50's and 60's were like.
Is it possible to pre-populate the data for this from pre-existing sources (like the TV show itself publishing information about where the clothing is from?). The reason I ask is that I stumbled on a Mad Men "fashion show" where the fashion designer from Mad Men talked about where you could buy clothing like the actors wore from stores (Macy's, I think). I'm guessing this information is available somewhere, although maybe I'm wrong. Do you make money on the referrals to the department stores via links?
Mad Men produces 13, 45-minute episodes a season. 13 hours of content for $33 million (at 2.5 million an episode.)
That's $55,000 a minute, versus $1,462,962 a minute for Avatar. An order of magnitude difference. Each minute of Avatar cost nearly as much as a small episode of Mad Men.
That's exactly the kind of feature a shrunken Hollywood, not focused on blockbuster hits, might produce.
Mad Men is a big-budget TV show. Its per episode budget is north of $2 million.
Blockbusters are not the only movies that get made. Let Hollywood keep Batman. In the meantime, it's not hard to imagine a new way of making and distributing Mad Men and Portlandia.
TV writers do tend to make more money than movie writers. They also tend to have more creative control (in TV, directors are usually the ones who play second fiddle), but they also have to work harder. It isn't really the case anymore that the top movie writers do better than the top TV writers, either. Show runners, who are almost always also head writers, are all making "fuck you" money. I believe Matt Weiner of Mad Men is still the highest paid, at an estimated $8-10 million per year:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/31/mad-men-matthew-weiner-amc_n_843409.html
Netflix in the US is great for full seasons of TV shows. Sons of Anarchy, Mad Men and a bunch of others. It's also decent for classic movies and documentaries. I wouldn't expect to get the latest hollywood releases or you'll be disappointed. I'd guess that licensing in the UK is totally different and their library my reflect that. Sorry that media companies are dicks about viewing content in different regions.
I like that some independent films are beginning to branch out in their strategy. For example, one of the best films of the year -- Margin Call -- was released on a variety of streaming services the same day it was available in theaters.
Sometimes I like watching a movie at home, other times I'm looking for a chance to go out. Dates will probably always involve movie theaters for my girlfriend and myself -- even if I have a very nice home setup.
That being said, I think the film industry is in for secular decline due to the compound effects of high quality home theaters with streaming content, some piracy, unrealistically high ticket prices ($32 for two tickets?!) and high quality television production.
I do think the most significant threat is high quality television productions though. Downton Abbey, Mad Men, and many other cable dramas are produced with extremely high artistry both in production and story values. Several times I have found that rewatching these TV series on Netflix has been far more rewarding than the latest 90 minute theater affair.
most comic book artists and writers are male, most readers are male, a big chunk are teens, and males like pretty/nude/curvaceous females, most teen males likes big breasts and many teen females want to have big breasts
The TV show Mad Men is set in the early 1960s USA, when the same thing could be said of the professional world. "Everyone who works here is men, our clients are men, our customers are men" etc. And yet there was a lot of discrimination and sexism then. And things have changed (in the professional business world) then.
the college/PC/lesbian/feminist litmob doesn't care about that, then it's not talked about
Sure they do. Here's a series of blog posts about how twilight has terrible characters. http://skepchick.org/2011/11/twilight-breaking-wind/
That wasn't the case for AMC before "Mad Men". Now, in addition to "Mad Men", they have "The Walking Dead", "Breaking Bad" and "Hell on Wheels". Even more than that, they have my guarantee that I will at least try a few episodes of any AMC original show that comes out.
You're right that Netflix would have to build an audience, but if they are able to create exceptional quality shows, as HBO and AMC have done, then they can very print that certificate very quickly (within a couple of years).
I like Chuck Klosterman's take on this show: http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/6763000/bad-decisions
tl;dr: "Breaking Bad is not a situation in which the characters' morality is static or contradictory or colored by the time frame; instead, it suggests that morality is continually a personal choice. When the show began, that didn't seem to be the case: It seemed like this was going to be the story of a man (Walter White, portrayed by Bryan Cranston) forced to become a criminal because he was dying of cancer. That's the elevator pitch. But that's completely unrelated to what the show has become. The central question on Breaking Bad is this: What makes a man "bad" - his actions, his motives, or his conscious decision to be a bad person? Judging from the trajectory of its first three seasons, Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan believes the answer is option No. 3. So what we see in Breaking Bad is a person who started as one type of human and decides to become something different. And because this is television - because we were introduced to this man in a way that made him impossible to dislike, and because we experience TV through whichever character we understand the most - the audience is placed in the curious position of continuing to root for an individual who's no longer good."
I've only seen the first few episodes, but am hoping to find some time to go through it now. I get plenty of morality from shows like "Mad Men" and "The Wire" in which we feel conflicted because the characters we love are doing bad things (in fact you could say that this is the main theme of serious, dramatic TV shows now), but I think the appeal of "Breaking Bad" is watching a desperate man make the conscious decision to become "evil."
They have a pretty good catalog of TV shows - Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Office, etc. Their movie content is pretty poor, but that is mostly the fault of Hollywood executives and their golf buddies at HBO/Time/Warner.
I could probably rhapsodize about the insights of Mad Men all day.
Something I find interesting is that Mad Men and Breaking Bad are superficially different shows, but actually extremely similar. Ignore the radically different backdrops and they're both about out-of-control egos and "men at work" drama. The difference is that one setting involves alcoholism and advertising and people who fall out just get fired, while the other involves methamphetamine and murder and failing (for Walter) means death. Mad Men is erotic, Breaking Bad is thanatoptic; but the shows are two different takes on the same society.
I don't know if this correspondence is intentional on the part of AMC's directors, but Mad Men and Breaking Bad are, to me, clear A-and-Z bookends of the American Era.
It's only after that happens when the soldier has time to process what they've done that they run into trouble. I saw a documentary on this and it was talking about how there's a real disconnect between the how of a soldier's actions and the why with the increasingly effective training.
Soldiers and policemen have a terrible job. For psychopaths (2%) killing another person is easy. For everyone else, it's extremely difficult (even in self-defense) and something people generally avoid. Which means that an untrained normal person drawing against a psychopath is likely to be shot dead. This may not be new knowledge, but 85% of guns issued in the American Civil War were never fired.
> I agree. Windows, as far as I can see it, is the worst of both worlds. You have to do a lot of work (make a lot of decisions) to get a half-decent experience but if you want to control it at a low level, the way you can with Linux, you can't.
I have a slightly different take on this. While I agree that Windows is an example of how trying to be all things to all men leads to a confusing mess, at least in Windows 7 it's still a fairly decent default experience. It probably does punish the true tinkerer for all its complex layers of the registry, local and group policies, magic folders (eg startup), etc.
But Linux on the desktop just goes to prove time and again just how bad a user experience it is to give true "freedom". I don't want to figure out what the best way of playing video or audio files is and choosing between N (where N is typically a fairly large number) options.
This is something that Canonical (for one) is trying to address but at this stage it almost requires a complete rethink of the Linux desktop (which may be what Wayland and others hope to achieve).
> I remember that scene (in Mad Men) quite well and I think it's insightful. It reminds me of On Killing, an excellent book on the psychological effects of war.
I could probably rhapsodize about the insights of Mad Men all day.
That's certainly an interesting take on war. I think it's more than that though. In modern warfare we (as a society) have become incredibly good at training soldiers to do their job reflexively. In a combat situation the training kicks in and the modern soldier will, generally speaking, shoot an enemy (as one example) almost completely instinctively.
It's only after that happens when the soldier has time to process what they've done that they run into trouble. I saw a documentary on this and it was talking about how there's a real disconnect between the how of a soldier's actions and the why with the increasingly effective training.
when nearly every culture in the world seems to have pretty much the same sort of normative ideas about men and women.
You're saying Saudi Arabia is like USA now? Have you even watched the TV show Mad Men? 1960s USA was different from 2000s USA.
Mad Men costs about $3m per episode (http://adage.com/article/mediaworks/mad-men-advertising/145179/), the same as Breaking Bad (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_Bad).
> AMC is ending Breaking Bad next season because of Madmen sucking up the budget
Thankfully, that's not going to happen. AMC tried cutting BrBa back to only 6 episodes next season. But Sony owns the rights to the show, so they shopped it around. AMC caved. For all the press Mad Men gets, Breaking Bad has ~2x the viewers per episode, and Walking Dead (which had it's budget cut due to Mad Men's cost) gets about ~2.5x the viewers.
[Edit: Removed my snarky comment about AMC's management.]
If you absolutely must have some form of TV entertainment in your life, just try a 1-week or 1-month binge on Netflix or AppleTV to soak up any relevant or thought-provoking show/movie/doc you must see, then unsubscribe/stop using those services for a year—preferably more—and repeat.
I stopped watching TV and most films from 2007 onwards… until Netflix finally came to Canada and I gorged on it like an all-you-can eat buffet for a month or two. I couldn’t believe I missed stuff like Mad Men and Slumdog Millionaire and started to kick myself for not having seen them sooner.
But really, I watched those a few years after their release, and they’re still just as great as when they first came out. I may have missed a few water cooler talks about Don Draper’s relationships with his secretaries, but who cares. And while many documentaries I’ve seen during the binge were eye-opening, I didn’t lose big by not being able think critically or apply what I’ve seen immediately after.
tl;dr: Marketers control Hollywood production and are risk-averse gatekeepers. A bubble in independent/boutique production disrupted that side-channel.
It's not a complete picture; why doesn't the independent/boutique side fire back up? I think a better explanation is technology/distribution, i.e. HDTV + cable/internet. TV's mentioned in the article, but only as kind of a silver-lining; really it seems more like a classic disruptive technology. Shows like Mad Men, Boardwalk Empire, Breaking Bad are highly visual and would until recently have been better as movies; now plenty of people have nice TVs, and they work fine there.
So the movie theater's niche is now reduced to material which needs to be huge in size, enormously loud, 3D, or seen primarily by people who refuse to or can't buy HDTVs. Everything else seems transitional.
"So here's a shout-out to my new BFF's Jon Hamm and DJ."
Can someone please make it happen that Linus gets an appearance in Season 5 of Mad Men? He could play an IBM salesman or something like that...
It probably hasn't helped that TV can now feature long-running complex shows (Lost, the Sopranos, the Wire, Dexter, Mad Men, the Office, etc) that 2 hour movies can't beat in terms of character exploration and plot depth.
I am on Teksavvy and a Netflix subscriber. I found Netflix catalog to be quite good, it may not have any blockbusters from the past few decades but it has a very good selection of indie, foreign and old movies. Netflix Canada also has good selection of tv series e.g. Mad Men, Topgear etc. Its definitely worth it for monthly price which is half the price of a movie ticket.
I just dropped my cable TV, I never watch it and anything I do watch comes from Netflix, including TV Shows (like Mad Men and Dexter right now). Still playing with what / if I want to get a replacement box (Google TV / Apple TV / Roku) but for now, now cable tv for me, and frankly I won't miss it either.
Of course Charter in their infinite wisdom decided that they were going to cut of my "cable" which means TV AND Internet. The level of incompetence of ISPs have reached these days is mind boggling.
One thing that can be both a quality and a problem, is that The Wire is very demanding. A lot of what happens is implicit or not directly seen on camera. Also, episodes are not as self-contained as, for instance Mad Men, where you can watch one stand-alone, without needing too much background on who's who, and what happened before.
You mean except for The Sopranos, The Wire, The Shield, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The West Wing, Six Feet Under, Dexter, BSG (gak), Friday Night Lights, Lost, Sons of Anarchy, Deadwood, Extras, Damages, Weeds (gak), House...
What's tricky about this comparison is that there's so much North American TV. A lot of it is ABC sitcoms, yes.
Or rather, it was just a dick but pointless move by Microsoft (probably because the Marketing/partnership/demo deployment teams don't talk to each other very closely).
This article seems to try to make a mistake sound like it was some genius move. Can't see why it is, or why the Angry Birds developer is under any kind of pressure at all. People will be putting pressure on the developer? Seriously? All they need to do is tell people the icon was used without permission.
The fact that he has to come up with some TV series-inspired expression and explain it (with the help of some bogus, paraphrased, empty quote nonetheless) just makes it worse.
If the author is so interested in making people aware of his Mad Men obsession, there are less lame ways to do it than this.
To me, the most important part of this (great) post was that Apple doesn't do market research. It reminds me of a recent episode of Mad Men ("The Rejected", season 4, episode 4).
In this episode, the agency explores the idea of a cream being part of a beauty ritual rather than the traditional approach of linking beauty to matrimony. Near the end there was this exchange:
> Dr Miller: Well, turns out the hypothesis was rejected. I'd recommend a strategy that linked Ponds cold cream to matrimony... a veiled promise.
> Don Draper: A la 1925. I'm not going to do that. So... what are we going to tell the client?
> Dr Miller: I can't change the truth.
> Don Draper: How do you know that's the truth? A new idea is something they don't know yet so of course it's not going to come up as an option. Put my campaign on TV for a year then hold your group again. Maybe it'll show up.
To me this so succinctly sums up the disconnect between market research and the best products.
Take the iPad: I don't know why they decided to do a 10" tablet but I would bet money that they came up with several form factors then Steve Jobs walked into a room, picked one and said that's the one they're doing. This may be an oversimplification but I'm sure it's not far from the truth.
So just tried this with divx episodes of mad men, The software was great and syncing files from itunes was a breeze(Same interface as syncing files with pages and keynote). The video itself though was pretty choppy. Not sure how it will work for other filetypes but not super impressed, but I imagine it would be hard to do any better with similar hardware.
Kind of really lets you see the value of apples H.264 hardware decoding on the iPad.
Even if you do accept the dubious assumption that Mad Men is an accurate depicition of "the good old days", the author seems to have missed the point (or just wasn't paying attention).
The constant drinking has caught up with several of the characters - one character has his foot mashed, permanently disabling him, during drink-fuelled office "fun". In the latest episodes, even Don is cutting down...
I don't know about you, but Mad Men isn't exactly scientific research. It's a tv show about the advertising industry. I worked in that industry a few years, it's still a lot of fun, and they still drink at work, sleep with each others and treat women badly.
Also from my parent's perspective, they didn't have much fun at work, they were working long hours and put up with so much because switching job wasn't exactly as easy as today.
Finally, I don't require a rock climbing wall at work, I just want to do good work with good people and I will have fun naturally.
Louie is a surprisingly good show. I think I like it for the same reasons I like Breaking Bad and Mad Men, which is it sticks out from the rest of tv (American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, Bones, House, Law and Order, etc.) I think what's nice is that its not just another over used trope, spin off, sequel, trilogy, reproduction--it's original. I especially enjoyed the episode with his mom. The authors arguments are really interesting and I tend to agree with her. There are flaws in everything though.
As I was preparing for the new Mad Men season, I noticed that AMC was selling old Mad Men episodes for 99¢. At that price, it's about as cheap as renting the DVDs, and I thought Finally a network is coming to its senses.
That was short lived, however. They jacked up the prices when the new season started.
At 99¢ per episode or, say, $20 for a season I would jump right in and probably cancel my cable.
The Wired article (especially the charts!) is essentially equating bandwidth with usage: according to it, video is > 50x more "alive" than email. I typically spend much more time per day on email than video, but my guess is the episode of Mad Men that iTunes downloaded for me yesterday counts more than my last month of email...
There was a hullabaloo last week with the premiere of Season 4. Arial was suspected as a culprit, thankfully someone tracked down the new SCDP logo and sure enough it's accurate:
(If you aren't spoiler free on seasons 1 through 3, don't look)
http://burndownblog.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/mad-men-font-fail-or-was-it/
I've also noticed a couple of glitches on _Mad Men_. In the first season, the glass doors of the upscale-wanna-be department store the agency is working with has machine cut film lettering, a poorly spaced script, rather than hand painted letters. It's not impossible there was some kind of manual, stencil based system in use in the 60's, but I'm not aware of it.
Also, a lot of the hand drawn layouts and designs pinned up on the wall in Sal's office are actually pages from Andrew Loomis's excellent book _Creative Illustration_. And most of the designs would have been more at home in the late 30's to mid 40's. But hey, in this case it's just wallpaper...
Still a great series, and as a child of the late 50's, early 60's I can say they get an amazing amount of details right.
Mad Men has great lessons in the art of the high-concept pitch: giving the listener a compelling vision rather than being constrained to a conversation about sales numbers or product features. Funding a startup (or buying an ad campaign) should make the person writing the check want to tell everyone they know that the smart investment they just made is going to make the world a better place, not that they're going to beat the competition by x.y%.
aside: bought the Mad Men three-season box set to catch up before the upcoming season 4, but didn't realize I got a Chinese bootleg; producer's listed as Linsgate (sic), not Lionsgate. :)
Here is another motivational thread on HN: Ask HN: Movies that motivate you? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1349566
I just watched the first episode of Mad Men and I'm hooked.
Your comment reminds me of the Mad Men episode where they create a Lucky Strike ad campaign. The ad team offers up the slogan "It's Toasted" and the Lucky team replies that all cigarettes are toasted.
"It's Toasted" became the Lucky Strike slogan despite their protests and was a huge success. This wasn't entirely fiction of course, it was based on a true story.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky_Strike
See also: David Ogilvy's Shell campaign
http://www.copywriting1.com/2007/10/famous-david-ogilvy-tv-ad.html
And Claude Hopkins' Schlitz campaign
http://www.copywriting1.com/2007/10/claude-hopkins-schlitz-beer-ad.html
99 cents seems like a fair price to watch an ad-free episode of something. The old $1.99 price always seemed excessive, and I've never paid it for anything except Mad Men (I buy a season pass for thirty bucks and it saves me an entire year's cable subscription...)
On the tv show Mad Men, Don Draper described it as "we let our people be unproductive until they're productive". I think this applies to any kind of creative work. If I know exactly what needs to be done and how to do it, I'll just do it. If I have to come up with a solution to a difficult problem, I do whatever until I solve it.
The article makes a false assumption. He starts by saying that AGW has the ball, but then carries that on through the rest of his reasoning as a proxy for "global temperatures will be 6 degrees higher in 2100 hundred has the ball", although he doesn't come out and say it.
Few educated people disbelieve in the evidence for some AGW. There are a few things that many of us don't believe.
We don't believe that there is any reasonable evidence that the magnitude and impact of AGW will be dire. When the IPCC reports come out, there is tons of evidence for weak AGW. But that tons of evidence applies to weak AGW. Each of those studies is evidence for modest claims. It doesn't matter if you accumulate 10 times as many studies supporting those modest claims, it will not be evidence for the incredibly less likely hypotheses that they are made to do work for by the press and politically-motivated scientists.
In fact, there's plenty of reason to believe increased temperatures will be a net benefit to humanity. Humanists, but not reactionaries, should be open to this. There is no reason to believe we're currently at our "ideal temperature", and there's no reason to freeze our current ecosystems in time as if they're sanctified objects of a disorganized but fervent religion. Regardless, the claim that rising temperatures will leave us worse off isn't remotely proven.
The author waves his hands by the "cost-effective things we can do to mitigate global warming" as if such a thing exists in the current public debate. Almost every proposal normally under discussion in the public venue have overwhelming costs.[1]
This is a costs/benefits judgment, and you can't make that judgement without knowing the benefits. On an episode of Mad Men, Don Draper is standing in the living room with his wife and the interior decorator. His wife asks him what he thinks about the new furniture and its arrangement. He says, "Well, it's kind of hard to judge without knowing the price." People seem to forget that.
Concerning the benefits, there is no plausible, let alone tested, theory of risk prediction for climate temperatures in 2100. At all. So we're not talking about science here anymore. When you say, well, we can't calculate the risks, but the worst case is the extinction of mankind, you're getting dangerously close to the St. Petersburg paradox. Spreading FUD is a principal mechanism by which con men of all stripes manipulate.
[1] Although I'm all for as many nuclear reactors as we can build. By the steady resistance to this cheap and plentiful source of new energy, it's clear that a certain segment of the alarmist AGW movement is only willing to solve our energy problems by putting a cap on human productivity.
Edit: Meant to write 6 degrees higher, not 106, in the first sentence.
I watch about 1-4hrs per day depending on what's showing. Mostly sports but I like NatGeo, History, Travel, Discovery etc. I don't watch any sitcoms but there are a few well written shows like Mad Men, Wire etc. I also enjoy stuff like Top Gear and Ultimate Factories. But it's mostly sports for me.
I haven't had Cable/Satellite since 2002. I started watching all my TV on DVDs that I bought from Amazon, but then switched to iTunes around 2006.
Now it's mostly a combination of iTunes/DVD - I'm pretty certain it's less expensive than subscribing to TV.
The good part of this (and it should be emphasized) - is that you now watch for a _purpose_ - Latest episode of Lost, BSG, Dexter, Weeds, South Park, Doll House, BtVS, Angel, The Wire, DeadWood, Heroes, The Office, Dr. Horrible, Mad Men, Parks and Recreation, Castle, Californication, Dr. Who, Kings, Sarah Connor Chronicles, True Blood, Torchwood.
Any time that might have been lost to just passively watching television, news, is now, of course, lost to passively reading ycombinator, nyt, wsj, groklaw... :-)
I've come to similar conclusions. Salary discrepancy is another related phenomenon. My observations are completely based on anecdotal evidence, but having had to interview people for jobs, I'm also now of the opinion that women are paid less than men because they ask for less money. In general men asked for more money than we, as potential employers, had anticipated. Women asked for less money. The difference was significant, at about 10% of the salary (e.g., on a $50K position, men might ask for $55K and women might ask for $45K).
Once I started seeing this pattern, I met a girl who was looking for her first programming job out of school. I insisted she ask for a salary figure that I would have asked for in her position. She was extremely hesitant. She ended up asking for $5K under what I suggested, but when the interviewer didn't balk, and in fact gave her $3K more than she had requested, she was ecstatic. She phoned me up in complete disbelief.
On the other hand, I have another friend who's very unhappy in her programming job right now because she asked for so little money to start and now she just gets cost-of-living raises, which themselves have been frozen due to the current state of her company's finances. She knows that men make $15K to $20K more than her doing the same job, and I keep trying to coax her to ask for a big raise anyway, so it's at least on her boss' radar. I'm actually meeting with her in a couple of hours for a little developer meet and greet, so I'll be sure to remind her again :)
The issue of sexism is a delicate one because it involves perceptions. Also, most men today try not to be sexist. Watch an episode of Mad Men and you'll see how far the workplace has come. What sexism is left is unintentional, subtle, and sometimes the result of both actions on the part of men and women in the workplace. If we want to come to a solution on sexism, I think we need to stop thinking of it as something that people do to other people, and start thinking of it as a phenomenon. People are more willing to discuss why something is the way it is rather than feel obligated to defend or otherwise justify their own actions.
Don't know how many fans of Mad Men are here, but a recent episode had Don Draper going to see Conrad Hilton, and Hilton ends up pushing Draper to to do some freebie ad work right there.
Draper clearly wants to do business with Hilton, but tells him, "I think you wouldn't be in the Presidential Suite if you worked for free."
People like to claim that TV is only full of crap. This is grade A, Microsoft-FUD-level, Bullshit.
Like anything, sure, most of it is crap. Just like if you went to a bookstore and picked up 10 random fantasy novels. You might conclude that they're all just cookie cutter pablum - most are - but then you miss out on George R. R. Martin's Song of Fire and Ice, Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana, LeGuin's Earthsea, and other truly excellent works of fiction.
But like anything, it takes some investment to tell the good from the bad. If you just watch Jon & Kate Plus 8, Entertainment Tonight, and According to Jim, yeah, you're better off without the TV altogether. But I claim that there's more good TV being made now than at any time in history, particularly for niche markets.
Here's some of my recommendations: Mythbusters, Penn & Teller's Bullshit, Supernatural, Dollhouse, The Office, 30 Rock, Lost, The Simpsons (not as great as it was, but still fun), The Daily Show/Colbert Report, Mad Men... and more, there's just a ton of really high quality work being done.
If your argument is that instead, you watch things online/through netflix, that makes sense. If I didn't enjoy live sports sometimes, I'd consider doing the same.
Not everyone has to have a hobby of watching television, or movies, or reading for that matter, but the opinion that it's all crap is extremely ill-informed and snobbish, and I strongly encourage it to be dropped as something that makes you sound actively stupid when you say it. It's an anti-pattern.