Saturday, July 08, 2017

Is That All There Is?

This post is about watching TV.



Wow. What a song. Don't know if I've ever heard a pop song like it. Such a melancholic, witty, and knowing pop song. Turns out it was a major hit back in 1969.

It's featured at the beginning and end of episode 8 "Severance" in the 7th and final season of MAD MEN. I restarted watching the show recently, starting from the 6th season. I could never figure out what I liked about Mad Men, I always said that it was a weird and difficult show, hard to like.

However, in May I watched the 1st season of TWIN PEAKS. Don't think I'll watch the others, including the new one. Everyone I talked to about this would say "Isn't it weird?" and I would always respond, actually, it isn't. Watching Twin Peaks now, it feels like a lot of TV shows today; it's cinematic, long, directed by a film director, with lots of awkward pauses. Sure, back in 1990, it must've felt really bizarre, in the era of sitcoms. But I think David Lynch broke a lot of ground with this program, and influenced a lot of current TV, as many episodes of many shows now are directed by film directors, if not the entire series.

In rewatching Mad Men again, I realized very quickly that it had whiffs of Twin Peaks in it. Mad Men is also a weird and awkward show, and I finally figured out where that's coming from - I could really sense at times the impact that Lynch had on television.

I also like the program much more this time around. Before, I liked watching it, but I didn't know why. This time around, with rewatching season 6, the 1st half of season 7, and now I'm watching for the first time, the final 7 episodes, I can see what Mad Men is so good at. The writing is terrific, because you can never tell where the story is going. Even though I had seen most of these episodes already, and only a couple of years ago, I still found myself surprised by the actions of the characters. Terrific writing leads to terrific directing and acting. Mad Men is full of surprises. It's unconventional in that way, and that's why it's so good.

So that's what I'm learning from Mad Men, how you can never tell where its going to go.

The show I was watching before it was THE AMERICANS. I tend to only watch one program at a time; that's all my brain can handle. That's also a great series, and also happens to be set in the recent past. That also has great writing, directing, and acting, though I don't feel as compassionate towards the characters, probably because they are spies and assassins.

What I learned from The Americans, is how every little detail counts. Something appears in an episode of a show or in a film, because it matters. It might not matter right then, but it will come up later. For example - a mailbot that goes around the FBI offices...it might seem inconsequential, but it's not, at all. The mailbot drama - an innocent woman ends up dead, the spies risk their cover and lives, the Russians make choices based off of their intelligence from it, and once the FBI finally figures out that they're being spied upon from it, people's careers are on the line. All this from a mailbot, that first appears so casually and comically.

There are so many things like this that pop in The Americans, and I love how the writers handle things like this and play with your head.

One last thing - I think Mad Men has much better music than The Americans. 60s versus the 80s...the older decade wins in regards to its musical output.

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