Let’s Get Mad (Men)!

In her RSC debut, EmTrack2 takes a look at how Mad Men stands above the rest of television today.



There comes a point where you realize how spoiled you are if you watch Mad Men.


Truly, Mad Men ruined television for me. Why? Because it bothers me so much. I spend days at a time thinking about what happened on Mad Men a couple of nights earlier and what is to become of them next Sunday. I can’t sit and watch Supernatural and be so affected. Or Glee. Or any show for that matter. Even when I start watching shows like Boardwalk Empire that are considered to have a similar level of quality, hoping to find that passion and it always falls short for one reason or another. I mean not to take a whack at these shows, they have their moments and I can understand wholeheartedly why anyone would like them, but they are lacking at one thing or another and it is troublesome. (Don’t get me wrong, I still watch other shows. Downton Abbey is fantastic  and I fell in love with the BBC series Sherlock. But, even then, still lacking.)

But Mad Men never does fall short. It has a passion to it, characters I hate and love, leaving me to remind myself that no matter how real these people seem, they’re not. There was no Don Draper in the sixties who left his Betty to later marry a Megan after a year of drunken unhappiness. There was no Peggy who came to us as a shy catholic girl still living in the fifties to a woman becoming the very man who frustrates her so. These people didn’t exist. But, by god, the feelings I have for them are so great and numerous that they might as well be real. 

I used to describe Mad Men as a show about “beautiful people doing terrible things.” I take it back. It’s much more than their looks and how they dress and how they act.  It’s about human beings being, wonderfully and tragically, human. They end up with the wrong people, lash out, hide their emotions very well or not at all, and, as a spectator, it’s heartbreaking. 

These people are all of us, in some way or another. And it scares the hell out of me because no other show has done this for me yet. It’s special, and it knows it, flaunting it’s brilliant writing and dreadfully complex characters in my face, batting it’s sultry eyelashes in my direction with it’s promises of beautiful and talented people that it always seems to fulfill.


Mad Men is the perfect temptress and I love every waking minute of it.