Mad

What does it say about me that I read Maureen Ryan’s long interview with Matt “Mad Men” Weiner and the quote that most interests me is this, on Mad Men‘s now-famous attention to accurate period detail:

You know why Mad Men is the perfect subject for a post like this, apart from the fact that the DVD just came out this week and the second season starts near the end of this month? It’s because the writing staff is so small. Makes writing a post like this a bit easier than those network dramas with 95 co-executive producers, all of whom are waiting for a chance to take the showrunner’s job.

Some interesting discussion here and here about whether Mad Men is, in Susannah Breslin’s words, “a fantasy about the time before feminism, when men were men, period.”

A reader wants to know if I have any thoughts on The New York Times Magazine‘s big piece on Matt Weiner and Mad Men. I don’t have very many thoughts that could be considered original. It’s a good piece on a good show, though obviously it follows the same pattern as most in-depth reporter-on-the-scene articles on cable TV shows. That’s not meant as a criticism of the writer, Alex Witchel. These articles follow the same pattern because the shows follow the same pattern behind the scenes: there’s this guy, this writer guy, who has been kicking around network shows for years, wasn’t happy with many of the shows he worked on, the major networks wouldn’t let him in the door to pitch his stuff, and finally <fill in name of network> took a chance on his dream project despite the offbeat concept and apparently unlikeable characters, and now he’s the hottest writer in town, but he’s still an iconoclast who doesn’t fit into the whole Hollywood scene. The name changes from “David Chase” to “Alan Ball” to “Matthew Weiner” but the pattern is the same.