Mad Men: Season 3

I have been watching the dvds of the first 3 seasons of Mad Men for several months and have come to the conclusion that I have no idea where the producer, Matthew Weiner, and his writing team are headed. This is part of the reason that I am so addicted to the series, I never know what will happen next. It's a good thing to keep the audience on its toes in this way because the writing and plot lines are often preposterous to the point of dada-istic. I don't think Weiner is that clever and that the improbability of the circumstances these characters operate within are actually the result of some faulty original thinking when the show was conceived. Much of what goes down here for believable plot points would not get a passing grade at the American Film Institute screen-writers course.The most glaring howler, to my mind, is the situation with the hero, Don Draper, played like a replicant Ken doll by Jon Hamm, a man of extraordinary handsomeness, in a bland kind of way, who can't act for beans (yet the awards continue to shower down upon him). Don Draper is actually one Dick Whitman who stole the identity of the real Donald Draper when the latter was killed in the Korean war. Dick survived, switched dog tags and went home as Don Draper. Whoever he is Draper/Whitman is a cad, a jerk and a phony, and, with Hamm's annoying, gravelly voice and pseudo-seductive delivery, the lowest order of lounge lizard.So this basic flawed premise of the series has to be swallowed whole and then forgotten or the show is a non-starter. The other great gaff is poor old Peggy Olson, getting pregnant on her first day at work at Sterling Cooper on Madison Avenue, gradually getting porkier and porkier as Season One unfolds and ending up going to the ER with a stomachache and, shazaam, giving birth to a 9 lb. baby boy. We are to believe that an intelligent working woman in Manhattan in 1961 had absolutely no idea that she was pregnant until the blessed event occurs.Matthew Weiner and his team must think all goyim, especially Catholic goyim (like Peggy), are so stupid and naïve that this sort of thing could possibly happen. Maybe in some Dogpatch somewhere but even that is pushing the limits of credulity.Otherwise I must conclude that Weiner is delusional about his greatness and can't objectively assess and reject his bad ideas?Whatever the case Mad Men is addictive because of the characters, the sets, the props, the costumes and make-up and the splendid original music by David Carbonara, intermixed with popular songs from the 1960s. No one watches television for the brilliant dialogue anyway. Weiner ultimately gets a pass because he has shown that he is quite willing to jettison characters who have lost their way, as he does at the end of Season Three when he dumps almost the entire staff of the original Sterling Cooper and several prominent characters. I was very glad to see the end of the obnoxious Paul Kinsey who served no other purpose in the series than to pout and puff himself up.I'd also love to see Weiner ease out the horrid Betty Draper, played by the empty-headed, ice-queen January Jones. So she looks like Grace Kelly, is that why they hired her for this crucial role? She is a horrible actress and is incapable of pronouncing contractions like 'wouldn't', 'shouldn't', 'couldn't' and ,didn't'. In her mouth these words come out invariably as 'wuhnt', 'shuhnt', 'cuhnt' and 'dint'. No one talked like that until recently and most of those people simply can't communicate beyond the constant use of text-messaging. Jones should be written out of the show as soon as possible. Her character is awful enough without having to listen to her terrible delivery of the lines. Ms Jones is the other bad actor in this show who is receiving lots of accolades for her work.The irony is that most of the rest of the cast is brilliant. The others manage to make Jon Hamm look good so he can stay, but no one can save Jones from herself.The best acting comes from Elisabeth Moss (Peggy Olson) and Vincent Kartheiser (Peter Campbell). There is also the ab-fab Christina Hendricks as Joan Holloway-Harris. Her rendition of 'C'est magnifique!' accompanying herself on her red accordion is one of the highlights of the entire series so far. Those three deserve awards, not the pretty faced empty-heads at the top of the cast list. How can a show survive with such weak leads? It's just another fascinating conundrum that keeps me watching. Will Don Draper survive? The show could certainly go on without him. Sometimes I wish it would.I am heartily sick and tired of his goat-like sex-drive. The way he's going I'm afraid he's going to end up in his own private Lost Weekend when the potential for far more interesting avenues is open to his character.Weiner makes a big deal out of Ayn Rand's great novel Atlas Shrugged. If he really understands that masterful science-fiction/philosophic book he'd be making much more interesting situations for these characters. As it is Weiner seems content to simply show us how selfish, greedy, bitchy, drunken, bigoted and cruel business people were (are), which puts this show into the huge pile of television shows that live and die by political correctness and ignorance of the facts of history. If this is the way it's going to go it will be a pity and the show won't go past Season Five. Season Four seems to be doing well but only the die-hard fanatics are reporting in so far.Suggestions:Let Betty run off with her new ghastly husband, the vile political lawyer, Henry. Good riddance, but let Don keep those two marvelous kids, Sally and Bobby, played with humorous aplomb and startling naturalness by Kiernan Shipka and Jared S. Gilmore.One last plea, to the sound man. Please resist the temptation to put the microphones down the actors' throats, especially when they are snogging in bed. The disgusting slurping and smacking is so loud that all ambient noise, like Evenrude-powered window-unit air-conditioners, passing diesel locomotives and New York traffic jams, is drowned out by smacking lips and over-extended panting, like Don's just run the one minute mile or something. I'm glad middle-aged people have sex but these miking policies would make it difficult to sit through the sexual antics of the most nubile studs and lasses Hollywood could offer up.I hope Mad Men gets better. Season One hadn't found itself yet. Season Two hit a nice stride except for the Betty Draper side lines which always slowed the shows down. Season Three was hobbled by a particularly obnoxious trollop named Suzanne Farrell, a neurotic school teacher and aboriginal hippie in the making. Don falls for her hillbilly ways, because he's a hillbilly, remember. Far too much celluloid was wasted on their affair and it went piffle at the end, contributing little or nothing to the whole.The last two episodes of Season Three were superb, aside from January Jones. Even Jon Hamm improved with the better scripts, not to mention the direction of Barbet Schroeder in the next to last episode that involved the assassination of JFK. The best scripts are all centered around huge traumatic social events, like the Nixon/Kennedy election, JFK assassination and the Cuban Missile Crisis, a terrifying period of time that I remember vividly; I was about Sally Draper's age at the time. Oh, that reminds me. Weiner, lose your kid from the series. Little Glenn Bishop (played by Martin Weiner) is the creepiest little bedbug I've ever encountered in a television show. Pugsly Addams has nothing on this bizarre child.Mad Men is grand soap opera, like Dallas and Dynasty, but hyper realistic in an alternative universe sort-of-way. So I am content to continue watching faithfully to the bitter end just in the hopes of hearing Christina Hendricks play her accordion again. C'est magnifique!

No cable in this not so recession proof household. We have our favorite shows that don't come via the four major networks and it's cheaper to buy the DVDs than pay a cable company $70 or so every month. "Mad Men" is one of about five of my "must have" titles. As a very low echelon advertising geek for many years, "Mad Men" gives me an insight into the lives of the hotshots in the ad game. Being very familiar with advertising in the sixties, but from a newspaper perspective, some elements run true. Dressing up was true, even for a worker bee like me. (I think the worker bees are guys; they slave for the queen bees--just a way of saying I am male.) I think ties were about one inch wide then and pretty drab. I wore a very wide bright blue and yellow striped number to work one day and was actually sent home to change. Same thing happened with a pale blue dress shirt. Shirt had to be crisp and white.The real pain with these cable shows (also, for example, "Dexter") is the gap between "seasons." It was so long a wait for me before the season three "Mad Men" DVD came out, I really felt out of touch with the plot line. Once I had my order in for season three, I pulled out the first two seasons and immersed myself in the eight disks, going through one or two disks each night (I am retired). Being of this era, and of its history, I totally lost myself in reliving that halcyon time of my life (it seems so because, after all, I was young). "Mad Men" proceeds at such a leisurely pace one becomes enveloped in not only the story but the lifestyle as well. The homes, the clothes, smoking and drinking without guilt ("major" guilt), the cars, the bars and, I suppose, the endless bed-hopping. I worked in newspaper advertising for the latter half of the sixties and with an agency from 1990 into the 21st century. "Mad Men" focuses on the behavior of what I believe were a minority of those in high (and not-so-high places). I'm referring, of course, to the massive amounts of fornication "Mad Men" implies was so absolutely routine. To be fair, the creator primarily suggests the most aggressive womanizing is by a very small number of top agency executives. To be fair, how many executives of any business report their crimes and misdemeanors to the workers? To be honest, there's always the water cooler.This is pretty much a generic review of the entire series because I did immerse myself in all three seasons over something like ten or so nights. The seasons of "Mad Men," like the seasons of the year, flow seamlessly together. I believe each season has ended with a cliffhanger of sorts but season three, without spoiling anything, felt challenging and, therefore possibly more upbeat than seasons one or two. Season three really does help establish the peripheral characters and their stories in the "Mad Men" saga. The first disk, again without revealing plots, left me tweeting about creator Matthew Weiner having completely lost his vision for the series. By the second disk, all was right with the world again--and wrong with Sterling, Cooper Advertising. Which is what we viewers expect, and want. Season three is a tumultuous ride because, of course, the agency has been acquired by an international advertising force. If advertising is a world where you have a job one day and are hunting for one the next, Sterling, Cooper's merger escalates this trauma both individually and within the overall scope of its little universe.I've given it five stars not merely because I grew to adulthood and finished a formal working life in this particular sphere of influence but because the drama is real, the characters are true and any viewer can relate and enter into the experience for about 45 minutes each week. Regrettably, for only about 13 weeks. And, for those of us who wait, we still have summer 2010 ahead with season four of "Mad Men" and we will twiddle our thumbs until the spring of 2011 when the season four DVD is finally released. We would have it no other way. One 45 minute episode, and leaving us hanging for a week -- I'll take my medicine one season, one big dose at a time.One lingering lament in this rather poor review (if you wanted story details): The first season "Mad Men" DVD package was unlike any I've ever seen. The set arrived in the form of a "flip open" silver grey Zippo lighter. After months of waiting for season two, I made a poor decision to get a little extra cash by selling off some of my too large DVD collection. Selling season one of "Mad Men" was a mortal sin. Tell Peggy's priest. I, of course, had to reorder it. It was like the first edition of a classic novel: one of a kind. The reissue of season one was as drab, as sad as anything I've seen. Season two was a decent suggestion of a shirt box. For season three, you knew there had been staff cuts. The signature Sterling, Cooper old-fashioned glass was pretty ordinary. That's advertising. Win some; lose some. Anybody who kept their original Zippo "cover" should hang onto it or expect a healthy return at eBay.

La temporada 3 de Mad Men en Blu-ray (edición UK) viene con subtítulos en español latino (al igual que las temporadas 1 y 2). Audio sólo en inglés. Los numerosos extras no tienen ningún tipo de subtítulo. La serie: imprescindible.

The third series is more of the same. Stylish, good plots, sub-plots, character development. Of course it is a slow burner but that's why I like it.Some reviews here have said the third series is not as good as the first two - have to disagree. Can't go wrong if you've enjoyed series 1 & 2.

I'm a late comer to Mad Men - someone let me borrow Season 1, and I thought nothing of it til the last two episodes. Then I was intrigued. Season 2 continued the intrigue and then I bought Seasons 3 and 4 just on the off-chance it would be worth the money, and it was.While a slower pace than "modern" programmes, once you realise that is purposeful, you relax and enjoy it a bit more.It honestly does get better as you watch more of it. I find watching the commentaries good as you can get an insight into what the director/producer/actor was aiming for in the episode.

Son bought series 1& 2 for Christmas.Wife and I have become addicted to Don Draper and Company.Excellent service too.Thank you!

Bought as a gift for my mum who loves it as she missed this on TV. We both love the series and it was a well presented box set.