MagneticMediaFed

“Sex sells.”
“Says who?”

Mad Men is back with a vengeance and (at least after one episode) hasn’t missed a step. You know you’re watching a great television program when a season gets underway without spelling out exactly what had transpired in the interim. Here, we’re (possibly) years in the future (er, past) and just flung back into these characters lives, having to a do a lot of the between-season leg-work ourselves. The show is so character based, now that we know the players the series’ creators have almost limitless room to explore.

It appears that the chief explorations this season are 1) the notion that Sterling-Cooper is slowly, steadily, becoming obsolete as new, younger, talent starts making waves in the industry and 2) Betty (and by extension Peggy) have a new sense of empowerment.

Brilliant, brilliant stuff.

Well, the nominations are out and The Wire failed to get even the obligatory “final season” nod. Even if it wasn’t their strongest, I still don’t understand how the actors continue to be ignored. Isiah Whitlock Jr’s Clay Davis? C’mon. Simon and Burns did get a writing nod for the finale.

That being said, both Mad Men and Damages were nominated for Best Drama, which is pretty damn cool — especially since this is the first time a basic cable show has been up for said award. The rest of the list you can probably predict. (HBO nominated for a miniseries? Now I’ve heard everything!)

Full list can be found here.

Just when you thought the writer’s strike had sucked out the very last drop of interesting scripted television this year, AMC goes ahead and delivers to us Breaking Bad, a new hour-long drama starring Malcolm in the Middle’s Bryan Cranston as a science teacher who starts cooking meth to supliment his income. The network, which was previously known for categorizing “Cat Woman” as an American Movie Classic, now has a lot to live up to after delivering Mad Men to us last summer — one of the best new shows of the decade.

Frankly I don’t know what to expect from Breaking Bad (foolishly, I missed my opportunity to catch a press-preview of the episode earlier this week), but I have to say I’m optimistic. Cranston was great recently in guest spots on How I Met Your Mother and I look forward to seeing him do drama. I’m also hoping the show proves to be a more down-to-earth, less self-destructive version of Weeds. We’ll find out on Sunday.

Breaking Bad starts this Sunday (January 20th) at 10:00pm EST on AMC.

HBO is going to be posting new episodes of The Wire on HBO On-Demand a week before they air. Because of this, and because “seeing them early” doesn’t really mean “seeing them fast” I have watched the season five premiere three (3!) times over the past week. Some would say this may be excessive. Those people are idiots. More after the jump…

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I love making end of the year top ten lists. Sometimes I think it’s the only reason I put up with the fifty weeks of mediocre nonsense (but then I take my antidepressants and go back to playing with that shiny piece of foil). The problem with having television as your medium of choice is that the television schedule doesn’t fit nicely into the Gregorian calendar. Typical seasons on the networks run from September to May, while cable tends to stick closer to the actual climatological patterns of the earth. It’s easy to say that first season Friday Night Lights was the best thing of 2007 except for the fact that half of the season landed squarely in 2006. MagneticMediaFed has figured out the solution to all of this: EPISODES. Episodes are what make television TELEVISION. A good episode keeps you glued to the screen for the full hour (or half hour), it tells a complete story while adding significantly to the series as a whole, it shows you something you didn’t think you’d see or makes you laugh in ways you didn’t think were possible.

I’ve spent a good chunk of the past couple weeks culling over the MMF-archives reminding myself of those episodes that I thought really stuck out. I watch a lot of television, though I don’t purport to watch all television (anyone who does should be shunned and bathed — not necessarily in that order). Because of this, my list only includes the shows that I regularly watch and is missing some obvious gems that I simply don’t know/care about (i.e. Battlestar Galactica, A Shot At Love with Tila Tequila). Still, I think most of the bases are covered. If there was a fantastic episode you remember from this past calendar year, please let us know in the comments. The full list, available right after the jump…

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The first season of AMC’s brilliant new drama Mad Men wrapped this past Thursday. While my personal viewing schedule is now significantly lighter it’s a shame I won’t be able to sit through new episodes until next summer (assuming a writer’s strike doesn’t push things back even further). There is currently no other series on television (outside of The Wire) that is attempting to do what Mad Men has done over these past thirteen weeks. There’s a lot of great, highly entertaining television these days, but few series are able to tell their stories with the same degree of sociological and political resonance. I suppose I should also give props to Damages, but that series is much more a triumph of technical bravado. When all is said and done it ends up being an expertly crafter murder mystery. Mad Man seems destined to ask bigger questions about humanity and the course we’ve made for ourselves over the past half-century. More after the jump…

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What more could you possibly want out of a television drama? Lasers? A man-eating lion? A man-eating lion who shoots lasers out of his blood-soaked teeth? Perhaps, but I’m pretty content with watching AMC’s Mad Men just the way it is: as a nearly perfect drama of social, political and ultimately human commentary. More after the jump…

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While watching Mad Men’s always awesome credits sequence tonight I noticed that Freaks and Geeks creator Paul Feig directed this episode of Mad Men. Mr. Feig has directed countless episodes of Arrested Development and The Office but it seems to me like this is his first foray into drama. Television isn’t really much of a director’s medium, but he certainly seemed to be up for the challenge. If the man deserves any credit it most certainly has to be for the brilliant, hilarious, final shot (pun intended). More after the jump…

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“Sometime we’ve all parked in the wrong garage.”

I’ve always liked John Slattery. The season he played Carol’s cool-guy fiancé on Ed was probably the series best season. He’s been in what seems like a million roles on television, all to a certain extent capitalizing on his uncanny ability to emit a very mild sense of arrogance and entitlement. Mad Men might be the first season to really use the full potential of his talents. As Roger Sterling, the man whose name is on the building, Slattery perfectly encapsulates the “Do you know who I am?” mentality of the 1960s male, corporate elite. So when you have an episode where a character like this is taken down a peg or two, you can’t help but smile. More after the jump…

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Um, Don… who are you?

After failing to post about Mad Men the past couple weeks (which is a shame since last week’s episode involving Pete’s glorious ascent to the middle — and near-colossal fall — was easily the best episode to date) we return this week with “Babylon” an episode that had two interesting things happening. On the one side we start to get a glimpse as to why these guys consider the ad-game to be the zenith of creative-capitalism. On the other, we start to see that our “hero” Don Draper is hardly who he purports to be, which isn’t so much of a surprise as it is an unsettled peeling away of a character who up until now has mostly been seen as the poster-boy for the thoughtful alpha-male set. More after the jump…

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It is a hot one in New York City. Real hot. In fact, it was so hot yesterday a tornado touched down in Brooklyn (I’m no meteorologist, and really have no idea if tornadic developments have anything to do with heat, but for the sake of this post, let’s just say they do). You know what would sound good in these the dog days of summer? How about an ice-cold martini made in your very own martini shaker — courtesy of the fine folks over at AMC’s new series Mad Men.

It goes to the first person to answer the following question: In the series’ premiere episode, for what product did the Sterling Cooper Agency need to create an ad campaign?

Send your answers to rick at magneticmediafed dot com. Good luck, and happy drinking. (Check back here tomorrow for the winner and Check out more on Mad Men at AMCTV.com. New episode tonight at 10:00pm.)

In the fish tank.

I feel like all you need to know about Mad Men, and by extension 1960 corporate America, was summed up early in this week’s episode when Peggy walked into the ladies room and saw one of the other secretaries (I think it was Kristin Schaal’s character) bawling her eyes out. It’s that sense of having to spend your waking hours in a perpetual state of objectification; where the ladies room presents the one place for sanctuary. The irony being this was also the primary location for beautification — preparing oneself to go back into the wild of the office space. More after the jump…

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You know that old expression “when men were men,” the delightfully glib declaration of gender prowess from a day gone by? That’s what AMC’s compelling new drama Mad Men is about (premieres tonight, Thursday July 19th at 10:00pm). However, what makes the series more than a LaButeian exercise in awful people doing awful things to one another is the shocking familiarity between this 1960 man’s world and the world we inhabit today. In short, when men were men, they also happened to be drunks, chain-smokers, womanizers, and racists. In a way the only way we’ve changed is in our ability to do a better job at hiding these rather unpleasant qualities when in public. More after the jump…

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