All the women in the series have to sacrifice things, have to accept compromise or societal punishme

With its second season, Matthew Weiner's Mad Men has at last become key west florida vacation packages the show its biggest supporters have always made it out to be. Don't confuse things, I liked the show's first season, but only begrudgingly as it got on. It took some effort to go along to get along, because I often found it underwritten in terms of characters and overwritten in terms of its depiction of life in 1960. I think the line I often kicked around was that its tongue was shoved so hard into its cheek, it must have bruised. The knowing Far From Heaven "girlfriend please" double entendres of the closeted art director, the endless trotting out of new inventions to gawk at, the winks to the camera with each pop culture key west florida vacation packages reference--it was more That '70s Show than I would have liked.
These problems waned as the season wore on and Mad Men got its sea legs, and they are completely gone in Mad Men: Season 2 . The series key west florida vacation packages grows richer, darker, more firmly rooted in its own reality. It's also damn good television, the kind of show you can't turn away from, a pop culture flashpoint that everyone key west florida vacation packages wants to be a part of to such a degree, I am sure somewhere right now, someone who has never seen it is pretending he has just so he doesn't feel left out. "I've got to see that damn show...."
Season 2 jumps ahead a couple of years to 1962. This dispenses with a couple of dangling plot threads--Peggy's key west florida vacation packages baby has been birthed and she's back to work, Duck Phillips is now on staff, and the social change that was barreling down on the Sterling Cooper offices has now fully arrived. One of the writers, Paul Kinsey (Michael Gladis), the fellow with literary aspirations, has grown a goatee and gotten himself an African American girlfriend. Another, Harry Crane (Rich Sommer), is advocating for a TV wing in the agency. Social change, technology, and in between the old and the new is Don Draper, an invented man, a product of the previous age but a perfect candidate to live free in the new one. Which will he choose?
The interesting thing about the Don Draper conundrum is that for as much as progress is alluring to him, he still clings to traditional values. key west florida vacation packages In his work clashes with Duck Phillips (Mark Moses)--a man he helped get hired at the agency, and whose drinking problems will come into play over the course of the season--the fundamental disagreement key west florida vacation packages is over Don's preference for the way things were always done and Duck's urging for Sterling Cooper to go more high risk and pitch for bigger clients. It's a dangerous game, one that could pay off or could toss the men into unknown waters. So, we have the aforementioned TV division, a pair of youth experts brought in to tell the old guard how to appeal to the new generation, and in perhaps the most dramatic example, ditching their long-term small airline client for a much larger one, the onset of new corporate greed introducing the idea of making money out of tragedy.
In the middle of this is Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser), a character annoying by design and played by an actor who is regularly called in to be so (see his run on Angel , for instance). Pete has married into money and is supposed to inherit more, but he's also a man who wants to make something of himself. He's eager to chase Duck into the new frontier, but he's also been chasing Don's approval for the entire series. This psychological key west florida vacation packages failing comes to bear when Pete's father passes away and it turns out he's left his family broke. It's one of several instances key west florida vacation packages where it's discovered that the stalwart men of the previous generation, who are now in charge and still prattle on about WWII, are not as stalwart as they would have us believe. Roger Sterling's marriage crumbles as he chases younger women, including a paid escort and eventually Don's new secretary (you may recall that Roger (the always entertaining John Slattery) dipped into the secretary pool before and had an affair with Joan Holloway, played by the remarkable Christina Hendricks). Bert Cooper (Robert Morse) is growing exceedingly eccentric. Duck is separated from his wife and children. And, of course, there is Don and his many secrets.
For as much as there is an amazing cast of supporting characters, key west florida vacation packages Mad Men is really Don Draper's show. All the complexities hinted at in Season 1 are now being revealed in Season 2. Though Don loves Betty (January Jones) and their life together, though he longs for stability, his soul is that of a wanderer. As was revealed at the end of the initial season, Don adopted the identity of a man he served with in Korea, and he used the new name to get away from a life that had begun in transience. He isn't exactly rootless, but the roots he does have are self-made key west florida vacation packages and thus tenuous. His eye wanders from Betty to new women. Having lost both of his lovers in Season key west florida vacation packages 1, he now looks at Bobbie (Melinda McGraw), the reckless wife of insult comedian Jimmy Barrett (Patrick Fischler), the pitchman on a potato chip account run by Sterling Cooper. Don is at first attracted to how ballsy Bobbie is. She can play and drink with the best of the boys, and her history of self-invention makes Don see a kindred spirit; that same independence quickly causes the tryst to sour, however, and Don is ready to end it. This has massive repercussions in Don's life.
First, the end of the affair key west florida vacation packages forces Don to face his actions. Jimmy is aware of what has gone on, and he does not believe that Don should be able to walk away clean. More important, though, is when Bobbie reveals key west florida vacation packages that the reputation Don has earned key west florida vacation packages does not entirely match the one he believes himself to have. The broken connections, remaining oblique and avoiding any significant revelations, these things start to add up. For as much as Don has tried to remain aloof, a new being--an untrustworthy, reckless one--has emerged. Bobbie's rejection forces Don to face himself, and it opens up dark, sometimes violent places. This is compounded when Betty kicks him out of the house. A trip to California gives way to a journey toward finding himself, sampling a truly groundless life and also exploring the bridges between key west florida vacation packages his true past and his invented present.
It's going to be interesting to continue to watch Jon Hamm develop as a known actor. His recent stint on 30 Rock played with the idea that he was just a handsome shell without much going on behind it, but Hamm's portrayal of Draper brings the very fine writing to life in complex and fascinating ways. We've been staring into his blank expression for two seasons now, and the longer key west florida vacation packages we look, the more that emerges. The expressions are not blank at all; look close, and you will see subtle images of a man that runs deep. In this way, Jon Hamm, who wasn't a known quantity before key west florida vacation packages Mad Men , is revealing himself as a performer a the same time he reveals more of Don Draper. It's a difficult role, full of tricky maneuvers. Don is not always a nice guy, but we have to always want to watch him and even kind of love him for being bad, the way we previously loved James Gandolfini key west florida vacation packages as Tony Soprano or enjoy Larry David's curmudgeonly rants. Try not to side with Don against Betty. Try not to be a little electrified when Don pushes Bobbie against a wall and threatens her. Try not to smirk when he verbally cuts Pete down. You'll find all these challenges pretty difficult.
Though key west florida vacation packages Don ends up being the center of attention in terms of the males on Mad Men , the female cast is much more varied and far more integral to the writing than simply being possible love interests for Draper. In real life, the movement for gender equality was starting to foment. We see it in the office with the career efforts of Peggy (Elisabeth Moss) and Joan. Peggy has pushed her way into the boy's club, becoming a copywriter, and as we will discover, had to make the classic sacrifice expected of women throughout time. In order to have more than the cliché, she has to give up the cliché; the baby she was about to have at the end of Season 1 has been taken away from her and given to her sister and mother. Peggy struggles as a single girl, forced to keep quiet when slighted, key west florida vacation packages to accept the attempts to pigeonhole her into only working on women's accounts. She also struggles with the way organized religion perceives her, becoming the focus of a conflicted young priest (Colin Hanks) whose efforts to help her are as much about helping himself.
Joan, a potent force of nature whose position as office manager--what key west florida vacation packages the boys call "head secretary"--has allowed her to control pretty much the entire office, finds her own speed bumps on the road to success. Her failed affair with Roger Sterling is one of a string of failed affairs, key west florida vacation packages and its collapse and Joan's dismissal from Roger's bedroom could be seen as a woman being punished for knowing her own sexual powers. It's like her mother probably key west florida vacation packages warned her, men don't take girls like her home to their own mothers. In Season 2, she is engaged to a doctor, but even he only accepts her as something to possess, to control. When she takes on extra work reading TV scripts to find the right programs to advertise on, he dismisses her ambition as silly. His personal subjugation of Joan takes an even darker turn near the tail end of the season. It's one of the more painful, haunting key west florida vacation packages moments in both seasons, and all the more painful for the sense we get that this is not the first time things have gone so wrong for her. The silent stare, the unspoken pain--Christina Hendricks' performance will break your heart. Again, like Don, Joan is a character whose ruthlessness arguably deserves some comeuppance, but the charisma of the actor woos us to her side; granted, she suffers an extreme punishment no one deserves, but even earlier, when she loses ground in the office to Jane (Peyton List), we'd rather see Jane defeated and Joan victorious.
All the women in the series have to sacrifice things, have to accept compromise or societal key west florida vacation packages punishment. Bobbie works in a man's role, but she has to navigate it in ways men don't, using he