I Will, However, Adopt The Practice of Addressing to All Women as "Sweetheart"

Few things turn me off more than ubiquitousness or bandwagoneering. And with seemingly everyone spurting blog-love for AMC's Mad Men, I planned to avoid a show I figured was basically just Gossip Girls for the mutual fund set. However, bored with Simpsons reruns and DVR'd episodes of The Sopranos and drawn by the fact that the show was set in an advertising agency in the early 1960s—long before viral marketing and social networking and that stupid fucking Burger King king—I decided to give Mad Men a shot.

Two episodes of the new season in and I can't say the show is as great as has been reported, but I'm enjoying it well enough. There's something uniquely satisfying about men with square jaws and precise hair standing around talking mechanicals and art departments, tumblers of scotch and lit Chesterfields in hand. Beyond that, however, there's not much else going on. The mad men wear wool suits and eat red meat for lunch and drive their American cars out of the city at five o'clock to their homemaker wives. The mostly one-dimensional secondary characters—the Jews, broads, blacks, and homos—seemingly exist only for the proselytising of the writers. This is how it was in 1962, man!

Meh, I'll keep watching for now, either until the storylines spiral into overwrought love triangles, outlandish murder cover-ups, and long-lost twin brothers, or when football season starts, whichever comes first.