she also pulled off her pants too….and all while on her period…

lets not forget that.

pretty awesome chick she was

The characters are zero-dimensional ciphers. They barely function as icons or symbols, because they aren’t really icons or symbols for anything. The truly bizarre acting is due to the fact that they cast some actors who are as flat and affectless as the characters they play–sadly, the leads–esp. John Hamm, Elisabeth Moss, Vincent Kartheiser (occasionally) and the astonishingly wooden January Jones. (She’s so bad I can’t take my eyes away, like the proverbial car crash.) I’m dying to make a collage of stills and/or shots of these 4 actors displaying the same blank expression again and again and again and again. And again.

It’s hard for these cable series to avoid falling into soap opera. Mad Men tries to avoid that trap, but it doesn’t really offer an alternative format or phone, so the pace, rhythm, narrative structures and stories are all over the place and don’t add up to anything. Watching episode after episode in one go, it’s obvious how harebrained the creators’ approach is. Even the characters have very little consistency episode to episode, season to season. (True Blood has fallen prey to the same thing, in a more egregious and obvious way.)

I don’t doubt that Matthew Weiner and his team mean well and are trying to accomplish something, and it’s always painful to watch big shows stumble again and again. What can you do? Serial TV is really, really, really hard to do. We should be grateful that Breaking Bad even exists–a consistently brilliant show is a rare an special thing. Enjoy the good stuff and ignore the bad stuff!