Mad Men

My boy Matt Wall had been trying for a year to get me to check out AMC's Mad Men, an hour-long drama about an advertising agency in 1960, New York. I wasn't really feeling the pilot the first time I peeped it. But not unlike Wale, Rising Down, No Country for Old Men and a number of other items, I took them in with a certain frame of mind that I've since gotten over. I missed a lot while in the shadows. So now I'm playing catch-up.

Mad Men is a show about an era long-gone, a time when the masses of Americans still believed what they were told and who were shaken by anything that wasn't an established norm. The show's protagonist, Don Draper, is a successful account exec with a mysterious past and a penchant for having affairs with the kinds of women he's really like to be with as opposed to the cookie-cutter blonde who bore his kids. I've been watching it all but nonstop since yesterday as I try to get caught up with last season so that I can watch the new season, which premiered yesterday. I haven't been this a show since Lost, though Burn Notice had my undivided attention as well.

The plan is that someday I'll have my own show, most likely after putting in work on someone else's for a given stretch. I've been making a lot of plans lately, post a time when I stopped because it felt like most of my efforts ended up failing. If you asked me why I'd say that a whole lot of it has to do with my "too early, too late" timing, a fact of my life that I can't seem to help no matter how much I try. But just because it's been that way thus far doesn't mean that that will always be the case. I've learned to not take it all so personally, not to wince when folks come to me after the fact to say that I was right. We're all only human after all. And none of us are on our own clocks anyway. Out.