Blogoland

The seriously over-hyped AMC show that purports to document the thrilling adventures of advertising men in the 60's comes in for a good thrashing at the hands of TNR's Sacha Zimmerman:

"Mad Men," it turns out, is all ambience and no action. For all the effort put into making the sets as vivid as possible, the show sorely lacks for character development. Like a bad soap opera, the only plot seems to be a mind-numbingly slow march toward sex.

Agreed. The show is unconscionably boring. The characters are not interesting. The situations in which they are placed are not dramatic under any definition I could conjure. To take one example of many, the alleged climax of the pilot episode involves the giddy experience of men pitching their new cigarette campaign to skeptical tobacco company executives. It doesn't get much more gripping than that. Frankly, as I type now, I can't even remember what happened in the second episode. I gave up after that.