Before I get started... Is it good, folks?
Or am I going to be disappointed a la the ending to The Sopranos?
:anti-italian-action:
disappointed a la the ending to The Sopranos?
I can't account for bad taste.
I'm pretty meh about it but there's one aspect of it that's absolutely brilliant. It is supposed to show life in the 60s of a white male labor aristocrat from his perspective. So people of color only barely intersect with his life and when they do, it's usually in brief moments on the periphery. Realistic for the era. Don is largely ambivalent about race (as he is most things). That doesn't make him good, it's just that black folks don't really enter his field of vision. It feels appropriate for someone like him in that time and place.
And then you have everyone else - mostly other white male labor aristocrats. They range from being openly racist to just sorta low key racist. I'm struck by the scene where they do show some blacks folks protesting outside the office building. Two young guys (not characters in the show but they work in the same building as our cast) throw balloons with ink on them. And the scene ends.
The civil rights movement - despite how massive it was to most of society at that time - itself barely registers in this show. Because that's how rich white folks in NYC would have experienced it. Something they see on the TV but not something that really mattered to them in any real way.
The way race was portrayed in Mad Men got some people upset. I think they felt black people were being ignored. Which is true, but that's also how rich enough white folks in a place like NYC lived in the 1960s. They were able to live in a blissful little white bubble where they rarely had to interact with anyone who wasn't white. And the show does intersperse enough people of color to remind you that this world you are seeing isn't the reality for most of America.
I think this approach is so much better than nearly all portrayals of mid-century America. Where most white Americans don't have a racist bone in their body (despite the fact that basically every white person in that era who wasn't leftist was pretty damn racist on some level). Or if they are racist, it's only at the beginning of the movie and once they befriend a black person for 5 minutes they immediately become anti-racist. It absolutely white washes the pervasive racism that was in White America at that time. At least Mad Men doesn't run from this reality.
Seriously, watch closely how the show portrays race and I think you'll see what I'm getting at.
Or am I going to be disappointed a la the ending to The Sopranos?
it's probably safer for you to stick to the algorithmically generated cartoons on youtube tbqh.
The later seasons drag a bit, but the ending is perfect. Very good show overall.
Good to great for what it is but the creator/showrunner is a sex pest that like sexually harassed all the girls on set afaik
The Sopranos couldn't have ended in any other way. If Tony lived it's just a ripoff of The Godfather but without a real consequence for his actions like Michael's daughter dying. If Tony died, there's too much character development across 6 seasons for it to be anything other than melodramatic or underwhelming. Ambiguity keeps the best parts of both outcomes while avoiding the pitfalls of a scene spelling out the answer.
Yeah I love the Sopranos ending and I hate how popular the "no its not ambiguous actually" reading has become. Like thinking he died is valid and there's strong support for that reading but also it's so obviously supposed to be ambiguous lol. And for me personally, the last few episodes did such a good job painting what remained of Tony's life as a psychological wasteland that it's more interesting and thematically powerful to imagine him living in that empty and hollowed out world.
It's fine. Kinda like Community, it's fun to watch if you have a so that's into it, but I mostly want to dumpster all the characters.
