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Mark Olmsted commented on The very white poetry of 'Mad Men'

For me, the genius of Mad Men has everything to do with the sheer arbitrariness of the plotting. You really just have no idea what character is going to pop up to do what, and the dialogue is just as unpredictable. It seems to be that Matthew Weiner dreams every episode and then writes it all down -- and that is just a very rare feeling to get watching any TV. I'm the age of Sally Draper, and my father was very Don Draper. We were raised in, of all places, Mount Vernon. Weiner gets so many of the details spookily right of what a white suburban child grew up perceiving his parents to be like in the 60s. My block went from mostly white middle class to mostly black middle class in the 70s, and MVHS was majority African-American. My best friend was black (gay trumped color for both of us) and the Drama Society where I socialized was indeed a rainbow. Wouldn't I love to watch a drama based around black characters in that time, written and directed the black men and women who lived it. I saw them up close, and their stories were as interesting as anything on Mad Men, particularly against the backdrop of parents and grandparents who were almost always products of the great black migration from South to North. I imagine there's some pretty decent pilots running around town, and a network exec just can't be convinced to greenlight it. Damn shame. (Oprah, don't you need something like that for OWN? If not you, who?)

Posted on June 9th, 2012 2:12am