Mad About Mad Men

With hundreds of television shows sprawled all over the world, it becomes difficult to pinpoint one favorite. Created to be alluring to millions of people, television shows are quite addictive, and tend to upset users after their finales. However, this state of sadness soon oozes away after another amazing television show takes the place of the previously desired one - this will never be the case with Mad Men, though.

Mad Men is by far the most interesting and seemingly realistic television show I have yet seen. The clothes, the smokes, the drinks, the furniture, the sexism, the racism, the slang, it all comes back and sits on your twenty-first century television, and you sit there befuddled wondering if you are truly seeing what you are seeing. The answer is yes, yes you are. Though I am only three seasons in, I am hooked, and I cannot keep watching episodes endlessly because despite the fact that I do not have much to do in my days off from days off, they occupy my life. When I watch Mad Men I am utterly immersed in whatever is happening in the episodes. When Don Draper is fighting with his wife, I am fighting with his wife. When Don Draper is suffering from insomnia, I am suffering from insomnia - but that is probably because I stay awake at ridiculous hours in order to maintain episode flow in my mind.

I have been so immersed in Don Draper's life that I feel as though I work in his advertising office. Depending on his mood in certain scenes, I either feel like I am his lover, his secretary, his work colleague, or a stranger he meets at a bar. The show is that realistic, that I am able to transport myself into its metaphysical existence. And most of the time, I wish this metaphysicality was a reality, so that I would meet Jon Hamm himself and express to him my deep and utmost desires of how badly I want to breathe in the air he breathes - without cigarette smoke, though. I would most likely get him to drive me to a barren picnic site, wherein I will drug him with sleeping tablets and drive off in his baby blue Cadillac into the shimmery sunset, and smell the seat belt when it is buckled onto me so that I may know, in a non-creepy manner, how his body smells like.

Just like reading a book, I have become overly familiar with the characters in the series and their thought processes, drinking preferences and desires. The characteristics of the possibly fictitious persons portrayed in the series are portrayed so well that I am beginning to remember traits. This is what draws me in. And, spoiler alert, when Peggy falls pregnant, my heart skips every second beat whenever I see her distraught reaction to what she will have to do with her child, and my heart pumps itself with adrenaline whenever she is confronted by Pete at the office thereafter. 

Though I am in awe with the show, I am not in the least obsessed. I can go days without having to resort to watching another episode, let alone thinking about it, which I suppose is the downfall of this show. With that said, though, this is all mentally erased when I come to view another episode, because in the duration of that moment in time, I am again immersed, and I do not want to exit from the reality that is lurking on my television set. Whenever I have to load up another episode, I momentarily stare down at my bare legs and Sesame Street Elmo pyjama shorts and recall that I am a mere young adult wasting her Saturday reminiscing on days and lives she had never experienced herself.

The show grasps you. You are forced to react and empathise with each character, and sometimes loathe others to the point where your mind begins plotting death threats. It wraps its metaphorical hands around your shoulders and rocks you during dramatic scenes, and releases soft fluorescent 60's style wing patterned butterflies which tickle at your cheeks and fill you with the utmost of joy whenever a joyous scene comes on. It chokes you with foggy pressure in stressful scenes with one-too-many lit Lucky Strike cigarettes, and fills your ego with delight when another office member receives a raise, particularly Peggy. In contrast to these joyous feelings, you begin to feel the burdens of sexism and racism gnaw at your spine. What I am trying to say is that every scene contains invisible reactors, which you feel when those scenes play. 

Mad Men is an exceptional series and I am excited to eventually embark onto the final series and release myself from the amorous 1960's chokehold it has caught me in.