You'd be mad to miss it
James Forsyth 4:20pm
If you haven’t seen Mad Men—the drama set in a Madison Avenue advertising agency in 1960—already, I’d thoroughly recommend watching it. (You can catch up on the first episode here.) It is the best drama that there has been on TV in quite a while. As James Delingpole says in the magazine this week, it is "utterly brilliant."
It does, though, beg the question of why all the best TV these days seems to be American—quite a turn around from a few years back, when British shows were the best thing on American TV and the worst things on our screens had been shipped in from across the pond. Now, we export pappy, reality TV formats and import high-quality American drama. I wonder what accounts for this shift?
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Comments
Alex R
March 10th, 2008 4:32pminvestment in writing teams and production values.
William
March 10th, 2008 4:41pmLife on Mars, Waking the Dead, Foyle's War, Harry Hill's TV Burp, QI, Housewife, 49, The Road to Guantanamo, The Thick of It, etc. Plenty of good British TV - and plenty of good American TV. I suspect you see the best of American TV and all of British TV, good and bad.
Simon
March 10th, 2008 4:59pmEven a few years back, the US was producing great TV drama: West Wing, Sopranos, Lost and even 24. What has changed is the willingness of the BBC to show it -- Damages on BBC1, Heroes on BBC2 and now Mad Men on BBC4 (and BBC2). I think you would be pushed to find any UK drama on US TV -- in fact much UK TV at all in the US outside of PBS.
Max Kaye
March 10th, 2008 5:22pmWilliam: Your patriotism is charming but misplaced. With the exception of 'Ab Fab' and 'Father Ted' I am truly struggling to recall any really first class fictional TV programme - drama or comedy - produced in Britain in the past 20 years (and I'm not sure that Father Ted qualifies as British!).
salieri
March 10th, 2008 5:46pmSorry, Fraser, it does not beg the question, it raises it.
salieri
March 10th, 2008 5:46pmoops, I meant James
Max Kaye
March 10th, 2008 6:20pm.... OK, and Blackadders II-IV.
Jonathan
March 10th, 2008 6:33pmThe bbc iplayer says the first episode is unavailable. Or is that just me?
Fred
March 10th, 2008 9:03pmThis is not a good programme. It appeals mainly to those who like to watch misogynistic, unpleasant people being such to women and inferiors. It is a measure of how far we have to go as a society that this is considered not only acceptable but good. We have moved far enough that they don't include the casual racism of the period, but not far enough to avoid the anti-semitism. Plus the plots are rubbish.
William
March 11th, 2008 9:31amMax, do none of the programmes I mentioned meeet your 'first class criteria'? 'Absolutely Fabulous' better than 'The Thick of It'? It's a strange old world, right enough. 'I think you would be pushed to find any UK drama on US TV' Is that not because they tend to remake it with American actors, locations, etc? Sometimes this can have disastrous consequences, mind you. I know they're doing so with Life On Mars, for example. If you do a search, you'll find Matt Lucas and David Walliams (another couple of British talents) performing the 'American' version of Only Fools and Horses - Only Jerks and Horses.
Max Kaye
March 11th, 2008 10:34amWilliam - I'm afraid not. First class must be just that. I must, however, concede that taste is subjective which may explain the juxtaposition of Matt Lucas and David Williams in the same paragraph as 'first class'.
Ted Tedford
March 11th, 2008 11:27amI seem to be the only person who thinks The Black Adder was the best of the four series. Time for some revisionism. The Black Adder and Blackadder II were great comedies. The Black Adder was a really ambitious and innovative project, and made serious demands of the viewer. It repays repeated viewing in a way that the others don't, and had at its core a genuinely interesting conceit. And terrific casting - Brian Blessed, Peter Cook, Frank Findlay. Blackadder II was, in its way, also funny, although slightly 'broader'. Blackadder the Third and ... goes forth were lazy and formulaic, though admittedly with some good sequences. The characters became caricatures; the "as X as Y the Z on an A B in C" lines wore really thin. Even the cameos - Robbie Coltrane, Stephen Fry, Rik Mayall - were self-congratulatory in a US sitcom way; and there were really poor production values, especially in the fourth. And the 'poignancy' of the final episode of ...goes forth was sentimental, exploitative and pompous - in a Comic Relief way: if you're going to base the comedy on anachronism and fantastical caricature, it's hardly appropriate to get all po-faced in the last ten minutes and try to 'say something important' about actual recent history.