#i don even like men

[halolime]

Jesse BreakingBad has me kicking my feet everytime he's there. I feel like a teenage girl

[damian-lil-babybat]

Damian al Ghul Wayne

"I'm going to choose my own colors."

[raylangivins]

When Betty finally confronts Don about the Dick Whitman shoebox that’s television babeyyyyy. I could watch two hours of this.

[mariocki]

Donald Sutherland guest stars as the appropriately named Philip Guest, a less appropriately unbalanced kidnapper, in Gideon's Way: The Millionaire's Daughter (1.21, ITC, 1966)

[cinematicnomad]

what are your favorite episodes of mad men?

oh ho, so you're out here asking the REAL questions!!

god this is hard. i just tried to go through the list of episodes and before i'd even finished scrolling through s2, i'd already jotted down 6 "favorite" episodes. it's just!! SUCH a good show, and the episodes really span the gamut of what tv can actually BE. like, there are episodes that come to mind for just how absolutely buckwild FUN they are (3.13 is basically a heist episode! don tricking roger into getting wasted and throwing up oysters in 1.07 makes me laugh EVERY time! watching everyone in the office get high and pull an all-weekender to win chevy in 6.08 is a blast!) but then there's the poignant episodes. the one's that fucking break me. the culmination of s1 resulting in don's nostalgia pitch in 1.13. the exploration of don and peggy's bond in the perfect 4.07. the end of lane's arc in 5.12 and all of the grief that follows. the moon landing and the way these people have all shaped each other being laid bare in 7.07. the end of it all in 7.14!! peggy's voice any time she chastised don: "that's not true."

that doesn't even get into, like, every time we got to see the office throw a big party and all the characters got to interact with each other. THE MOWER!! betty and don going to rome, their last perfect weekend together before reality crashed down on them. father gill trying and failing to "save" peggy through catholic guilt. megan trying to love a man who only loves the beginning of things (faye!!). joan fighting tooth and nail for every ounce of respect she built for herself. SALLY! EVERY MOMENT WITH SALLY! the tragedy of sal romano, his crush on ken cosgrove. MICHAEL GINSBERG and his friendship with peggy and stan!! anna draper who knew don's secret and loved him anyway. the entirety of peggy and pete's relationship, simmering in the background but forever informing their interactions.

i'm sorry i could keep going. i really do fucking love this show more than words can capture. i have to stop myself or else i'd just ramble forever.

[lastofthe20thcenturygirls]

um how did we go from this to THAT

[scientologyblows]

matt made sure to unfollow jim as fast as he could but not don. i can only imagine the chaos happening since everyone is split up right now (matt and friends in milwaukee, ryan and justin in LA).

[zosonils]

historians will say they were esteemed colleagues

[socialbunny]

hopefully i dont portray skip as someone with rizz of any sort in any of my posts. he has zero rizz. no intentional charm At All. women throw themselves at him even with hes out with his wife and he'll stare them dead in the face and keep it moving

[dykeseinfeld]

don draper. unfortunately my model for masculinity.

[hudbannonarchive]

as i’ve been watching the sopranos i’ve been thinking a lot about how someone could watch this show and find tony to be an aspirational character and obviously the answer is in the way he’s framed. i think when you compare him to the rest of the big three peak tv antiheroes (don draper and walter white) he’s technically the most evil and i also think he’s the one who’s painted in the most sympathetic light, clearly evident in the way everyone around him is either a total baffoon or made to look one by the narrative. to me this is a classic case of the people writing a show misplacing its themes and ideas. in contrast, don is technically the least evil (i’ve said before those other two kill people don just cheats) but i think he’s framed the most critically. ofc you do feel sympathy for him, but i think he’s largely an aspirational figure to audiences because of the lie he’s constructed that is his life. audiences want to be him because he’s handsome rich brilliant and charming but don’t realize or care that all sits on top of his empty soul like oil on water. so that one is definitely on them.

[spector]

FASCINATING cinematic choices with editing in this sopranos episode (s1e7) ... the way flashbacks are spliced into the episode is something i haven't seen in a tv series before ... and the way the final flashback from tony's childhood is like. so explosively overacted, the way the kid actor playing little tony has a suddenly shaved head, giving it a total mismatch and this sense of Classic Dreamlike Logic from Prestige TV.... the way they freeze frame on the scared kids face and then transition to present in a white out, no sound... very interesting to see that

[takiki16]

are u entering a jon hamm phase?

[skrunksthatwunk]

majima everywhere: future encounter pt 5/5

pt 1 / pt 4

[righteousruin]

Shoutout to BTAS Barbara for hallucinating the hottest and meanest version of Bane whose vibes definitely didn't get recycled for Thrax three years later

[idiopathicsmile]

you know what really grinds my gears?

okay, bear with me: so as you may know, harry houdini and arthur conan doyle were friends, at least for a while.

by the early 1920s, both arthur conan doyle and acd's wife jean, aka lady doyle, believed whole-heartedly in spiritualism, talking to ghosts and all of that. (sidenote: this was of course right on the heels of a devastating world war and a devastating pandemic, both of which had created a huge population of grieving people, so spiritualism was having a moment.)

lady doyle sincerely thought she had the ability to go into a trance state and pass along messages in writing from the dead. she offered to do this for houdini. houdini agreed.

lady doyle attempted to channel houdini's late mother. she basically drew a cross at the top of the paper and filled it with generic platitudes addressed to "harry." houdini's mom was jewish and didn't talk like that, so houdini knew the jig was up, even if lady doyle didn't. but not wanting to make the situation awkward, he kind of went along with it to their faces.

then acd decided to publish a glowing account of the seance, and since both he and houdini were super famous, it got a lot of attention, and letters started pouring in for houdini, asking if this was true. ultimately, houdini couldn't lie about it. so he essentially said, like, "yeah, i think lady doyle THINKS she can talk to ghosts but she absolutely can't." and it ruined his friendship with acd forever.

and then of course a lot of the people running seances weren't even well-intentioned like lady doyle, they were just simple charlatans taking advantage of traumatized people mourning loved ones. in houdini's youth, he and his wife had traveled the carnival circuit where he did an act pretending to commune with spirits, so he knew all the tricks of the trade AND he had lingering guilt over having done this, AND he was infuriated by this increasingly popular wave of con artists so he decided to assemble a team of anti-grifting grifters and together they went on the road exposing whichever spiritualists were preying on the locals.

houdini's best agent was a young woman named rose mackenberg, who donned disguises to visit the fraud de jour and then importantly sussed out what non-supernatural thing was actually happening, and then houdini would demonstrate the techniques onstage to packed audiences.

(if you want to know more, check out episode 175, "ghost racket crusade" of the podcast Criminal or read Tony Wolf's book The Real-Life Ghostbusting Adventures of Rose Mackenberg.)

but yeah, what really gets my goat is that all this happened and as far as i know, we still don't have like four seasons of a Leverage-style historical procedural about rose mackenberg and the rest of the crew having adventures in the 1920s as they unmask craven hucksters all over the united states. (what we do have, apparently, is one season of a show called "houdini and doyle" which is about the oddball friendship of two contrasting men solving sometimes-actually-supernatural mysteries, and whose premise does i think at the very least a real disservice to houdini's whole quest and also totally erases rose, who is arguably the most interesting part of this story to me.)

i am just steamed about this. steamed.