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155 of 168 found the following review helpful:
 What happens to a dream blown to pieces? Oct 13, 2010
By J. A Bowen
"tabithajab"
When I think about Season 4, one word comes to mind -- "dark". This is the season of Don's discontent -- indeed, his comeuppance, if you will -- and as the season opens we find him living in a seedy Greenwich Village apartment, where his rendevous with the ladies end all too often in rebuffs rather than ravishings. On the work front, Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce has all the trappings of success. They have nice offices, a corral of secretaries, and a big client list. Don is being interviewed by a magazine asking the question "Who is Don Draper?" and further on into the season, we see him accepting a Cleo for his talents. The only problem is, he's drunk when he's accepting it. In fact, he's drunk most of the time. Dead drunk, and his decisions and fine-honed genius with words suffer for it.
Of course, being Don, he looks good. Hard to believe a man can drink that much and still not show the wages of sin. But as the season progresses, we see him losing his grip more and more, on the business as well as the personal front. He blows up at clients, neglects his children, and uses his women to get what he thinks he wants. At the same time, he is watching himself, from a distance, deconstruct. He starts keeping a journal and swims every day to clear his mind. You keep thinking he's going to get a grip on it. He has to. He's Don Draper.
The supporting staff is suffering too, all the with exception of Peggy, who seems to have really come into her own this season. She is confident, perky, and looks great. She's even dressing the part. Joan Holloway is given more to do this season, thankfully, and her character only gets more intriguing. There's really no telling what Joan can pull off, because no matter what happens to her, she keeps on going. As for Betty Draper, she isn't present too often, but when she is, she is still very much the Mom you love to hate, and she doesn't seem to have learned a thing.
I can't reveal too much more without spoiling the season. In fact, I probably should have put spoiler alerts in the beginning of this, but I don't think I've ruined anything for anybody. This is great stuff, amazing stuff for television, and no matter how painful the journey, you've just got to watch Season Four. All of it.
59 of 68 found the following review helpful:
Best Show on Tv, Bar None Nov 08, 2010
By carol irvin
"carol irvin"
The excellence continues with this fourth season of MAD MEN. Matthew Weiner, its creator, was one of the writers on the SOPRANOS. He hovers over every detail of MAD MEN, getting it absolutely right, just as creator David Chase did for the SOPRANOS. The first choice he made was absolutely insisting that Jon Hamm had to play the lead. Everyone thought Weiner was crazy insisting on an unknown. Result? Jon Hamm is now a major tv star and probably going to be a major star period. Next bit of historical marvel was that HBO turned this show down so that Weiner took it to an upstart cable channel, AMC, and ended up putting AMC on the map. For those of you who don't know it, this show IS Weiner and this was nowhere more evident than at the 2010 Emmy Awards show where he walked up to the stage to receive Emmy after Emmy including the best drama show one, the big one. I am dwelling on this point because often viewers do not realize that it is one person off camera who is making the whole thing happen. That is certainly the case here.
Don Draper (played by Jon Hamm) continues to be the fulcrum for the show; everything pivots around him. However, it is a very rich band of characters indeed who do that pivoting. In season four, everyone is coming into his or her own, whether for good or ill. Draper himself goes through a huge melting down crisis post divorce, flailing around now that what little identity he had seems gone. His entire identity now comes down to his job, which is finding a way to brilliantly project falsity, which is a metaphor for his entire life.
Betty, his ex, is becoming more of what she has been in the prior three seasons. More brittle, more vicious, more intent on achieving her ever elusive goal of perfection. This becomes so paramount that one scarcely notices her Grace Kelly like appearance anymore. Her new husband belatedly realizes what a morass he has gotten himself into by marrying her. Her relationship with Sally becomes one of the best of the show. There is a boiling point coming between the two of them which I am awaiting more eagerly than any other plot development,
Don Draper's secretary also becomes a pivotal force. For half of the show it is an old battleaxe who is just fantastic and then we get a very attractive, very maternal young French Canadian woman. As the show gathers steam towards its end, it becomes apparent that this is a very important character to watch.
Peggy and Joan also remain big characters. Rounding them out as the women of the mid 60s in the work force, is a woman who is the harbinger of things to come. She has her doctorate in psychology and is using it to measure and predict consumer acts in the advertising world. She begins dating Don and Peggy sees her as a role model for herself, a woman much further up in the business world model. Joan is still mired in the head secretarial world and also is stuck with unfinished business with her major weasel of a boss, Roger Sterling.
Don Draper's nemesis Peter becomes no longer his nemesis but now a comrade in arms. Where once these two were at odds, they now need one another, more than even they realize as Roger Sterling gives them only half the tale of a major crisis. Pete Campbell has changed a great deal as a character and is now a force for stability that once seemed impossible.
The only bad thing about season four is that it ended. For those of us who are in its thrall, that we have to wait until next summer to delve into season five, is a very sad state of affairs indeed.
23 of 29 found the following review helpful:
Best Season Yet Jan 18, 2011
By Luz M. Garcia
While I cannot rate the packaging/full product itself (though if it is anything like its predecessors, I can at least say it will be good), I can say that this is undoubtedly the best season of Mad Men yet. This season is the most enticing from its queezy beginning, to an earth-shattering end. You will see most complex character development in this seasons then others and bigger dilemmas, dramas and setbacks...this is a must have for Mad Men lovers, and a must see willing to give Mad Men a second (or fourth) chance
9 of 11 found the following review helpful:
 Not what I was expecting Oct 02, 2011
By K
I love "Mad Men", and have wanted to start collecting the dvd sets for awhile now, but they have generally been priced higher than I wanted to pay. Imagine my excitement, then, when I found Amazon selling a new copy of season 4 for only $9.99- I was thrilled, but also cautious- I figured there had to be a catch. I researched to make sure the packaging pictured on Amazon was the actual packaging for the dvd set- it was, so I placed my order. It just arrived yesterday, but instead of the shadow picture of Don Draper falling, the cover has a picture of Don Draper standing by a window looking out. I recognize I got a great deal, but if Amazon is not actually selling me the version pictured, then that information should be specified somewhere. I would have paid a little more to get the actual product instead of a version from who-knows-where.
9 of 11 found the following review helpful:
Pound for Pound, Probably the Best Season Yet Jan 28, 2011
By Adam Beck
"carolinaguy"
Though Season 4 petered out a bit at the end with a few too many plot mechanics and a distressingly predictable and repetetive finale, the first 10 episodes were, all in all, sensational. The Season 3 finale, "Shut the Door. Have a Seat.", set up a delicious situation which was a chance to reinvent all the characters and storylines. Matthew Weiner and company took advantage of the plum they handed themselves and got the new firm set up in cutting edge digs and managed to weave old characters in and out as needed. Overall, the show was fresher, more focused, and more streamlined. This season really did trace the trajectory of Don's downfall from booze and buried sorrow--which culminated in a hit-between-the-eyes moment in episode 6, "Waldorf Stories". It was so perfectly set up that when you got the impact of it, it was truly stunning. (January Jones as Betty Draper was in this episode for one brief scene, but she delivered the three-word line that made Don realize he'd finally hit rock bottom. Interesting the connection those two still have.) From there, we began to follow Don as he made the first real attempt we've ever seen to take control of his demons. This led to what may be the best episode the show has ever produced, "The Suitcase", episode 7. (Or at least equal to Season 2's phenomenal finale, "Meditations in an Emergency".) Primarily a two-character piece for Don and Peggy, it was the episode the entire series had been building to, if only we'd known it. The two had to work overnight on a Samsonite presentation and various demons and frustrations finally escaped and Don got some bad news from California that at last led to a needed breakdown. Written by creator/executive producer Weiner, "The Suitcase" is television at its very finest and may well win Jon Hamm and Elisabeth Moss those elusive Emmys come this summer. (Weiner, at least, is basically assured another writing Emmy for this masterpiece.) From this point, the financial woes of the newly-formed Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce take center stage and involve a fascinating examination of women's roles in the '60s workplace, as well as a life crisis for Roger Sterling, which provides John Slattery the chance to do career-best work. The final few episodes don't live up to the start. They're well-crafted, but it's distressing to see the plot wheels turning a bit obviously and watch Don appear to begin repeating familiar patterns. However, we never know what Season 5 will bring us.
Other delights from #4:
--Pete Campbell becomes a man with a backbone and a conscience
--Don gets saddled with battle-axe secretary Miss Ida Blankenship, who constantly spouts wildly inappropriate comments and is played to delightful perfection by Randee Heller; this humor is much-needed as a juxtaposition to some of the darker goings-on
--Roger writes his memoirs!
--Joan leads a conga line!
--Some Japanese businessmen are quite impressed by Joan's, er, assets
--John Slattery directs a couple of episodes, "The Rejected" and "Blowing Smoke", and proves himself as capable behind the camera as in front
--Episode 5, "The Chyrsanthemum and the Sword", features a hilarious caper played on a rival agency and a truly good performance from January Jones. She sometimes gets some flack, but I think she plays an incredibly complex character with just the right touch of lacquered veneer over raging internal chaos. In this episode she ranges from near child abuse to breaking our hearts talking to a child psychologist with a thinly-veiled desperate need to be heard. This episode won the Writers Guild award for outstanding single episode of a drama series. (The series, incidentally, won the award for overall drama series as well.)
In all, this was a fascinating season exploring the difference between a character's appearance and their reality. Everyone in a large cast got chances to shine--and they still made room to incorporate some historical happenings which are skillfully woven in.
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