I know I made fun of this earlier, but I want to point out something disconcerting that indicates something about the way we live today:
Of all the TV shows I’ve ever heard people discussing, by a very wide margin, Mad Men is the one where the most people talk about the ongoings of the real-life actors who star on the show but always use their stage names. Every single time. If Jon Hamm does something, people say, “This weekend, Don Draper was seen doing”… and if it’s January Jones, she’s “Betty Draper”… and if Christina Hendricks shows up to the Emmys wearing something so va-va-voom that half the men in the country tumble sideways off their chairs, people will comment, “Oooh, did you see that dress that Joan was wearing?” (Close second: The Wire.)
I’m not saying they’re making a mix-up with names… they’re actually calling the people by the names that they believe they were given in this world. Apparently the show is so psychologically and stylistically involving that people believe we actually live in an extension of that world.
This is like those Tim Meadows-era SNL sketches where they start with a nugget of a good idea, but never figure out the punchline and try WAY too hard to keep the joke going, or worse, bring Lorne Michaels onto the screen to comment about how the skit went nowhere.
