Mad Men

Did the John Deere riding lawnmower really need to run over the guy's foot?

We were introduced carefully to a Englishman with glasses who would manage the office, then to be told he was being sent away to the Far East. The new appointment loses his foot (in a bloody spray that one could only, in a grisly moment, take to be precursor to an assassination we all know about, either through memory or history, given the show's setting in the first years of the Sixties) and so he won't be staying with us, and we'll have the chap we know already. (Introductory writing classes tell us to keep things streamlined, to not introduce characters who won't later be essential to the plot.)

This viewer feels manipulated. As far as the show, it all makes sense, I suppose, and let's not be overly squeamish. But... The Elizabethans liked gore, by reference, more than show. (There is no mention of any fake blood at the time, even as much as they liked Lady MacBeth trying to wash her hands, and extravagant language incarnadine.) One comes away from Elizabethan drama and swordfights feeling better about himself, and coming away from the recent episode of Mad Men, well, I felt a bit shaken.

Still, the figures on my TV screen seemed to turn to something predicable, in the way of the characters of an old myth, which I hadn't felt before. Must TV life make things escalate with each episode? I don't feel as if the art of story-telling has been advanced by this new turn.

However, it shows a certain democratic vitality, and so we will suspend judgment and continue to view, even though one recalls an excellent nutshell description of the show Dexter by an old colleague I trouble from time to time. "Vile." Her word, not mine.