Set The DVR

Although our television is usually tuned to Giants games, news or the Disney Channel, we make a little bit of time for series television. For instance, we watch Burn Notice on USA, a breezy crime/spy program, because one of our friends is a writer on the show.

When we lived in Southern California, nearly everyone we knew was connected to the entertainment industry somehow. Some were very successful, whether on screen (such as the Little Mermaid) or as part of the vast army of busniesspeople, cameramen, technicians, scenery and makeup artists and the like. We knew just as many people who spent year after year trying to gain a foothold in the industry, whether as a writer, actor, editor or some other capacity. When the dream of Hollywood takes hold, it does not let go. The tenacity of these people in the face of daunting odds is inspiring.

Our friend the Burn Notice writer lived the dream. Not long after he and his wife arrived in Hollywood, he managed to meet the right people and intern for the right projects so that he was in the right place at the right time when Burn Notice came along. He started off as a writer's assistant, and as the show became a hit, he worked his way up to become one of the senior writers, with at least a couple of the episodes to his credit. The show is enjoyable in the manner of a summer movie -- fast paced and witty, with explosions. It has an honored place among Mythbusters and Top Gear in our DVR's schedule programming.

Another show that we will add to our DVR roster starting this weekend is Mad Men. We arrived late to this party. Over the past three years, Mad Men garnered enormous critical acclaim even as it toiled in the far reaches of most cable lineups on AMC. We finally gave it a shot a few months ago, Netflixing the series DVDs. It quickly became one of those shows that we could not turn away from. The next disk could not arrive in the mail fast enough. The show expertly evokes the look and feel of the early sixties, or at least the early sixties as we imagine they were. The smoking, drinking, casual sexual harrassment ... it's all there. They even use these glasses, which I grew up with, and I'm pretty sure still live in Dad's cupboards:


The show plays like a long movie, with multiple story arcs given plenty of opportunity to live and breathe. The story payoffs are satisfying, and there is a depth of character that can only exist in long-form TV series, of which Mad Men takes full advantage. The lead character is one of the most intriguingly flawed figures in recent TV history; you find yourself questioning why you like him so much and pull so hard for him. The show is highly stylized, yet it is the imperfection of its lead that gives it deeper roots in humanity than almost anything else on television. Sure, it's a soap opera with moodier lighting and better clothes, but it is produced with great care and expertise.

We finished going through the first two seasons just as the disks for Season 3 were released, which we dashed through quickly. Season 4 begins on AMC Sunday evening. Now that we have caught up to the broadcast schedule, we will have to suffer through weeklong delays as each episode is released. The horror.