Mad Men sold me Don Draper.
Flash forward 20 years, and Your Friends & Neighbors is selling me something very different. It's the same actor. But time has changed everything. The suit is now a quarter-zip. The Manhattan ad agency is now a cul-de-sac. We see Don Draper in shorts.
Jon Hamm has aged in front of our eyes. He's like a real-time preview of what's coming. And honestly, it just feels sort of sad.
Everything that was cool and sexy about Mad Men is so depressingly absent in this new Apple series. We're still being sold. It's just nothing we want. The show is trying so hard to capture the things that worked in the original -- the face, the voice, the pitchman cadence -- but the magic is gone. Hamm still makes you want things... but everything he is describing is stuff he is stealing. The magic was when he was selling you something that wasn't tangible. Not an object. But a feeling. Now he's just reading off specs and price tags. Same delivery, but completely soulless. The other Mad Men ingredients are here, too. The premise that you can rewrite who you are. The sex, the drinking, the loneliness of being good at things that don't love you back. None of it lands the same. The entire show feels like a cheap imitation of Mad Men with a much bigger budget.
But, if I completely ignore how bad the show really is... It is sort of poetic that the suburbs Don Draper ran from are where John Hamm ended up.
Or maybe the show isn't bad. Maybe I'm just watching myself age and don't like it.