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| Mad Men - Season One | 
 enlarge | Actors: Jon Hamm, Elisabeth Moss, Vincent Kartheiser, January Jones, Christina Hendricks
Studio: Lionsgate
Category: DVD
List Price: $49.98
Buy New: $28.48
You Save: $21.50 (43%)
New (39) Used (17) Collectible (1) from $27.62
Avg. Customer Rating:  114 reviews
Sales Rank: 43
Format: Widescreen, Box Set, Color, Dolby
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Subtitled), Spanish (Subtitled)
Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Number Of Items: 4
Running Time: 616
Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.3 x 5.6 x 1
MPN: 22938
UPC: 031398229384
EAN: 0031398229384
ASIN: B000YABIQ6
Theatrical Release Date: July 19, 2007
Release Date: July 1, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Set in 1960 New York City Mad Men explores the glamorous and ego-driven "Golden Age" of advertising where everyone is selling something and nothing is ever what it seems. And no one plays the game better than Don Draper (Golden Globe - winner Jon Hamm) Madison Avenue's biggest ad man - and ladies man - in the business.System Requirements:Running Time: 600 minutesFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: TELEVISION/SERIES & SEQUELS Rating: NR UPC: 031398229384 Manufacturer No: 22938
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Stills from Mad Men (click for larger image)
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| Customer Reviews: Read 109 more reviews...
 Great show, deplorable DVD packaging. July 9, 2008
115 out of 165 found this review helpful
As with quite a few reviews I've written, this is not concerning the quality of the show itself - but rather the DVD release (which is why you are here anyway).
MAD MEN comes packaged in a plastic case shaped to resemble a Zippo cigarette lighter. The discs are inserted into a piece of foam inside, along with a paper sleeve with some details on the program. This sort of packaging is similar to the DVD releases of the science fiction program Sliders - The First and Second Seasons.
As anyone who has bought a season of SLIDERS can inform you, the discs can be very easily damaged by the packing - particularly if your set sees quite a bit of use. The friction between the foam insert and the discs can be harmful itself, and you'll find often as you open or close the top it will catch one of the discs.
In short - this is a fragile and embarrasingly cheap design YOU are paying good money for. Evidently the public eats this sort of contrived garbage up: "Wow! It's cool 'cause it's shaped like a lighter! And the characters in MAD MEN smoke ALL the time! How do they think this stuff up?"
The box claims it is "LIMITED EDITION PACKAGING", so perhaps a better release is in the future. But, for now, be warned that you may have to use extra care when removing and replacing the discs. If you're skeptical that this could be problematic, just wait until you've used your set for a year or two - I'm willing to bet you'll have discs with a multitude of surface scratches and oily fingerprints.
As a footnote - the producers should take a page from HBO home video, nearly every one of their television releases are in attractive, unique packaging that actually protect the discs as well. From The Sopranos: The Complete First Season, to Rome - The Complete First Season, and on into the more recent John Adams (HBO Miniseries) - they're all top notch DVD packages.
EDIT 8/3/08 - It should be noted that many consumers are reporting that there is a different packaging available for the series in which the novelty faux-Zippo packaging is dropped for a more mainstream style.
 The Pursuit of Happiness July 14, 2008
59 out of 63 found this review helpful
It would be hard to imagine a more absorbingly intelligent American TV series--in terms of writing, acting, and visuals--than MAD MEN. Just before the final season of THE SOPRANOS began in late 2007, AMC presented us in the summer with the thirteen episodes of this marvelously atmospheric series created by one of the main writers of the series, Matt Weiner, that HBO insanely took a pass on. Ostensibly the series is about a group of advertising agency working for Madison Avenue advertising agency, the fictitious Sterling-Cooper, in 1960, during the Nixon-Kennedy presidential contest; yet on a deeper level the show wrestles with much larger questions about the meaning of obsession with having (and marketing) happiness in mid-20th-century America. The series centers primarily around four characters whose lives are inextricably linked with one another: Don Draper (Jon Hamm), a handsome advertising executive at Sterling-Cooper of few words but enormous creative gifts who hides a mysterious past; his beautiful but childlike wife Betty (January Jones), whom he keeps entirely separate in the suburbs from his work life and his mistresses in the city; Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss), Don's new secretary, whose naive affect and kind heart belie her tremendous ambition; and Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser), the smarmy account executive who trades on his ties to the Old New York "Knickerbocracy" to get him ahead. The four central actors are absolutely first-rate, as are several within their near orbits: John Slattery as Roger Sterling, the roguish partner who is both Don's friend and his competitor; the gifted Joan Hendricks, as the firm's femme fatale head secretary; and Robert Morse, as the firm's wily and eccentric senior partner.
Morse's presence ties the series to his famous work in both the Broadway and Hollywood production of HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS WITHOUT REALLY TRYING, and the episodes make intelligent reference also to any number of important American fictional works about the NYC business and suburban domestic worlds of the post-War era, including THE APARTMENT and THE BEST OF EVERYTHING. (Richard Yates's REVOLUTIONARY ROAD and the films of Douglas Sirk are also repeatedly evoked too, if in less direct ways.) One of the pleasures of this fine DVD set are the superb extras which allow us to see the especially thoughtful work done by the series' set designers, hairstylists, and (particularly) its head costume designer. The commentaries are generally excellent, and it will come as no surprise to fans of the series that not only the series creator, Matt Weiner, and its writers are especially eloquent but so too are its actors, especially Hamm and Kartheiser. The eye-catching design of this DVD package (fashioned to look and open, naturally, like a classic American manufacturer's product: a Zippo lighter) has been rightly praised for its innovation but also rightly criticized for its unwieldiness.
Mad about Mad Men. April 26, 2008
39 out of 54 found this review helpful
Sopranos' writer, Matthew Weiner's Mad Men is arguably the best reason to own a television these days. Set in 1960s New York City, the show involves a group of Madison Avenue ad executives and their naughty secretaries working, smoking, drinking, and socializing together at the Sterling Cooper advertising agency. The retro show provides a window into an American culture of Nixon-era social taboo-isms: alcoholism, sexism, racism, and consumerism, which is mainly what makes Mad Men so fascinating. It's easy to see why the show won two Golden Globe awards in 2007 for Best Television Series - Drama, and Best Actor in a Television Series - Drama.
Mad Men's characters are a truly well-drawn bunch. For instance, the protagonist, Don Draper (Jon Hamm), is not only the creative director and junior partner of Sterling Cooper, he is also the illegitimate son of a prostitute, now living an assumed identity to hide his inner "whore child" from his wife and competitive Madison Avenue colleagues. Don is unhappy with his life. He drinks Jack Daniels, chain smokes Lucky Strikes, cheats on his trophy wife Betty (January Jones), and constantly dreams of escaping his life. Betty, a former model, represents the classic '50s homemaker, but suffers from profound loneliness, sexual frustration, and dissatisfaction with her "perfect" life. (Household appliances literally give her orgasms, and in one of my favorite scenes, Betty makes her point with a shotgun.) With aspirations of becoming the agency's first woman copywriter, Peggy Olsen (Elisabeth Moss) is a new secretary at Sterling Cooper, who is unexpectedly confronted with an unwanted pregnancy. Italian bachelor, Salvatore Romano (Bryan Batt), is Sterling Cooper's macho art director, a homosexual afraid to come out of the closet, and equally afraid to act on his sexual impulses.
Imagine the "Mad-ness" of a bunch of complicated, alcoholic ("liquid lunch, anyone?"), Nixon-era, GQ ad men in starched white shirts, spending their workdays in a fog of cigarette smoke, and you'll have the basic premise of this highly-acclaimed, must-see show, which is now long overdue on DVD.
G. Merritt
Glorious, involving, terrific drama; best TV in years June 22, 2008
30 out of 34 found this review helpful
The summer of 2007 is when Mad Men swept the nation. Why? It is anti-politically correct. It is an intelligent, thinking man's ("persons" would be too PC for *this* show)) show for adults. Not to mention the fantastic, Rod Serling-esque realism in the quality of its writing, the direction, the scope, and the dazzling work of the previously unknown cast - now all certified household names - stars, if you will (none will ever have to worry about getting future work). The best part of this casting is that there are no familiar public-entrenched "personalities" to disturb the continuity and believability of the proceedings; a "star" would have interupted the realism of the story and surroundings. And, in the process, we get to discover a whole new set of actors (their work and camaraderie is gaspingly satisfying, the most sheerly pleasurable in recent memory).
Matthew Weiner, the show's genius creator, has painstakingly ensured that we're really getting a believable early 1960s. There's not an irritatingly currently contemporary viewpoint to be found anywhere. Of course the show is depicted in a hindsight manner; but all of the dialogue, situations and characters are all breathtakingly, reassuringly of a past time. Despite the deceptively, smoothly stylized look via the posh sets and clothes, the atmosphere is constantly invaded by the smog of cigarette smoke; we're not used to seeing such flagrant puffing and inhaling on film. You can almost smell the overfilled ashtrays. No one goes outside to smoke here. This is the Martini and Rossi era, and everyone in corporate America smoked and drank as if it were part of the life and job description. Then, too, you see women used as business, sexual and marital props. They existed to serve their men (and I hope the PC feminists are in a tizzy, because they should be). To provide their dictation, their pleasure, their masculine image, their food, their offspring. Of course, we see in Joan, the foxy, knowing secretary, using the men in return to get what she wants; and we see in Don Draper's wife (brilliantly, tensely enacted by January Jones) an all-pervasive, unnameable malcontentedness. We see the glaring dichotomies of the men, looking Madison Avenue dapper, but behaving and displaying attitudes of overgrown high schoolers. Most of these men, from today's standpoint, are bastards; and no attempt is made to Ralph Nader or Alan Alda-ize them (it would be interesting to have the series run into the late 1960s, when these men are forced to run into the massive social consciousness that emerged in a shockingly short time later).
Most of all though, the tone of the show is presided over by the brilliant Jon Hamm, whose Don Draper is the most multifaceted character on television in ages. Hamm is blessedly allowed several moments in deep repose, and we can see the massively disturbed soul behind the savvily successful executive. And yet the character's troubled mien allows him to understand human nature, therefore key elements in advertising - how to emotionally ensnare the public into believing the merit of a product or slogan. He's also smart enough to see that Peggy (wonderfully played by Elizabeth Moss), the secretary, with her questioning, probing mind, has a depth unavailable to most of the male executives, to provide key insights into how to sell a product. Hamm's Don Draper is already a classic, public-entrenched persona. It is a stunningly limned portrayal.
The great strength of this show is its quietly commanding, un-TV-like sense of pacing. You wouldn't call this a suspense show, yet the bottled-up, stealthy sense of pacing keeps us in a tantalizingly unnerved state; you always wait for that cork to explode unexpectedly. The brilliance here is that the explosion factor doesn't always come when we expect it; but the build-up leads us to believe it will. Those explosions come when the build-up has not been prepared, and happens in a swift, tightly controlled manner, never spilling over into predictably cheap shock value.
After each show, we smile, having been on the edge of our seats, engrossed, and left deeply satisfied - and impatient for next week. Thursdays at 10:00. Phone turned off, a glass of wine or spirits.
Another great asset to the overall tone is the darkly cynical humor. Never overplayed or explicitly self-conscious, it nevertheless ingeniously, deftly exposes the foibles of human nature. The most overt humor is slyly depicted by Christina Hendricks, whose eye-poppingly Kim Novak-voluptuous, leeringly confident secretary Joan is an absolute delight. Hendricks looks and acts so unerringly real of the time period, it would be a shock to see her as she really is in real life. She and John Slattery, perfectly playing the sloppily amorous boss, create genuine sexual edge in their scenes together.
Vincent Kartheiser, playing Pete Campbell, an insecure, untalented but ruthlessly ambitious business and social climber, is scarily effective; there's an element of genuine danger in this character. Campbell is so aware of his limitations, and you sense he'd stop at nothing to prove himself.
The good-time unreformed Frat-elevated-to-biz-executive contingent, played by Rich Sommer, Aaron Staton, Michael Gladis, and Bryan Batt, strike just the right notes; they're all joyfully oversexed, blithely good-time, but very real, and we get to see inside their characters.
Robert Morse, the only familiar name in this cast, is perfect as the head of Sterling Cooper, a boss who cares not what goes on as long as the money rolls in.
I hope Mad Men will be on for years to come. HBO's loss is AMC's considerable gain - and is the best-written, best acted show of our time. It will be heralded, discussed, and acclaimed for years to come, and be held as the classic show it has already become. I have never enjoyed something so much as this intriguing, wonderfully engrossing drama. Cheers and thanks to all those involved.
 The show's brilliant, the packaging? Not so much. July 5, 2008
25 out of 36 found this review helpful
The show itself is fabulous. And I'm pretty sure most of the people hitting this page would agree. Otherwise, why else would you be here? You've seen the show, you love it, and you just want to know whether or not to buy the DVD.
Yes, you totally should. Because the show's brilliant, and therefore you should support it.
The packaging is horrendous. It looks awesome. Zippo lighter shooting out flames. The flames are the problem though. You have to be really careful taking the discs out (set up stadium style) as you're going to get your fingerprints all over them. And you have to be super careful closing the box, as the way it's set up, you end up scratching the discs.
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