T LOunge, Mad Men-Style

Let's all raise a glass, people.

Ah, minions. What a bittersweet occasion. On the one hand, let's all get together tonight and enjoy the finest show on television, Mad Men. On the other hand, let's all get together tonight and weep over the fact that it's going away for a long time.

For our money, Season 4 is the season where it all came together. Which is funny, because prior to Season 4, we thought it already did come together.

You'll find many a historian, both amateur and those with an alphabet after their names, who will tell you that the '60s didn't really get started until there was a Kennedy in the ground and Beatles on the tarmac. In other words, 1964 is when what we all think of as the sixties, from both a cultural and historic point of view, got underway. The so-called "Camelot" years of the Kennedy administration were a prelude. An amuse-bouche between the Elvis years and the British Invasion.

How fitting, then, that the show took this oft-repeated bit of conventional wisdom and structured the entire 4-season arc around it. For the characters of Mad Men, everything from 1960 to 1963 was a setup for all the big changes to come, and we the viewers were able to travel with them as they transitioned out of the 1950s and into the bright, loud, confusing, unstable 1960s. That's what's made this season so damn enjoyable to us. It's paying off all the time we spent obsessively watching the first 3 seasons.

So, raise a glass, minions. And tell us what your favorite scene in Season 4 was.

In other news, not to be jumping on anyone's grave, but we've been toying with the idea of blogging HBO's Boardwalk Empire. Now that both Mad Men and Project Runway are winding down (and The Event is falling down), we're thinking of putting it on the roster. If you have HBO and you haven't seen it, catch up On Demand. What do the minions who've seen it think of the show? We thought the pilot was pretty disappointing (WAY too Scorsese, if you know what we mean), but it's gotten steadily better with each episode and we find ourselves becoming quite invested in some of the characters.

[Photo Credit: amctv.com/originals/madmen]

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