Mad Men

Spotlight and The Big Short neck-and-neck at the 2016 WGAs

Last weekend’s Writer’s Guild Awards saw Spotlight and The Big Short split the biggest honors of the night, while the final season of Mad Men received a farewell gift of Best Drama Series. Spotlight walked away with Best Original Screenplay while fellow Oscar-frontrunner The Big Short took Best Adapted screenplay. On the TV front, Mad…

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TV Review: Mad Men – Season 7 Episode 7 “Waterloo” (USA, 2014)

“They saw what I saw” And with that, the Draper torch has been passed. An incredible amount of hype and hesitation has been attached to the mid-season finale for Mad Men Season 7, and it’s safe to say that Waterloo delivered on every note it had to. From the rocket lift off at the episode’s…

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TV Review: Mad Men – Season 7 Episode 6 “The Strategy” (USA, 2014)

What an episode! The Strategy stands up against some of the finest episodes of the entire series and will likely be looked back upon a defining moment of season 7. A whole lot happened in this one, by Mad Men standards of ‘a lot’, and much of focused on Don and Peggy. Always the most…

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TV Review: Mad Men – Season 7 Episode 5 “The Runaways” (USA, 2014)

Critics and fans of this current age of television are quick to wax lyrical over the current crop of shows we have to enjoy; “The Golden Age of TV” and “TV is the new cinema!” are two phrases that get bandied about often. Yet for all of the past decade or so of television’s ‘cinematic’…

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TV Review: Mad Men – Season 7 Episode 4 “The Monolith” (USA, 2014)

‘The Monolith’ – what a title for an episode of anything not directly related to 2001: A Space Odyssey. The one shot that recalls 2001 comes early is blink-and-you-miss-it quick; a shot of the SC&P elevator doors, black and imposing against a white background. And like the monolith in 2001, this doors represent all the…

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TV Review: Mad Men – Season 7 Episode 3 “Field Trip” (USA, 2014)

Continuing the show’s dominance of 60s soundtracks, Field Trip concludes with Jimi Hendrix’s If 6 Was 9 – a song that essentially about the counter cultural movement of the 60s and how the hippies are the really aware ones against the white collar conservatives. Whilst the show does flirt occasionally with the 60s counter culture,…

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TV Review: Mad Men – Season 7 Episode 2 “A Day’s Work” (USA, 2014)

The Mad Men writing crew, whether this is planned or not, seem to always include one or two choice lines per episode that seem to sum up the theme (which certainly makes it fun to write about). Season 7’s second episode A Day’s Work had this line coming from Ted Chaough to Pete; “Just cash…

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TV Review: Mad Men – Season 7 Episode 1 “Time Zones” (USA, 2014)

This is the beginning of something – do you have time to improve your life? Would we ever have expected this kind of speech ad pitch Freddy Rumsen? His brilliant opening monologue (impeccably delivered by Joel Murray, in what was his work of the series thus far) belies every notion we’ve had of his character….

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Mad Men Season 7 – What Can We Expect?

Few show-runners are as tight lipped about their forthcoming seasons as Matthew Weiner is with Mad Men. For this reason, a certain amount of wild guessing is required… yet as is so often the case, this can lead to over analysis and needless extrapolation of minor plot points (let’s not forget the Megan Draper is…

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The Iris’ 13 Best TV Shows of 2013

We asked the contributors of The Iris to tell us their favourite shows of 2013, and here now are the top thirteen they voted! Only three new series make the list, with the other ten proving that the best only get better as the seasons continue… 13. Person of Interest – CBS, USA This continues…

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