I’m usually able to do two, three, ten things at once while watching TV. Laundry. Cooking. Take the dogs out. Clean up. Facebook/tumblr/email/random. Clean up. Text. 

But I can’t with Mad Men. If I prioritize one, like laundry or computer distractions, then I have to rewind and rewatch the 20 minutes that went past. Otherwise I’m lost. If I prioritize Mad Men, I get nothing else done. It just completely sucks me in. It’s not like a dialogue show like the Gilmore Girls, 95% of the time you really don’t even need to see what’s going on, just listen. Or like Lost, where 30% are explosions, 10% is focused on the Kate, Sawyer, Jack triangle, 25% are actual plot points, another 15% of the material won’t even come up again until three shows down the road, and the rest are just characters staring off in space or glaring at another character. That show (and I love it! don’t get me wrong), only needed half of my attention. But Mad Men… it’s like diving into a book. You can try to audiobook it, but have you ever tried to audiobook a classic? Our attention spans can’t do it. It’s not giving the book enough respect. Maybe a funny essay or a chapter, but you can’t do a book that way. It’s unfair. To you and the author and the truths. You need to focus your undivided attention, if only an hour, to it’s pages. 

So it’s frustrating, because I don’t have enough time to dedicate myself to it, but dammit, it’s so good! So heartbreaking, bitter and raw masked in glamor and subtly. It’s messiness of real life. No metaphors. No happy endings. Decisions and consequences all muddled by alcohol and desires. It’s absolutely beautiful. Tragic. But, hey, that’s our life right? Lonely and tragic and muddled with vices and decisions we make, good or bad with the right or wrong intentions, and then facing those consequences. 

And it’s fun to see it happening to someone else, someone hotter, in another decade.