maddened.
September 16, 2008 at 11:20 am
© AMC
I’ve been trying to catch up to the Mad Men bandwagon lately. I’m almost finished with the first season, and just two episodes in I could see why this show is so wildly successful. It’s so smart and so earnest in how it portrays gender and societal roles in the early 60’s, and in doing so, the show almost hits the mark of satire. The set and costume design are to-die-for, the dialogue is spot-on, and the development of each character goes incredibly deep, seemingly without even trying.
So imagine my delight when Betty Draper and Ken Cosgrove both started following me on Twitter! I did a little digging and realized that a majority of the characters from the show, no matter how minor, have Twitter accounts that follow the plotlines to a tee. The hub of all the imposter action is wearesterlingcooper.com, a portal that tracks the Twitter activity and also the press attributed to the movement. Apparently an independent campaign started by people who are just huge fans of the show, and some new hybrid of fan fiction and Web 2.0, the Twitter/Mad Men phenomena is almost as captivating as the show itself:
Though the charade may appear well choreographed from the outside, in reality the effort is more haphazard, with independent fans creating characters that need to be integrated into the whole… Being a Mad Men Twitterer is akin to being in the Mafia; characters are told the identity of other characters on a need-to-know basis.
Keeping in mind that the show is focused on an advertising agency, the whole thing is so meta I just can’t even stand it.
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