Mad Men's symbolism, Homefront's era

Season seven of Mad Men begins with a pitch. Freddy Rumsen, played by Joel Murray, looks straight into the camera. "Are you ready?" he says. "Because I want you to pay attention. This is the beginning of something. Do you have time to improve your life? Do you have exactly thirty seconds to hear from Accutron watches?" Over the course of six seasons, Mad Men has turned into a show about social and cultural transformation, about our continued obsession with the sixties, about consumerism and the collapsing nuclear family, about the decline of New York and the rise of Los Angeles. But the seventh season begins with a return to the original subject: advertising. And that is how we know Mad Men will end in tragedy. In Mad Men, advertising and tragedy are the same.

At the center of Mad Men has always been Don's gift for the campaign; his deep psychological problems, whatever they may be, fed his enormous talent. The nature of that talent was a fundamental mystery — clients paid for it, everybody else wanted to figure it out.

Unlike other advertising men onscreen, Don isn't Cary Grant's louche comedian in North by Northwest or Richard E. Grant's monster in How to Get Ahead in Advertising. The episode ends with Don literally out in the cold, overlooking a crumbling New York from his balcony. (The show's penchant for heavy-handed symbolism is becoming a bit too heavy.) This is the fate that was always waiting for him. This is the fate that awaits anyone who lives by figuring out the nature of the moment. Eventually, the moment passes. Source: www.esquire.com

When Homefront (ABC) co-creator and executive producer Lynn Marie Latham finished casting Kyle Chandler as Jeff Metcalf in her period piece, she instructed him to rent some Cary Grant movies from the '40s. "I wanted Kyle to get a feel for the language and style of those times," Latham says. "I also wanted him to get a sense of the timing of Cary Grant and that whole era, because he impressed me as someone who could play not only drama but playful humor."It wasn't really necessary. "Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, Clark Gable - there was a whole world there from the '40s that I grew up watching," says Chandler. "It opened up that world to play with inside my head, and it was one of the main things that made me interested in acting."

If Chandler already had a running start on capturing the Jeff that Latham had in mind, the pairing of his aspiring major leaguer with Tammy Lauren's sassy would-be actress, Ginger, demanded that the audience recognize them as a breakout TV couple. -"Playing a '40s-era leading man just comes naturally for Homefront's Kyle Chandler" - The Cincinnati Enquirer (1993)

Winning the Home Front: When peace finally dawned, the world awoke to lost innocence. A world-weary seriousness, further fueled by growing cold-war uncertainty, seeped into literature, music, and film, rivaling the flag-waving, stiff-upper-lip stoicism that dominated the home-front during the war. Though sanitized combat pictures and happy-go-lucky comedies were popular with post-war moviegoers, a new breed of darker, grittier films soon rivaled them at the box-office. Dubbed film noir for their shadowy imagery as well as the darkness of their plots and characters, these films reflected the cynicism and doubt that colored the post-war world. Soon, for every courageous Marine storming the beach on the silver screen, there was a hardboiled private eye stumbling through a grim city of shadows. Source: library.umkc.edu

Noiring L.A.: Double Indemnity, Black Dahlia, and the Fears of Postwar America: Los Angeles media saturated the public consciousness with lurid stories about The Black Dahlia case. Despite the fact the city witnessed only 70 to 80 murders a year, with five newspapers and the blare of the radio, the media promoted an image of Los Angeles that reinforced those of early film noir. Described in various accounts as imaginative, flighty, given to prevarication, and possibly a habitual liar, the unsupervised Hollywood hopeful symbolized the dangers of the postwar city and its corrupting influence. To be fair, these kinds of fears originated decades earlier as the nation's industrialization in the late 19th century spurred increasing immigration from abroad and internal migration to cities. With the rise of Hollywood in the 1920s and 1930s, along with the various industries that expanded in the same period, Los Angeles emerged as an entrepot for young women intent on living the California dream, away from the watchful eyes of patriarchal families. The discovery of her body in Leimert Park fit neatly into noir sensibilities. Source: www.kcet.org

Mia Kirshner at Showtime's farewell party for "The L Word" in West Hollywood, California

Mia Kirshner has been cast in a recurring role on Netflix's new psychological thriller. The actress - known for playing Elizabeth Short in The Black Dahlia and the self-absorbed Jenny Schecter in The L Word from 2004 to 2009 - becomes the latest star to join the original series from the creators of Damages.

Friday Night Lights star Kyle Chandler, Mad Men actress Linda Cardellini and Oscar winner Sissy Spacek were previously cast.

Meanwhile, Revolution's Waleed Zuaiter has signed up for the role of Major Eckhardt, an authority figure having an affair with Cardellini's character, reports Deadline. The untitled show will focus on a family torn apart by secrets after the black sheep oldest brother returns home. Source: www.digitalspy.co.uk

Kyle Chandler was a surprise Emmy winner for best actor for the last season of Texas football drama "Friday Night Lights," blocking odds-on favorites among his fellow nominees. "I knew for a fact I would not be standing here. I did not write anything and now I'm starting to worry," said Chandler, who beat out frontrunners Jon Hamm of "Mad Men" and Steve Buscemi of "Boardwalk Empire." Source: wonderwall.msn.com