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THURSDAY, APRIL 10, 2014
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
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MCCLATCHY-TRIBUNE
AMC's 'Mad Men' begins a two-part final season
MCCLATCHY-TRIBUNE
AMC's "Mad Met" returns at 10 p.m. EDT Sunday for the beginning of its swan song: The first seven episodes of season seven start airing this month (AMC calls it "The Beginning"), and the final seven episodes (aka "The End") will air in 2015.
When viewers last saw Don Draper (Jon Hamm), he was taking a forced break from his job atop ad agency SC&P after a season of marked absenteeism. Don also came clean to his colleagues and family about his past as Dick Whitman.
The new season begins in January 1969 around the time of Richard Nixon's first presidential inauguration. There's a new occupant in Don's old office, and the tone at SC&P is tense. Even usually calm, calibrated Ken Cosgrove (Aaron Staton) yells a lot, although that might have more to do with wearing an eye patch after last season's injury (there's a great gag related to his vision impairment).
Roger (John Slattery) gets invited to lunch with his newly blissed-out daughter. And Joan (Christina Hendricks) receives a new work challenge. Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss) takes a watch-commercial pitch from washed-up freelancer Freddy Rumsen (Joel Murray), and it's surprisingly artful, which
Peggy doesn't hesitate to note.
Peggy doesn't hesitate to note "There's a nice way to say that and there's the way you just said it," a perturbed Freddy replies just as he announces his plan to get another cup of coffee before he leaves her office.
"You really put the free in freelancer, don't you?" Peggy teases.
It's one of the few lighter moments in this first hour of the new season, which is generally a pretty morose affair, particularly its dower ending. Has Don really hit rock bottom _ he's "damaged goods," as another character suggests _ or does he have further to fall?
Executive producer Matthew Weiner, who wrote Sunday's season premiere (directed by executive producer Scott Hornbacher), said the theme for the show's final season is consequences and whether change is possible.
"When your needs are met, you start thinking about other things," Weiner said in a recent teleconference with reporters. "For Don we saw real growth over the last season from what are the material concerns of your life to what are the immaterial concerns of your life, and that's really what the ending of the show is about."
Weiner has always been scrupulous about protecting any spoilers in "Mad Men" stories, especially after the show became a cultural
phenomenon. Sometimes he even asks critics not to reveal what year a new season is set in (that was not on the list of verboten "spoilers" this time). He said the desire for secrecy grew out of his experience as a writer on "The Sopranos."
"I think about how much fun it was before this whole machinery of spoilers was in operation, when you were going to sit down and have no idea what is going to happen, and that's even more important for our show because the plots are not told in extremes," he said. "They're happening on a very human scale. Don forgetting to pick Sally up at school is a big story point. I love to surprise, and I love the fact that we have a unique position commercially as being something you just don't know what's going to happen when you sit down to watch. I watch trailers for movies, and knowing the entire story in the movie is disappointing for me."
So while Weiner is loath to tease much of the new season beyond a very general theme, he's happy to reflect on the characters' journeys so far. One thing viewers can count on: Limited happiness.
"Drama is made out of conflict," he said. "People's lives being good is never good drama. So we're always looking for more problems for these people."
Imagine Dragons, Lorde lead award nominations
MCCLATCHY-TRIBUNE
Imagine Dragons, Lorde,
Justin Timberlake, Katy
Perry, Macklemore & Ryan
Lewis and Miley Cyrus lead the nominations for the 2014 Billboard Music Awards.
Atop the pack of nominees, which were unveiled Wednesday morning, are Las Vegas rockers Imagine Dragons and 17-year-old New Zealand pop prodigy Lorde, who both scored 12 nods.
Imagine Dragons and Lorde dominated radio last year with inescapable hits. The quintet's Grammy-winning smash "Radioactive" made Billboard history in February after spending a record-breaking 77 weeks on the trade publication's Hot 100 chart and Lorde's biting, yet ubiquitous, hit "Royals" nabbed her the honor of being the youngest artist to win song of the year at the Grammys. The two will square off in nine categories,
including Hot 100 artist. digital song, radio songs artist, top rock artist and rock album.
Lorde is also up for new artist against Capital Cities, Ariana Grande and Passenger.
Timberlake scored 11 nods, including top artist and Billboard 200 album for his comeback opus, "The 20/20 Experience" (the two-part album even competes with itself in the R&B album category).
Perry is up for 10, including top artist, top female and Hot 100 artist, and breakout Seattle hip-hop duo Macklemore & Ryan Lewis are in the running for eight trophies.
Cyrus, whose transition from Disney princess to urban pop provocateur has yet to pay off with any actual awards, could see her luck reversed on the Billboard stage. The headline-grabber is up for nine, including top artist, top female, Hot 100
artist and Top Streaming artist.
Finalists for Billboard's Milestone award, which was launched last year to honor musical ingenuity and innovation (Justin Bieber won the inaugural fan-voted award to mostly jeers) are Imagine Dragons, John Legend, Luke Bryan, OneRepublic, Ellie Goulding and Carrie Underwood. The six finalists will be whittled down to three and fans logging their votes online can also enter a contest to present the honor alongside Kelly Rowland during the telecast.
Other notable nominees include Beyonce, whose surprise album is up for a slew of honors, Pharrell Williams, Robin Thicke, Luke Bryan and Eminem.
The 2014 Billboard Music Awards will air live (except on the West Coast) from the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas on May 18 at 8 p.m. EDT on ABC.
TELEVISION
HBO renews 'Game of Thrones' after record fourth season premiere
It's not a surprise, but still good to hear. HBO has picked up "Game of Thrones" for two additional years.
The lavish and brutal fantasy series returned to a record audience for its fourth season premiere Sunday night, drawing 6.6 million viewers. That was up more than 50 percent from the show's third season premiere. The show's combined three showings on Sunday drew a gross audience of 8.2 million. It was also the most-watched HBO program since the finale of "The Sozanos" in 2007.
HBO had been renewing the series one season at a time,but
clearly with an audience like this, it knows the crowds aren't going away anytime soon. Michael Lombardo, president, HBO Programming, said in a statement: "Game of Thrones' is a phenomenon like no other. David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, along with their talented collaborators, continue to surpass themselves, and we look forward to more of their dazzling storytelling."
The two new seasons will be the fifth and sixth and will tackle events in the fourth and fifth books in author George R.R. Martin's series "A Song of Ice and Fire." The series, set in the fictional Seven Kingdoms of Westeros, is loosely inspired by the real life Wars of the Roses in 15th century England. We say loose, because the British crown never had to deal with dragons and ice zombies.
"A Feast for Crows" and "A Dance With Dragons" are notable in the series for following different sets of characters in the same time frame. While the show's producers, Benioff and Weiss, have not said how they will handle the events of those books on screen, it's likely the character stories will be reconfigured to keep all the characters (at least those still alive) in every season.
Meanwhile, fans eagerly await word on when Martin will finish the sixth book in the series, "The Winds of Winter." The TV series adapted from his books is steadily bearing down on the writer, who has been very tight-lipped about his progress on the story and when he anticipates its publication.
— McClatchy-Tribune
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