The end of Mad Men

The good TV shows...they eventually end. Some hit the rerun circuits. I still delight in watch old Seinfeld shows...the genius of Larry David and the wacky, unpredictable plots the cast would get involved in each week. Did I have a favorite Seinfeld actor? It probably would fall on Kramer. In real life, Michael Richards turned out to be a jerk...but on Seinfeld he was classic.

I know guys like Kramer. That's the beauty of it.

I remember when the sci-fi Lost In Space got cancelled when I was a boy. I was heartbroken. The robot, Dr. Smith...Will and Bloop the Chimp. Judy Robinson and the crush I had on her.

Throughout the years, other great show have come and gone. Star Trek, M*A*S*H. Laugh In and The Carol Burnett Show. The Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts. Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and Dick Clark's American Bandstand. Name your own...I could fill up a few more paragraphs with shows I liked that demised.

Now, MAD MEN is gone and I am sad that it is. It was an era that my Dad was a part of. I wasn't old enough to understand the things going on back in the show's time line for the most part...but I remember watching the astronaunts landing on the moon with my parents in our big Admiral TV in the den.

I remember when JFK was assassinated. I was in the second grade and they dismissed us from school early. I walked to school in those days and when I walked into the house, my mom was sitting in front of the TV crying. Another good Catholic boy gone.

I worked for a few years with a guy who was a part of that crazy, corporate world of the 60's. The three-martini lunches...drinking in the office and taking a nap on the couch, smoking everywhere and office flings and romances...he had been a part of them all as a advertising executive in Chicago. Divorced twice, three kids, pack of smokes a day and drove a Mustang convertible. A friendly, opinionated and brash loser...who ended up getting fired from his job for copulating with an account manager's wife in his office and getting "walked in" on. I have no idea what happened to him after that.

Mad Men was a look at the age of innocence. Before wifi, smartphones, laptops, self pump gas stations and the WNBA. I remember the classic commercial "I'd like to teach the world to sing." and thought it was stupid. I was a teenage and full of hormonal rage. Frank Zappa, Alice Cooper and the Grateful Dead were cool. The Monkees, Carpenters and John Denver were not.

There will be other shows I'm sure I'll follow in the future. I still have The Walking Dead, The Good Wife and all 40 NCIS's to fall back on.

I will miss Mad Men. I thought about the characters that were on the show and tried to figure out which once I might have most resembled in that era. I came up with Pete...the wide-eyed kid with a impeccable background who finally grew up at the end of the series. Who knows? It was a different time.

And, I wish that Don Draper had just walked down the Big Sur beach, into the water, and just disappeared into the surf and ocean.

paulie