"Pragmatism Refreshed" ends: so does Lane Pryce

Final entry for this blog. From this day forward, I'll be blogging at Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed, and the URL will be http://jamesian58.blogspot.com/ So for now, let's say something about Mad Men, which has also of late been about endings!


Episode 12 will be dominated in the mind of most viewers by the death of a character who has been a mainstay of the show since the beginning of the third season, Lane Pryce, as played with uniform greatness, by Jared Harris.

This death, a suicide, happens as most of the office continues to float on a sense of elation about landing a big automotive account: Jaguar.

The writers bring these two facts: Lane’s despair and his co-workers’ elation, into several layers of collision. We see for example that the Jaguar of the time was mechanically a rather shoddy piece of work, and this in fact dooms Lane’s first effort to kill himself, by asphyxiation. He can’t get the ignition to work when he needs it to!      


When Lane does manage to kill himself, it is with a noose, in his office, and after typing out what should have been a suicide note but was in fact just a “boilerplate” letter of resignation.

Why not pills, Lane? The thing about pills is: they leave some room for doubt. The coroner may call it an accidental overdose rather than a suicide, which may make a difference to grieving relations and their insurers.  A noose, though, doesn’t leave any doubt. So does that mean that a real suicide note would have been, in methodical Lane’s eyes, redundant?

Also, the events leading up to the suicide are designed to leave Don feeling as guilty as possible. Don demanded that resignation, after discovering Lane’s embezzlement. He thought that Lane would and could recover from this and make a new life for himself back in England. Indeed, he said as much. “I’d had to start over a couple of times in my life. This is the worst part,” he assured Lane.

Well, no. Don is not Lane and neither of his start-overs seems analogous. Don learns how badly he had misjudged the matter with that chipper assurance only when he sees the body.

Likewise episode 13, the season finale, will likely be dominated in many minds by one scene – that in which Don encounters Lane’s widow, Rebecca. Indeed, the title of this episode is “The Phantom,” indicting I think that the writers meant for Lane to hang over the whole of it. Except of course there is another “phantom” involved. The titles always have multiple meanings. Don thinks he sees his dead brother.   

But let’s get back to Don and Rebecca. He gives her a check meant in effect to buy out Lane’s share of the partnership. She accepts it, but wants Don to know that however this may alleviate his own sense of guilt, it does nothing to make matters square between them. She blames the agency for giving her husband “ambition.” She appears to see him as always having been a frail reed, always best shielded from ambition and other potentially sharp things.

Also, it is in the course of this confrontation that Rebecca discloses she found the photo of a mystery woman in Lane’s wallet.  The photo brings us back to the start of the season.

I’ve wondered through this season why the writers would introduce that photo (and the trouble to which Lane went to keep it, and the single phone call he made to the woman it represents) without doing more with it than they have. I still wonder.  Will Rebecca start looking for her? Is that one respect in which Lane’s phantom will continue to hover next season?

Strong season over-all. The series' best since but not inclusive of its first.  

Mad Men

I've been catching up with the television series Mad Men.

Regular readers of this blog are of course aware that I’m a fan. Not-so-regular readers can become aware in detail easily enough:  here.

The first episode of the new series (formally known as episodes 1 + 2, I gather, though it was seamless dramatically) drew a lot of attention for Megan Draper’s (actress Jessica Paré’s) rendition of Zou Bisou Bisou (“shoo kiss kiss” according to a quick cheap net translation).  Here’s a link courtesy of YouTube.  And certainly that’s attention getting.

But an equally fascinating subplot involved the fantasy life of Lane Pryce. To review: Lane Pryce is the fellow sent to America by the Brits, Puttnam Powell and Lowe, when PP&L briefly owned the ‘old’ Sterling Cooper, to ride herd over these unreliable Americans. He took part in the shenanigans that helped create a newly independent ad agency, and for his help became a partner in what has since been Sterling Cooper Draper and Pryce.

We’ve known, or at least been given opportunity to sense, for some time already that Pryce has an inhibited and potentially troublesome sexuality. This episode seemed to bring that to a new level.

Pryce finds an abandoned wallet in a taxicab, and becomes infatuated with a woman in a photograph there. There’s also a lot of money in the wallet – Lane, a man of honor in all matters financial, returns the wallet with all the cash intact to its proper owner: a Mr. Polito. It’s a lot of cash, and Polito may be some sort of mobbed-up big shot.  Pryce has, though, pocketed the photo of the gal that both he and Polito now in a manner share: Delores.
In a brief telephone conversation, Dolores seems open at least to some flirtation with Pryce.
I’m not really taking any huge leap here when I say I smell trouble.  

Episode 3 is Betty-centric, and gives us a chance to catch up with Betty and her new husband, Henry Francis. Betty is wonderfully portrayed by January Jones, as a woman facing weight gain and, as the show develops, fears that something much worse is behind it.

The writers use Henry Francis to comment on contemporary (2012) politics.  After all, it is now certain (as certain as such things can be) that the Republicans will this summer nominate Mitt Romney for the office of President of the United States. Mitt is the son of George Romney, who was a rather big wheel in the Mad Men era.

In the summer of 1966, when George Romney was Governor of Michigan, and the former CEO of American Motors. He was widely considered serious presidential timber (a status he would eventually – in 1967 -- forfeit with an ill considered remark about how he had been “brainwashed.”) Romney was also seen as the heir to Nelson Rockefeller as the moderate/liberal Republican most prominent in the presidential sweepstakes. After a loss to Barry Goldwater in the 1964 Republican convention, Rocky seems to have lost interest in presidential contention and in effect he was thereafter a supporter of Romney’s own jockeying in 1966.

So much for reality: what about the fictive world? Henry Francis was an aide to Nelson Rockefeller when his relationship with Betty Draper began. He has left Rocky’s employ, and is now working for the Mayor of New York City, John Lindsay. So Francis is making a career for himself on the leftward end of the viable intra-party spectrum within the GOP. Francis is exactly the sort of person most likely to have been an enthusiast of George Romney at this time.

It is startling, then, to see Francis briefly on the phone, apparently with somebody who works for Gov. Romney. Francis is refusing an offer of a joint Lindsay/Romney photo op because, he says, “Romney is a clown.”

You can see a clip here.

I have no reason to argue with the opinion that Mitt Romney is a clown. But George Romney was not especially clownish, certainly not from the perspective of a Henry Francis. Nor was he clownish from the perspective of electoral success – that November he would win re-election by an impressive margin. I think it odd and unfortunate that the writers of Mad Men would let 2012 exert a sort of backward causation into their plot in this way.

Still … the show makes us think. And I enjoyed both (all three!) of these episodes.

Yes, Joan is Pregnant

Back on March 3 I posted a summary of the final three episodes of season four of Mad Men. Yet, as Cicily reminded me in the comments section at the time, I neglected to mention a rather important datum: Joan's pregnancy. Here is my penance -- the Joan story arc.

We first met Joan (then Joan Holloway), played by red-haired, buxomy Christina Henricks, in the opening moments of the first episode first season, where she was the veteran showing the ropes to the new secretary, Peggy Olson.

We soon learn that Joan has had a long term relationship with Roger Sterling. In episode six of this season, Roger buys Joan a bird. Why? Apparently to keep her company while she is alone in her apartment, so she won't be seeking other men to keep her company while he, Roger, can't be there (because of the wife and stuff.) Joan exhibits an unflustered realism about Roger, as she does about most of what happens in her life throughout the show's run. She says for example, "We both know I'll find a more permanent situation and you'll find a new model. The 61s are coming out soon."

In the second season, Joan briefly seems to have found a new career niche for herself, as Harry (who is now head of the 'TV department' -- actually, he is the department) puts her to work reviewing the scripts of TV episodes to be sure that there is nothing in them that conflicts with the products Sterling Cooper wants to sell. This doesn't last, though, and Joan is crestfallen when Harry finds somebody else to do that work.

Even more important, in this season Joan acquires a fiance, Dr. Greg, and we see that Greg has a dark side. He rapes Joan on a visit to the workplace -- in Don's office, as it happens -- and when Joan abandons her resistance to this she looks resignedly to the drinks cabinet as the camera pans off. Marital rape was generally not a crime in 1963 -- but these two weren't yet married -- yet the event has no repurcussions. Joan has apparently decided that marrying a doctor is the sort of thing she is supposed to do, and the significance of this event is to warn us, and her, what this particular marriage will entail.

In the third season, in July 1963, the Brits are taking over the agency, and Joan is supposed to have a going-away party (doctor's wives don't work). That party, though, is rather rudely overshadowed by a nasty incident with a tractor that crushes one of the Brits' feet. He'll never golf again, as someone remarks.

We see Joan a couple of episodes later working at Bonwit Teller, where snivelling Pete has to go to exchange a dress, for reasons I won't get into. She is there because of Dr. Greg's career troubles.

We catch up with her again when the Americans, dissatisfied with their Brit overlords, leave to start their own agency, and realize in the process that they can't do it without her. She is hereafter Mrs. Harris.

This gets us back to season four. As I've noted in earlier blog entries, Greg's career troubles drive him into the Army, and to Vietnam in the course of this season. On the day when Greg learns that he is headed for that battleground, Roger Sterling decides to re-ignite his old affair with Joan. She proves initially unreceptive, and he buys her a professional massage, which seems to both literally and figuratively loosen her up, as intended.

They have a meal together, and soon after they leave the restaurant, they are accosted by a stick-up man, who makes off with Roger's watch and wallet and Joan's bag. This proves stimulating, and they proceed to have sex in the street. This is the encounter whence comes Joan's pregnancy.

In the following episode, presumably some weeks later, Joan tells Roger she's late. "Very late." The subject of abortion immediately arises, although in coded language. Roger thinks she should have the baby -- after all, Greg could conveniently die in Vietnam, never knowing anything about it. Joan objects to this heatedly.

In a later scene we see Joan in the waiting room of a doctor's office, presumably with abortion in prospect. She speaks to another woman in the waiting room -- that woman is the mother of a 14-year-old pregnant girl, and assumes Joan's situation is the same. Joan goes along with this assumption. But we don't see anything further of Joan in this episode, and the fan sites buzzed thereafter with the question whether she went through with the abortion.

In the season finale there's a neat quiet moment with Joan and Peggy eating lunch together, grousing about Don's engagement to Megan. Joan says, "I learned a long time ago not to get all my satisfaction from this job."

Peggy replies, "That's bullshit," and they laugh.

In the final scene, Joan Harris is talking to her husband, who we see at his base in Vietnam. The conversation makes it clear to us that she did not have an abortion, and that she has told Greg she is pregnant with his child.

That, then, is the Joan saga to date.

Thoughts on Mad Men

Mad Men works as a series in large part because of the look. A lot of bright and hard-working people are evidently working very hard to get the 1960s right -- the clothes, the furniture, the cars, the ubiquitous use of cigarettes -- and it pays off.

But how often would you want to keep going back to the same museum? The show works, and is sustainable as entertainment, for some other reason.

Is it the plotting? As I believe all of the posts I have devoted to the question have helped illustrate: the plots are almost absurdly complicated. They deal with all the great themes that your undergraduate Lit professor told you were important: birth, death, commitment, abandonment, conflict, reconciliation, mystery. But every drama, and every comedy, treats of these themes. So what?

Is it the acting? The acting is serviceable but not, I think, in a stand-out way.

So (by process of elimination) is it character? I think there we have to say yes. The characters are indelible, and the otherwise rickity plots work only because these characters are interacting.

Why are the characters indelible? For those of us of a certain age, these characters are our parents, when we were kids and they were in their prime. (Yes, I know I'm not the first to make this point.) I was born in October 1958. Most of the events of the first season of the show took place before I turned two. But the world of the series, especially in seasons three and four, is decidedly my parents' world.

I had only the vaguest of ideas what my father did for a living, and the byzantine nature of the office intrigue at Sterling Cooper in a way captures this vagueness. The idea that the grown-ups were doing grown-up stuff and it wasn't something for me to worry about overly much.

The scenes in Westchester are priceless, they play to this sense of seeing events from a child's POV more directly.

What about for the younger fans of the show? I understand it has a lot of admirers who were born in the 1970s or later. My sense is that they pick up on the same inter-generational theme, even if it isn't meant for them in quite the same way.

Ending Season IV of Mad Men

Cicily and I have finally caught up with real time viewers of Mad Men.

Meanwhile, I've heard that Mad Magazine is coming out with its spoof in this year's April issue. Don Draper as Alfred E. Neuman. The thing almost writes itself.

Anyway, as always for no good reason, here's a quick review of the final three episodes.

Episode 11.
This episode is called "Chinese wall." That's a ubiquitous term in the business world. It refers to any situation in which different operations are underway under the same corporate roof that could create conflicts. For example, a bank may have a research department that provides analysis for the benefit of clients, and may also have a 'prop desk' that trades in various securities on the bank's own accounts. There is a need for organizational arrangements that keep the two operations separate so they don't undermine each other, or amount to a pump-and-dump scheme or the like.

In this episode, it is Faye -- one of Don Draper's current romantic interests -- who alludes to a Chinese Wall. She doesn't work for Sterling Cooper. She is a consultant, and Sterling Cooper is but one of the ad agencies with whom she consults. She has to abide by a "Chinese wall," i.e. separating what she does for one client from what she does for another.

Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, though, faces an existential crisis when it loses the Lucky Strike cigarette account. This was the account for which Don created the iconic line, "It's toasted" in the very first episode. That, though, was for "Sterling Cooper" full stop, and this is a new and somewhat wobbly firm, now in serious danger. So Don decides to climb right over Faye's Chinese Wall, and he asks her whether any of the other agencies that she advises are about to lose clients.

Peggy, with her stereotypical Catholic conscience, thinks the disappearance of the Lucky Strike account must be due to the fact that she's just had satisfying sex with a new man in her life. God is punishing her for that, surely. The punishments continue for Peggy, as she gives a client presentation while lipstick is plainly smudged on her teeth.

In the episode's final scene, Faye relents and tells Don that she does have a lead for him -- the Heinz people are thinking of a new agency for their beans.

Episode 12.
This episode features the return of Midge, a much earlier example of Don's flings -- his bohemian Greenwich Village girlfriend from the first season. They used to smoke pot and listen to beat poetry, then he'd head back to Westchester. Her life has evidently not gone well since those heady days of 1960.

Midge has found out where Don's new office is, and arranges to seem to have accidentally bumped into him so she can invite him over to her place. She there introduces him to her husband, and together they work to cadge money out of him, as it becomes clear they are both heroin addicts. Don agrees to "buy a painting" in which he has no interest, giving her the cash she has on hand, and then walking off with the painting, an undistinguished effort at surrealism.

Even before all that, though, Don had met with the man Faye had connected him with, the man from Heinz. They talk about beans ads. The meeting doesn't go well. The Heinz guy was thinking of SCDP as a possible resource months down the road -- Don knew that his agency needed income sooner than that, and his desperation has shown.

Later in the episode, our protagonists try to get a meeting with another tobacco company so they can transfer their Lucky Strike derived expertise in that area. They are rebuffed.

At this point, Peggy reminds Don of something he had said to her years before, "If you don't like what they're saying aout you, change the conversation." It doesn't strike a chord at first.

That evening he loooks again at Midge's painting. The gears fall into place. Change the conversation ... addiction ... heroin ... tobacco. Aha! He goes back to the notebook/diary he had started a couple of episodes back, and this time uses it for a non-Pepys-like purpose -- he uses its pages to draft an ad he will have placed in The New York Times the following morning, denouncing tobacco and avowing that SCDP will no longer do that kind of work.

His secretary (and yet anther romantic interest) Megan puts the gist of this gambit best. "It's saying 'he didn't dump me, I dumped him.'"

Episode 13.

Don is with Faye as this episode begins. Don is going to California with his kids, and Faye says goodbye. She has seen him (earlier in this season) in the midst of a panic attack over the danger that his Korea/desertion past will yet catch up with him, and in their goodbye scene she tells him that he has to find a way to come out as Dick Whitman. He tells her it isn't that simple.

Don's original plan had been to take his kids' nanny, Carla, along with him for this trip. But his ex-wife (for reasons I won't try to relate -- this all gets pretty complicated) has fired Carla and doggedly demands he not re-hire her for such a purpose. Faye isn't any good with kids, as we've learned from earlier interactions. So ... Megan comes to California.

While Don and Megan and the kids are in California, the folks back at the office are still trying to save SCDP. Except that maybe it is now SDP, becase Cooper, enraged at Don's anti-tobacco-industry ad, has severed connections with it. Things are picking up on a couple of fronts. The American Cancer Society is interested. And Peggy gets a "Topaz pantyhose" account. Meanwhile, they've laid off a good part of their staff to save money.

But the Big News in this episode happens in California. Don proposes marriage to Megan. He uses for this purpose the same engagement ring that the real Don Draper, the dead-in-Korea fellow, used for the same purpose. Megan accepts, and much of the rest of this episode is a display of how this news affects the various people who must inevitably learn of it.

From an earlier Asian war to a current one: we see a brief telephone conversation between Joan Harris and her husband in Vietnam. He's still alive. I had rather cavalierly assumed that he wouldn't survive the season. Further, Joan seems more committed to him than ever, since she seems at last to be free of her own emotional attachment to Roger Sterling.

The episode closes with Peggy and Joan gossiping together. Joan has recently received a grand new title, but with no additional pay and no popping of corks. She takes a cynical view of the Don/Megan announcement, and says that she's glad she has learned to find her own satisfactions outside the office. Peggy says, "That's bullshit," and they share a laugh.

I may find some Significance in all of this by the time I write tomorrow's entry.

Ending of Season III of Mad Men

Cicily and I continue to work our leisurely way through Mad Men episodes.

Season III ended not with one but with several "bangs".

Episode 11 takes place in October 1963 and focuses largely on Roger Sterling, one of the name partners of Sterling & Cooper, and the son of one of the founders.

An old flame re-enters Sterling's life, trying to get him to help her sell her dog food, without changing either the product or the name. This is difficult, because the product is made from horse flesh, and that fact has become public knowledge, making the name notorious. (The title of this episode, "The Gypsy and the Hobo" seems to refer to the younger and wilder days of this woman, Annabelle, and her dalliance with Roger.)

But an important sub-plot in this episode, one that I see as the first of the season-ending "bangs," involves Joan, formerly the head secretary at Sterling & Cooper, now the wife of Greg, a medical resident at a New York hospital.

Greg didn't get his coveted job as a surgeon there. His back-up choice was psychiatry, but in this episode he returns from an interview for such a position very ticked off. Greg and Joan argue. She smashes a vase over his head. This induces Greg to a drastic career move -- he's going to join the army, which needs surgeons, won't be picky about him, and will make him a captain. (I can see his demise in Vietnam on the story-arc horizon.)

Episode 12 takes place in November 1963. Roger's daughter's wedding day is rather rudely interrupted by news from Dallas that the President has been shot. We follow the characters through the day and evening and see the breaking news through their eyes, all the way up to the moment Jack Ruby shoots Oswald. Now THAT should logically have been not just the end of the episode but the end of the season, too. What could possibly follow that?

Episode 13 takes place in December. The final go-out-with-a-bang moment. All the principal characters arrange to get themselves fired so they can start a new firm in a hotel room. Pryce, the fellow the Brits who bought Sterling & Cooper had sent to New York to ride herd over the place, learns in a very indirect way that the mother corporation in London is itself on the trading block. He's shocked by how out-of-the-loop he is, and cooperates in the plan.

Pryce fires Sterling, and Cooper, and Don Draper, all at their request, and on a Friday afternoon. He is aware of course that London is five hours later, so nobody there will read his telex informing them he has done so until Monday morning. This gives the coup plotters the weekend to get everything they'll need for the new firm out of the offices of the old one.

In the course of that weekend they inform other members of their inner circle, including Peggy and Pete, mother and father of the unacknowledged child from season one.

They learn, too, that they don't know enough about the mechanics of running an office to pull this off, and they have to bring Joan back. She is thus with them in the hotel suite that constitutes the improvised new offices of "Sterling, Cooper, Draper & Pryce," in the following Monday, and nothing is heard for now about Greg.

Love the corporate intrigue. It all almost made me forget that through all these three episodes Betty was getting closer to Henry -- Governor Rockefeller's aide -- and learning a somewhat sanitized version of the deep dark secret from Don's days
in Korea. Betty and Henry are planning a quickie Reno divorce as season three ends.

Mad Men Thoughts: Part II

Cicily and I continue our viewing of episodes of the television show Mad Men. We aren't viewing them in "real time," but in our own time, and we've only recently moved from the later episodes of the second season into the earlier episodes of the third.

The second season covers the period from Valentine's Day 1962 until the Cuban Missile Crisis that October.

The Missile Crisis provides an obvious way to have the various characters contemplate their own mortality. Specifically, it leads to a conversation between Peggy and Father Gill that, I imagine, is meant to signify the state of the pre-Vatican-II-Council Catholic Church: just why it needed the reforms that Council brought.

Peggy is an ambitious career woman who arrived at Sterling Cooper in the first episode, and who has since become a copywriter. She had a brief fling with accounts manager Pete early on, became pregnant as a result, and gave up the child, so that her sister could raise him as her child. If I understand correctly, Father Gill has gotten wind of this and wants to get Peggy to confess it.

During the Cuba crisis, Gill makes an impassioned pitch that Peggy should confess her sins in order to save herself from hell -- to which she might be consigned rather quickly if the missiles start flying.

The Vatican II Council convened, as it happened, in October 1962, though unless I missed something the fact went unmentioned in the episode. Still, it is hard to believe the screenwriters were unaware of that fact, when seeing the Gill-Peggy interaction.

By the time of the opening episode of the third season, Sterling Cooper has become a subsidiary of a London-based ad company. The Londoners are laying off Americans, making everyone remaining quite nervous. Also, Don Draper and a closeted-guy member of his creative team, Sal, go to Baltimore to meet with the bosses of London Fog, a company with no actual London connection but which has had success branding its raincoats. (Also, as one of the actual Londoners explains, there's no such thing. The so-called "fog" of Dickens novels and other literature of the period was industrial soot -- London, as it happens, was the first industrialized metropolis in history.)

Draper catches sight (I won't try to explain how -- but Don was not playing the sneak -- the sight was an innocent accident) of an encounter that establishes for him that Sal is in fact gay. On the airplane flight back to NYC, Don tells Sal that he has an idea for a new ad campaign for London Fog. The tagline would be "Limit Your Exposure." At that moment, the significance of this phase is ambiguous. Are we really supposed to take this as an idea for a campaign, or is Don sending a message to Sal: "I don't care about your sexuality, but since others might I hope you'll keep it better hidden hereafter than you did last night."

It later turns out that Don and Sal are intent on putting together a "Limit Your Exposure" campaign. That doesn't change the obvious fact that Don was sending a message on the plane. Perhaps what was originally intended as a discreet message to Sal (to be discreet) got away from them both and became their actual campaign.

Mad Men: Some Thoughts

I've been watching Mad Men lately. Cicily and I, neither slaves to timeliness, have been working our way through the first season, which first aired in 2007-08.

So here are some comments about those early episodes.

The very first episode showed our protagonist, Don Drapper, trying to come up with a new advertising slogan for Lucky Stripes, which is under attack (along with the rest of the industry) as consciousness begins to dawn in some quarters that the product might not be entirely healthy.

This episode had some amusing scenes with a severe looking woman whose accent is, I think, supposed to be Viennese. She represents the Research department of the agency, and she believes in Thanatos. The fact that cigarettes could kill you might make them more appealing in a Freudian way, and the ads should play to that, she thinks. Don shoots this down, though an underling pitches it to the clients anyway, and they shoot it down.

Don finally comes up with "It's toasted!" as the slogan. This, in fact, was a historic Lucky Stripe slogan. "It's toasted to taste even better." I think in reality Larry Tate got started that way.

A few episodes later, Don is supposed to come up with a campaign to get American Jews to vacation in Israel. The prospective tour promoters came to him because they understood he had come up with a killer campaign to get tourists to Rio de Janiero. He asks, "Do you have a mountain with a statue of Jesus on top? That helped us with Rio."

Anyway, since there don't seem to be a lot of Jews in Don's social circles, he calls the one Jew he does know and pumps her for ideas. She is understandably put off by being taken as a token of the Chosen here.

All the pitching and strategizing generates dialog that firmly locates us in 1960. This was, after all, the year that Israeli operatives captured Adolf Eichmann in Argentina, as Draper's poorly-chosen confidante mentions.

Some of the efforts to allude to 1960 are confusing. Drapper's philandering boss invites his hot secretary to take a Caribbean jaunt with him for the weekend. She turns him down, saying "I don't care if it's Cuba. I can't go." Of course, there had just been a revolution in Cuba, but I'm not sure how that fact fits into this context. And I speak as an expert -- I've seen Godfather II about 20 times.

Some allusions are just plain wrong. One character says to another, "You know what they say? the medium is the message." 'They' weren't saying this yet. That phrase was popularized by Marshall McLuhan in the book Understanding Media, published in 1964. I suppose maybe this is all taking place in an alternative universe where McLuhan wrote that book sooner.

Still: the show is a lot of fun.