I was thinking about posting a different thing today, then I realized I wanted to reference this, so I figured I’ll post that other thing later and this today.

Full disclosure: I did not grow up in the 1960s. I was not alive during the 1960s. When I watched The Wonder Years, I watched it with my dad, who had grown up during the 1960s. Now, when I hear “A Little Help from My Friends” as sung by Joe Cocker, or see The Wonder Years on TV, I feel an urge to call upstairs to my dad: “Daddy! The Wonder Years is on!” and have him drop what he’s doing and run down to watch with me. I live 3,000 miles away from him now, and almost never watch the show anymore, and have begun to primarily think of Fred Savage as a prolific and talented television director (whom I met once, and to whom I handed his keys!) rather than as a confused suburban kid trying to establish something concrete when everything around him was changing rapidly. If there’s anything that has ever understood what it means to watch these opening credits, it is surely the greatest three-and-a-half minutes of television ever (I might stand by this, actually):

This is the excellent opening sequence of Archer. You can read all about its inception here, at the very-helpful site The Art of the Title. As you can probably tell, it’s another Saul Bass-inspired piece, like this and this. In fact, two of the Bass-inspired movie opening credits sequences I cited for Chuck are referred to as influences for Neal Holman, Archer’s art director. What ties this closer to Mad Men, though, is that this sequence is meant also to recall the era of Saul Bass sequences, as Archer takes place in a kind of 1960’s/present-hybrid. In that sense, it probably has the most in common with The Venture Bros, a sequence meant to recall that same era’s action cartoons. The Venture Bros too takes place in a sort-of hybrid between a bygone era and the present. And both are terrific series (Adam Reed, creator of Archer, worked primarily on Adult Swim shows before bringing Archer to FX).
This very much of-the-era song was written by Scott Sims and arranged and recorded by Dominik Hauser. This is what you should be humming when you’re sneaking around corners pretending to be a spy.

This little ditty is “Straight Up and Down,” by The Brian Jonestown Massacre. It’s somewhat in the grand tradition of the Mad Men theme (both period shows were created by writers for The Sopranos) that a show taking place in the past should have a modern theme song, so we understand that we’re dealing with contemporary themes. It’s a nice song, and definitely makes one feel a little uneasy as it goes on, which is the idea.

But let’s talk about what we see, because this is an extremely dense video. First, watch the sun. When the video begins, Nucky is walking toward it - it’s in the sky, at about 10am. At the end of the video, he again walks toward it as it sets. It’s a subtle way to suggest a LOT of time passing. Obviously about a day isn’t a lot of time, but it is a lot of time to stand in one spot on the beach. What we’re meant to understand is (The amount of time one usually spends on a beach):(The amount of time Nucky Thompson stands on this beach)::(The amount that can change in the world over the course of a TV series):(The amount that will change in the world over the course of Boardwalk Empire). That clear? You’ll be tested.

I’m going to start another thread here, but I promise we’ll return to the time thing. Now, in storytelling, there’s always a character called the audience surrogate (sorry if I tell you things you already know). This is especially important in a television pilot, as we’re being introduced to a new world; we need a character who is also new to this world through whose eyes we can see it. Think of any television show you’ve ever watched. Who’s the new character in this environment?

When Boardwalk Empire begins, Michael Pitt’s character Jimmy has recently returned from World War I. He’s getting promoted within the ranks of Nucky Thompson (Steve Buscemi), and we see ourselves in him. When you want someone handsome to take in a world, you can do a lot worse than Michael Pitt.

But then Jimmy begins committing acts of violence that surprise and upset Nucky. Nucky has been bootlegging for a while, and does not run his business this way. But, as Jimmy explains, this is how business is done now.

Now watch the opening credits again, and focus on the bottles, and on Nucky’s eyes, and on the weather, and on the water levels (SORRY THAT’S A LOT). When Nucky walks down to the beach it is a gorgeous day (the kind of beautiful day that it almost always is on the boardwalk, god they have fantastic set designers on this show). He stands in the dry sand and lights a cigarette. Then some dark clouds form. Nucky sees a couple of bottles in the water. The weather gets worse, more and more bottles start to appear as the tide comes in. At around 1:10 we get what an old friend used to call “the Gone with the Wind shot”; we pull back to so we can see just how devastatingly many bottles there are (in Gone with the Wind, it was injured soldiers):

Through all this, our takeaway should be that Nucky sincerely had no idea what it would take to run a successful bootlegging operation. I don’t think anyone in America really understood how much unspeakable violence would be committed in the name of getting people drunk. A red flag for us is meeting a young and friendly Al Capone; an emblem of the violence that is to come.

All of this is to say that Nucky, not Jimmy, is our audience surrogate. Jimmy’s not new to this world, he is OF this world. It’s Nucky who has to learn the ins and outs, and we in turn learn to be comfortable with moral compromises (in that way, the series is very much like Breaking Bad). At the end of this video, the tide comes out; Nucky’s shoes are dry again. I don’t know the fate of Nucky Thompson (none of us do), but prohibition did end, and with it most bootlegging. It must be nice to get away from that world, but the sun may be setting on our home town by the time the tide’s gone.

So I think this is pretty cool you guys. Allison Williams here is singing Eden Ahbez’s “Nature Boy” while the band pays “A Beautiful Mine,” the Mad Men theme. I think “Nature Boy” is a reasonable interpretation of the show Mad Men, though it’s not particularly one I agree with. I don’t really care about Don Draper’s ability to love or be loved in return. All I want is for Don to give Peggy lots of respect (this opinion is shared by, and may be predated by, Todd VanDerWerff). And the tunes don’t quite sync up as well as they could. However, I cannot resist revisiting and remixing theme songs, obviously.

And this is very cool, and stylish, and using a jazz standard meets the sensibility of a show about men whose emotional growth was stunted around World War II. Jaime Weinman, though, accurately notes:

All instrumental themes are really meant to be sung with just the title, over and over.

Yes, obviously. But in researching for this piece (research is a synonym for “Googling, and reading the comments on some blog posts”) I found out that A Beautiful Mine uses a sample from Autumn Leaves by Enoch Light. That’s pretty cool. Sorry I didn’t realize that earlier. Now we both know. Enjoy:

This is a fan-made opening title sequence for the forthcoming AMC show The Walking Dead. (Thanks to My Life is Television for sending the link my way). It was animated on spec by Daniel M Kanemoto, using artwork from the original comics by Charlie Adlard and Tony Moore. The song is Fresh Blood by Eels, a band that is nearly always a good idea, music editing by Jeff Yorkes.

Like everyone who has watched this, I’m hoping The Walking Dead would end up using it. There is some precedent for this.

Back in late 1997, when The WB started airing ads for Dawson’s Creek, they used Paula Cole’s “I Don’t Want to Wait.” These ads, and the song, proved so popular that they decided to use the song for the show’s actual theme song, just to appease to already-demanding fans of the show. So there’s a fan demand affecting a theme song.

In 2007, Mad Men star Rich Sommer commissioned artist Dyna Moe to design a Christmas card for the cast and crew of the show:

Following this design, Dyna Moe started drawing an illustration of each episode of Mad Men and posting them on her site. Her skill at recreating 1960’s design motifs made her work so popular and so iconic in their relationship to the show that AMC commissioned her to create Mad Men Yourself, where you can create a picture of yourself as a Mad Men character as drawn by Dyna Moe. You’ve probably seen these as everyone’s twitter icon or message board avatar. Here’s mine, by the by:

So this was AMC. If they do choose to go with this title sequence, it will mean exciting things for spec work. I’m not holding my breath, but wouldn’t that be cool?

The Mad Men theme is a piece of “A Beautiful Mine” by RJD2. I think (surprise!) that the use of modern music on the show is extremely significant. We’re not watching a show that only uses music from the time it takes place in - the soundtrack to the show also includes songs meant to take us out of the story for a moment. One great example is here. Another is in the show’s early promos featuring “You Know I’m No Good” by Amy Winehouse (which is like NOWHERE on the internet).

We’re not watching a documentary; we’re not even watching a period piece. The Mad Men story isn’t about the 60’s, it’s about the present. Using modern music or music not from 1960 is a way of reminding us that these stories and themes are relevant to us today. We’re seeing stories that wouldn’t get told if the show were actually made in 1960. RJD2 is a cool shorthand for that idea.

The sequence itself, directed by Mark Gardner and Steve Fuller, and produced by Cara McKenney, has quite a bit to unpack. First, here’s Matthew Weiner’s comments on it:

When he mentions Saul Bass, incidentally, here you can watch one significant Saul Bass opening title sequence. First of all, coupled with the Bernard Herrmann music, the speeding lines, moving to form a building in New York City, create a great deal of tension. This must have influenced Weiner’s idea of the buildings representing the inner demons of the lead character. The slower score from the Mad Men theme is kind of a way of playing with this notion: while Cary Grant’s R-O-T’s world is about to explode, and fast, Don Draper’s world, and the meticulously homogenous bubble of Sterling Cooper, is slowly deflating. Even as the world around them is changing fast, these institutions took much more time to even acknowledge change. It wasn’t until Season 3’s “Pete invents demographics” episode that Bert Cooper even seemed aware of the civil rights movement.

As to the man’s facelessness, there are two important facets to this. One is again a callback to Hitchcock. The now-iconic shot of the back of Don Draper’s head seems a strong callback to this scene here. Hitchcock’s formalist style meant that any deviation from a boring two-shot (basically just “here is the room, here are the people in it”) was Significant. The scenes in Vertigo that don’t involve Jimmy Stewart going crazy are pretty boringly filmed, to maximize the effect of the scenes where he’s suddenly falling through a concentric-circle rabbit hole. And this scene where all we see is the back of Cary Grant’s head is meant to say to us: “Hey! Who the hell is this guy?!”

The other important element of this faceless man is that you may recognize the director’s name: Steve Fuller. He also directed the little-loved Nurse Jackie intro, and once you know this, you’re kind of like “Oh, yeah. I could see that. These things are pretty similar.” One important difference is that we can see Nurse Jackie’s face as her various demons tumble around her. As I discussed here, faceless cartoons universalize a character. The man falling from the building here isn’t necessarily Don Draper. He’s Whitey. Straight white cismen: you have built a world of power on the backs of the oppressed. And that foundation will not stop fighting to bring it down. And, at the risk of being too cliched, the higher your building, the longer you have to fall.