Richard Termine
Everything is better with Muppets -- so what could be better than the best drama on TV getting the Sesame Street treatment?
Today the Sesame folks leaked their parody of the AMC drama Mad Men. (Watch it here!) Like many of the show's other satires, this one is primarily a play on the name: Although it's set in an ad agency like the real show, the joke is that the characters are actually mad. As in angry! And they want to be happy!
It's not a bad gag, but frankly, Sesame Street has done better. Take their hilarious version of 30 Rock -- available here – in which a Tina Fey-impersonating citrus fruit ("Lemon" – get it?) is trying to figure out where to put a shipment of 30 rocks that she’s ordered for her TV show. The parody uses the title, but also uses a hilarious Alec Baldwin Muppet and dialogue that mimics the show perfectly ("We can’t ask them – they’re rocks!").
The Mad Men sketch does employ a very cute Don Draper Muppet, but he doesn’t talk like Jon Hamm. And the other two Muppets in the sketch are generic ad men, seemingly not based on the show’s characters at all. (Raise your hand if you’d rather see a Joan Halloway puppet!)
Plus, Mad Men is a show in which all the emotions are seething under the surface. So while it’s fun to watch Don actually get "mad," wouldn’t it have been funnier if the sketch had been about getting Don to express his feelings? "Come on, Don – it’s okay sometimes to show people you’re sad!" Now that would be a valuable lesson for kids AND ad executives.
What did you think of Sesame Street parodies? Chime in below!
