Winner of the Week: Madness

With one legendary show (Mad Men) ending, and a franchise being (Mad Max) reborn, this week’s big winners are all things “mad.”

As two works of art, they couldn’t be further apart. One takes place in a rapidly changing America, where personal apocalypse hovers above all the characters. Another takes place in a post-apocalyptic hellscape, where each character has been reduced to the simple instinct of survival. But madness might be the most entertaining of emotional states, and, as this week demonstrates, possibly the most profitable.

The two things uniting the television seriesMad Menand the new film Mad Max: Fury Road might be their attention to detail, their beautiful production design, and incredibly well-developed plotting. Or maybe it’s the idea that desperation breeds a certain type of human, one who we find endlessly entertaining, whether they’re caught in a death race in the desert or trying to nail down a new client.

Either way, this week was certainly won by a beloved television program making a victory lap and the triumphant return of a film franchise that had stayed off the screen for an unbearably long time. But it was well worth the wait.

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