Have you ever seen those studies where a bunch of words are on a page but they’re missing the vowels or missing every third letter or missing all the letter inside the word or something but still it’s pretty easy to make out the meaning and the whole thing is to illustrate that we only need bits of information and our brains will fill in the rest?
I was thinking about this last night while watching Mad Men. I’m admittedly a latecomer to the show, but if I had to describe it in a word it’s elliptical. And then I started to think that I should try to describe all TV shows in one word and I should start a one-word review web site and then I realized that I’ll probably never do this and I’d rather spend time developing my brilliant cologne that comes in a cell phone shaped bottle called ConeXXXion idea. Don’t steal that idea, folks, unless you want to be a billionaire!
Anyway, most of the time while watching Mad Men I go back and forth between “huh?” and “what?” and yet I’m hooked. Probably more so than if I understood what I was watching.
And it’s probably silly not to mention Lost in this post however I’m silly, you guys!
(Joel Stein wrote a tweet that said “I am still watching Mad Men, but I am no longer understanding Mad Men”) which is what made me remember all this today. Although perhaps he meant it in a less literal sense. Hm.
