Saturday, July 5, 2008

Those Magnificent Mad Men (and their Women)


This post is specifically for those who were trying to decide if whether or not they wanted to take the time and indulgence to watch, and therefore get involved in the latest long form dramatic television series that took critics and basic cable televison by storm in the last year or so. I recovered from the first week of Summer quarter and a couple big nights out in a row by feasting on the first season of Mad Men. My conclusion is that if you enjoyed Sopranos or the other big dramatic serials of recent years, Mad Men is worth your time and attention.

We have had cop shows, gangster shows, so why not an advertising executive show? Why not indeed? Especially when you have the quaint time setting of nearly half a century ago at the beginning of the Kennedy era complete with mores, fashions and habits that help enfold this series into a world of its own.

There is drinking and smoking in darn near every scene of the first thirteen hours of this series. The first articles I read about Mad Men last summer when it premiered stressed its authenticity. The IBM Selectric typewriter was cutting edge technologyfor 1960 but the series producers apparently had a difficult time rounding up enough to outfit the office set of Sterling Cooper, the ficticious Madison Avenue advertising agency that is the setting and can also be considered a character in Mad Men.

I was a pre-schooler in 1960. The relative authenticity of the lives and trappings of the adult couples and ad men offices would be lost me, but I can speak to the feelings of going back in time in one short scene that takes place in a supermarket. The salmon walls, the displays, and the way the shelves were built took me back to the view from the front of the basket.

The NY Times Magazine recently ran a feature about the shows creator Matthew Wiener. In the article they spoke to veterans of Madison Avenue from that era. As to the shows authenticity, the jury was split. Some say it hit the mark. Others say they were way too busy working to indulge in the kind of hedonism and excess that is in the series.

The Times article by Alex Witchell is called Mad Men's Moment. And in a way it is. The second season is launching at the end of the month. The first series is available on cable On Demand and on DVD. The series has become a phenomenon, in part because it showed up in the unlikely location of the AMC, American Movie Classics basic cable station. And it was there becuase the big premium cable networks decided to pass on Weiner's series.

Mad Men has a morally disrupted but likable lead character, Creative Director Don Draper played by Jon Hamm. The scenes where Draper uses raw creativity and mental prowess to come up with just the right solution for the client's dilemma are a joy to watch. He is the center of the series, its Tony Soprano with his co-workers, mistresses, secretaries, and wife orbiting about him. I wasn't entirely engaged in the flashback backstory that is threaded throughout the series, but as a lead and central character, both content and delivery work quite well.

My favorite character is Peggy Olson, Draper's secretary, played by Elisabeth Moss. She begins her job at Sterling Cooper at the beginning of the series. The audience gets to learn about the characters and this world they inhabit at the same time Peggy does. As the series progresses, it appears that there is something unique about this woman that sets her apart from the rest of the company. One of my favorite scenes is the total abandon she puts into dancing the Cha Cha Cha and the Peppermint Twist with her office mates at a celebratory party.

The men of Mad Men seem very similar to each other in many ways, but the women show a greater diversity. Draper's child ex-model wife, their neighbors, and those he has affairs with provide a kind of prism and range relective of era and the changes the world was about to go through.

One of my colleagues once made the observation that the long form high quality dramatic series (ala Sopranos, Weeds, The Wire, etc.) seem to be the equivalent of our Dickens or big bestsellers of the 20th century like Gone With the Wind. I think there is something true and significant to that observation. We no longer read, buy the same records or go to the movies except for effects and events pictures. Have the role of film directors and novelists of years past been handed over to that of the "Created Bys?" Folks like Matthew Wiener and his former boss, The Sopranos' David Cross? Perhaps it has.
posted by well-executed buffet at 7:33 PM
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