August 10, 2008
Current Television: Mad Men
I don’t watch a lot of TV; it’s true. But I’ve found love in the new AMC series Mad Men. After hearing enough of the hype surrounding the Emmy-nominated series, I finally grabbed the whole first season on DVD to see if this story of the lives of 1960s ad men was really all the reviewers would have me believe.
All’s I can say is, the show is brilliant. Each character is written somewhere between a hero and a villain; the plots sometimes lead exactly where they’re telegraphed, and other times they turn out to be subterfuge, feints in the direction of catastrophe, which end benignly. For today.
In the style of today’s cable blockbusters, it has a gimmick. Sex in the City had designer name-dropping and orgasm jokes; Deadwood has cursing cowboys. Mad Men worships at the trinity of Marlboros, Manhattans and misogyny, in an effort to remind us that Things Were Different Then. However, after a few episodes, the mind becomes inured to the ever-present swirling smoke, 11am whiskey, and oh-my-god-the-misogyny; and one focuses on the travails of the superbly-rendered cast of characters.
Life is messy, and it rarely plays out the way it is told in a history tome. Mad Men is a blissfully un-preachy look at a sliver of life in a bygone era, where men and women were pretty much like they are today. With better writing.
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