Mad Men

The second season of Mad Men starts on Sunday on AMC at 10:00. I didn't mention it in my year-end best-of 2007 post but I should have - it's one of the best things going on television. AMC played all 13 season one episodes back-to-back last Sunday so I recorded them all and have been re-watching a couple of episodes per evening over the past week. I've got two more to go and I'll be ready for season two.

Mad Men is set in the world of Madison Avenue advertising circa 1960. Season one ends with the election of JFK and the Thanksgiving that followed so I expect season two will pick up from there. While they aren't explicit about it, one of the aims of the makers of Mad Men is to contrast that world with our own PC-drenched, so-called enlightened era. The attitudes then in place - towards women, marriage, divorce, drinking, smoking, psychiatry, and more - are presented here with little editorializing; things are simply portrayed as they were without comment or judgement. When one of the advertising executives calls a secretary "honey" or "sweetheart", or comments on the way she walks, there are no pauses in the action. The camera doesn't stop to show the woman's reaction. We only notice the moment because it contrasts so sharply with our current attitudes. The same is true when Roger Sterling, one of the firms partners, gets into his car to drive home blind drunk. Don Draper, the advertising whiz who is the show's main focus, doesn't try to stop Sterling, or take his keys, or call him a cab; he simply closes his front door. During another episode, one of the other ad men buys a rifle and playfully aims it at people in the office. In virtually every episode, the men sit in meetings, each with a drink and cigarette in hand. Draper keeps cleaned and pressed shirts in the bottom drawer of his desk so he can change into a fresh one before going home to his wife; he doesn't want her to smell the scent of his lover. Inter-office affairs are conducted, sometime in the office behind closed doors. Never does the show stop to announce, "See how bad things were back then? See how much we've progressed?" Nor does it take the other side, claiming things were better in the old days. Mad Men simply portrays the world as it was, a world in which women married young, had babies, raised a family, and had dinner waiting in the evening when their husbands arrived home; if they were ambitious they became secretaries. Men worked, smoked, drank, and had affairs.

And boy did they smoke. The screens becomes almost claustrophobic with cigarette smoke at times. Everyone smoked back in those days, or nearly everyone. My buddy who first told me about the show was from a military background and apparently his parents were non-smokers. He told me he found the amount of cigarette smoking done on the show to be off-putting - it was simply too much. It doesn't bother me because I come from a world in which everyone smoked. I grew up in that world. My mother didn't smoke but she was the only one - I remember my mother's uncle (Uncle Fred, long gone now, and one of my favorite people) once telling me that she was the only person in the entire extended family who didn't smoke. Same on my father's side. We all smoked. So the world of Mad Men does not seem far-fetched or exaggerated to me in that aspect whatsoever. Smoking was cool; it was glamorous. Take the cigarettes out of Mad Men and it loses that glamour.

Mad Men is much more than an anthropology lesson though - I hope I haven't given that impression. The acting is marvelous, the story lines are quirky and surprising, and it has lots of excellent characters. Don Draper is clearly the most interesting; the man with a past he's trying to escape. I think of The Great Gatsby when I think of Draper - the American story of escaping the world you were born into, remaking yourself into what you want to be, limited only by your own ability and imagination. And Draper is a man of immense ability and large imagination. As portrayed by Jon Hamm, he's a riveting presence on the screen, the kind of man other men want to be like, and women want to be with. I'm looking forward to season two of this excellent series with great anticipation.