There were seven deadly sins practiced at the dawn of the 1960s: smoking, drinking, adultery, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism and racism. In its first few minutes “Mad Men” on AMC taps into all of them.
This new drama set in the golden age of Madison Avenue serves as a bridge to a faded and now forbidden world.
Men wore white shirts, drank Manhattans and harassed compliant secretaries in the elevator. Everybody read Reader’s Digest. Jews worked in Jewish advertising agencies, blacks were waiters and careful not to seem too uppity, and doctors smoked during gynecological exams. Women were called “girls.” Men who loved men kept it to themselves.
The magic of “Mad Men” is that it softly spoofs those cruel, antiquated mores without draining away the romance of that era: the amber-lit bars and indigo nightclubs, soaring skyscrapers, smoky railway cars and the brash confidence that comes with winning a war and owning the world. It’s a sardonic love letter to the era that wrought “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” and “The Best of Everything,” but homage is paid with more affection than satire.
Matthew Weiner, who was a producer and writer on “The Sopranos,” created “Mad Men” and lends it some of the HBO show’s wit, apt music and sumptuous cinematography. Most of all the series walks the line between tongue-in-cheek knowingness and know-it-all parody.
The advertising executives, who called themselves “mad men,” were at the front of the consumer rat race, hypnotizing the American buyer with huckster campaigns created off-the-cuff in smoky meeting rooms or on a cocktail napkin at El Morocco. The advertising business was flush, blissfully unburdened by aging readerships, failing newspapers, DVRs or the Internet, and only barely accountable to the federal government or public opinion.
And that kind of unbridled freedom is the series’s one speck of sentiment, evoking nostalgia for a time before the current audience-knows-best rule of business, in which viewers vote on who gets to become a pop star, publishers ask readers to choose their authors, and politicians ask viewers to decide what issues they should discuss, as is the plan in next week’s live Democratic debate, a joint project between CNN and YouTube. When Don Draper (Jon Hamm), the suave creative director of the Sterling Cooper Advertising Agency, receives consumer data from the research director that suggests there is no way to avoid addressing Americans’ concerns about the health risks of smoking, Don coolly drops the report in his wastepaper basket.
But Don knows he has a problem. Reader’s Digest says smoking causes cancer, and the Federal Trade Commission won’t allow tobacco companies to suggest there are “safer” brands of cigarettes anymore. Lucky Strike is one of his top accounts. “All I have is a crushproof box and ‘Four out of five dead people smoke your brand,’ ” he complains to his mistress (Rosemarie DeWitt).
She goes by the quaintly dated name Midge, but has her own career as an illustrator and a modern view of love and sex. “You know the rules,” she tells Don as she hands him his wristwatch after their postcoital cigarette. “I don’t make plans, and I don’t make breakfast.”
Midge and the Lucky Strike account are just a few of the many challenges in Don’s life, though his trusting wife and two children tucked away in the suburbs do not appear to be among them.
The boss, Roger Sterling (John Slattery), wants Don to handle a new client, Rachel Menken (Maggie Siff), whose Jewish family owns a department store. Before the first meeting Roger asks Don to bring in a Jewish colleague to make her more “comfortable.” Don says there aren’t any, and is surprised to enter the room and find himself being introduced to David Cohen. ( “I had to go all the way to the mailroom,” Roger murmurs, “but I found one.”)
Don is put off by Rachel’s tony aspirations and high-handed manner. “I’m not going to let a woman talk to me like this,” he says, before storming out.
The younger, hungrier junior executives who aspire to taking over his corner office are also a worry. The worst is Paul, a slimy 26-year-old account executive engaged to a rich girl and constantly looking for a chance to outshine Don. (The show also owes a lot to “What Makes Sammy Run?”)
Roger, however, has so much confidence in Don he tries to enlist his protégé to work on a presidential campaign. “Consider the product: He’s young, handsome, a Navy hero,” Roger says. “Honestly, it shouldn’t be too difficult to convince America that Dick Nixon is a winner.”
Primitive technology is a running joke in “Mad Men,” and so is the position of women in the era before the dawn of women’s liberation and the widespread use of the Pill.
Tough, career-minded Rachel and Midge are the exceptions to the laws of the “Mad Men” jungle. (Exceptions, however, often rule: In real life two of the most legendary ad men of that era were actually women: Mary Wells, who had Braniff planes put in pastel and stewardesses in Pucci, and Shirley Polykoff, who asked, “Does she or doesn’t she?” and made Clairol’s fortune.)
On her first day Don’s new secretary, Peggy (Elisabeth Moss), is hazed with leering comments by the young wolves in the company. “You got to let them know what kind of guy you are,” one says to a meeker colleague afterward. “Then they’ll know what kind of girl to be.”
Peggy is shown the ropes by Joan (Christina Hendricks), a sexy redhead who advises her to shorten her skirts and keep a fifth of Scotch and a needle and thread in her desk.
“Try not to be overwhelmed by all this technology,” Joan says as she removes a plastic cover from an IBM electric typewriter. “It looks complicated, but the men who designed it made it simple enough for a woman to use.”
In recent years there have been a few movies set in the late ’50s and early ’60s and directed in that vintage style: before “Good Night, and Good Luck,” there was “Far From Heaven” in 2002, a loving tribute to the full-throttle melodramas of Douglas Sirk. In 2003 Renée Zellweger and Ewan McGregor were paired in “Down With Love,” a sendup of Rock Hudson-Doris Day comedies.
“Mad Men” is both a drama and a comedy and all the better for it, a series that breaks new ground by luxuriating in the not-so-distant past.
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