“Mad Men” — Cigarettes, Scotch and the American Dream
You know that old expression “when men were men,†the delightfully glib declaration of gender prowess from a day gone by? That’s what AMC’s compelling new drama Mad Men is about (premieres tonight, Thursday July 19th at 10:00pm). However, what makes the series more than a LaButeian exercise in awful people doing awful things to one another is the shocking familiarity between this 1960 man’s world and the world we inhabit today. In short, when men were men, they also happened to be drunks, chain-smokers, womanizers, and racists. In a way the only way we’ve changed is in our ability to do a better job at hiding these rather unpleasant qualities when in public. More after the jump…
Technology changes, people do not. This is especially apparent in the pilot episode when Madison Avenue advertising company Sterling Cooper is asked to give new life to Lucky Strike Cigarettes after a Reader’s Digest article is released reporting the negative health effects of smoking. The period is brilliantly recreated and doesn’t come off as a Technicolor remembrance of a by-gone era. It isn’t stylized. It looks how it should look. Characters aren’t running around talking in Hepburn and Tracy-esque movie-speak, but instead they talk like the drunks and philanderers they actually were. While social change sparks most of the drama (one female character starts taking this new form of birth control called “the pill†– from a sexist doctor smoking a cigarette no less), it hardly comes off as a We-Didn’t-Start-The-Fire greatest hits of 1960.
Jon Hamm stars as Don Draper, a straight-line jawed creative director for the aforementioned agency. The casting is brilliant. He plays the part with enough restraint we see that Don is perhaps questioning this XY business world, but has no plans on trying to adopt any new change (unless it’s to sell nylons, cigarettes or a new account with an area department store that is looking to shed its tired image).
On the other side of the sexual divide is Sterling Cooper’s new secretary Peggy who while given the walk through on her first day is told by another secretary that her goals her should be landing a husband so that she can move to the country. The whole thing is rather startling, especially as we see her start to take some of this advice. A network series would have Peggy be the forward thinking woman who eventually gets the company to change its arcade hiring practices, but Mad Men has too much respect for the period, and in that honesty we’re able to see complex characters make difficult decisions.
The series is created by Matthew Weiner, who cut his teeth with The Sopranos (David Chase is given a “special thanks” during the closing credits). Typically “from the writers of…” promotions usually mean next to nothing (From the producers of Saw!… what?), but in this case you really are getting what’s promised — not the violence, language, or sex (the series is on basic cable) but the integrity to character and to story.
Mad Men is a wonderful surprise smack dab in the middle of the summer. Especially in a summer where I’ve been dropping dramas left and right (farewell Rescue Me and Big Love!). Who’d have thought it would show up on a network that claimed “Catwoman” was an American Movie Classic?
Don’t miss this one.
