Mad Men

While of course it's an outrage that The Wire was once again snubbed by the Emmy awards, it's worth noting that the winner for best dramatic series, Mad Men, is a very good show. I watched season one on demand in August, catching up before the beginning of season two, an activity that was probably so typical for someone of my age, race, class, occupation, marital status, etc., that there is doubtless a Web site or two out there cackling with glee over its ability to predict the television watching habits and other cultural predispositions of people like me with near-total accuracy. Whatever; Mad Men is really great, for several reasons. There are the things you'd except: writing, direction, acting. It also has the really interesting milieu of Madison Avenue in the early 1960s, with the nation on the verge of becoming something different and all the men drinking Scotch in the middle of the day while wearing exceptionally nice suits. I read somewhere that the setting in a movie is a lead character unto itself, and that's especially true here.

But the thing that really elevates Mad Men is the way the plot dynamics and character development synchronize in such interesting ways. The twin themes of the show are the particular nature of American self-definition and the politics of gender. And in both cases those things drive the narrative and the characters simultaneously. Don Draper, the protagonist, is the creative director of a mid-sized but quite successful advertising agency. His particular talent is understanding the hidden hopes, urges and anxieties of the American buying public, and how to tap into that collective psyche in ways that sell things. Draper knows that in the prosperous consumer society American had become, people don't buy things for what those things are. People buy things for how things for how those things make them feel--and in America, more so perhaps than anywhere else, you are what you feel you are, what you decide you are. At the same time (spoiler alert) we learn throughout the course of the season that Draper himself is an extreme example of self-creation. "My life goes in only one direction: forward," he tells someone who wants to drag him back to the past he left behind. Draper understands that future-facing urge for the new so acutely because he lives it every day. It's his great talent, but it also threatens to pull him apart. 

Similarly, Mad Men positively wallows in the unreconstructed sexism of the time, when all the women were "girls" and wives were expected to fool themselves while their husbands wander. On the surface the plot-lines are standard issue: romance, infidelity, etc. But that's just an excuse to explore more interesting territory, as the characters seem to sense, nervously, that the ground of gender relations is starting to shift beneath them. And again this is personified in the characters: Don's wife Betty, who has the perfect life she always wanted and can't figure out what's missing, office manager Joan, who revels in the power of her attractiveness but also senses the tragedy of its limitations, and most of all Peggy, the aspiring copywriter, Don Draper's doppleganger in her desire to will her way to a different destiny but with all the massive differences that being young, single, working class and female bring. 

It all comes together beautifully in the final episode of the first season, where Draper is pitching an advertising campaign to Kodak, which wants to sell a funny looking plastic wheel in which people store and display photo slides. Using slides of his own family, thinking of the ways he both loves and betrays them, Draper talks about the enduring power of nostalgia, of a longing for an earlier, simpler time. "It's not called the wheel," he says. "It's called the carousel." It's an absolutely devastating scene, all the more so when Draper rushes home to his perfect home and family only to find it...empty. Mad Men is an emotionally brutal program, as pitch-dark in its own way as The Wire or Battlestar Galactica in its honesty about the human condition. Not the greatest show in television history, of course, but that's over now, and Mad Men is certainly worth your time.