The hype about ‘Mad Men’ has been considerable. ‘Utterly brilliant,’ wrote Lynn Barber in ‘The Observer’, ‘this could be one of the all-time greats.’ ‘Television has a successor to the Sopranos.’ (’The Independent on Sunday’). Newsnight Review also put it up there with early ‘Sopranos’ and ‘The West Wing.’
It’s hard to see any link with ‘The Sopranos’ except that creator Matthew Weiner is a ‘Sopranos’ alumnus (he worked on the 5th and 6th seasons) and that for a certain kind of critic, ‘The Sopranos’ is code for classy TV (see Clive James’s long essay in The TLS — it’s hard to imagine the TLS giving up that much space for any other TV show unless it’s a literary critic evaluating the latest hyped BBC costume drama). People who have never heard of ‘The Wire’, ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ or ‘House’, seem to go weak at the knees at the mention of ‘The Sopranos’.
There’s been much talk about the classy look of ‘Mad Men’. A clever pseudo-Saul Bass title sequence starts it off and the directors are among US TV’s finest. Alan Taylor who directed the first episodes has worked on ‘Rome’, ‘Lost’, ‘Deadwood’, ‘The Sopranos’ (inevitably), ‘The West Wing’, etc etc. Ed Bianchi worked on ‘Deadwood’ and ‘The Wire’, Lesli Linka Glatter on ‘Heroes’, ‘House’, ‘ER’ and ‘The West Wing’. It’s an impressive team. And as for the writing, Weiner wrote three episodes himself and co-wrote another three.
But usually when TV critics start talking about how good a TV drama looks, they usually mean there’s something else they like about it, and that means two things. First, and above all, it’s been sold like hell by the BBC press office and has done well in the States. Second, and these are mostly people who did English at university, it’s got issues and themes and it’s not just another cops ‘n’ docs show. And in ‘Mad Men’, it’s not hard to see the issues. They sort of reach out and grab you by the throat. It’s not what you’d call subtle TV. There’s lots of smoking and drinking. It’s like ‘Good Night and Good Luck’, the George Clooney black-and-white film about Ed Murrow, made for the small screen. The early Sixties sexism is non-stop and we have one of everything: one Jew (pretty and smart so no one gets too upset), one gay (in the closet, natch) and even a glimpse of a black man (a waiter in the opening scene). We get the idea: this is before the Sixties. It’s as prehistoric as ‘The Flintstones’, all those middle class young white men running the world, cheating on their wives, going home to their families in the suburbs after drinking and chasing skirt in the big city. And the suburbs are not like ‘Twin Peaks’ or ‘Desperate Housewives’. These are suburbs straight from ‘The Dick Van Dyke Show’ or ‘Happy Days’, as American as apple pie.
There is one problem with all this (though not for Lynn Barber evidently). Isn’t it all a bit one-dimensional? Now we’re all multicultural, less misogynistic, more tolerant, well, just altogether, better. Look at these dinosaurs with their cigarettes and their scotch and their stone age attitudes to women, gays and Jews. Wasn’t 1960 a more interesting and complicated time? OK, they hadn’t read Betty Friedan, but before we get too smug perhaps the nice people who run the BBC should just check how many blacks and Jews there were sitting around that table at Newsnight Review or at indeed at BBC4? They might not smoke like beagles, but some things have changed less than others.
It’s not at all clear from David Herman’s remarks about the show what he is really after. It would be entertaining — and deliciously self-reflective, but not on the mark — if he means to indict BBC4 for “false adverstising” concerning a show about the ad-business. I am watching the first season of the series on American TV, where it is being re-run. Without foreknowledge of how it will develop it’s fair to say that viewers are being given not only a “period piece” saturated in details forgotten or ignored by many of us who lived through that period but also a narrative in which characters are being built up layer by layer, yet not in a heavy-handed way that will produce stereotypes. For example, the “Don Draper” character remains enigmatic for the time being, a curious mixture of greed, aloofness, and intellectual independence, which is a nice mix. He also has the realistically portrayed trait of not challenging conventional ideas while at the same time not really believing in them; he is, in other words, a private skeptic willing to go along with the public or social drift of things and attitude. I remain open-minded about the overall quality of the show based on its professionalism and its ability to produce such ambiguities. Mr. Herman should give it a chance too, perhaps waiting until the end of a season (or until the writers’/director’s first obvious false step) before passing judgment. Isn’t any arbitrary year (not just 1960) a “more interesting and complicated time” than most of us remember or than any TV series is able to depict? And Herman seems to have the missed the intention of the show’s depiction of suburban (middle-class) American life at the time: material comfort and psychological security being nibbled away at its edges by anomie and self-doubt.
I am grateful for Mr. O’Keeffe’s careful and thoughtful reading of my piece on ‘Mad Men’. We don’t really disagree — I will certainly watch on and see how the series develops. I was respopnding to the over-the-top hype the series has received here from previewers and reviewers.
The point I wanted to make about 1960 being a more interesting and complicated time than we remember is that we have a very simplistic take about the Sixties (prepare for bucketloads of it as we approach the 40th anniversray of the Summer of ‘68 and Germaine Greer et al get wheeled out yet again to reminisce). The prevailing view is still that the Sixties marked a dramatic break with previous attitudes and values — we went from sexism, homophobia, racism and Cold War-mongering to a more tolerant, diverse set of values. I was trying to say that 1) We are not so superior to the late 1950s and early Sixties though we like to think we are; 2) Instead of a break between ‘bad’ 1950s and ‘good’ 1960s, the picture was more complicated.There is more continuity than ‘Mad Men’ and its admirers allow for. 3) The characetrs in ‘Mad Men’ who are ‘enigmatic’ and ‘private skeptic[s]‘ are precisely those (Don Draper, his girlfriend) who anticipate the new, ‘good’ values of the Sixties (and now), and are in strict contrast with the grotesque caricatures who stand for the neanderthal values of the Fifties/early Sixties and are meant to be entirely reprehensible — and yet who will be very familiar to anyone who has worked in an office in the last 25 years.
But Mr. O’Keeffe is absolutely right: this is all based on the first episode and there is much more to come.
David Herman
Mad Men is enjoyable pap, but any social anthropologist watching this subjective TV series in search of facts will find very few ; it reeks of product placed ideology to fit current political rhetoric
In the UK advertising industry ( including the then top American owned agency J Walter Thompson ) during this period there were many highy paid female account executives, creative directors, designers and copywriters, who went onto create hugely successful ad campaigns
Still glowing from childhood is the brilliant Angela Landels’( JWT, creative director Charles Barker ) real low-slung leather cartridge belt, filled with lovely pink and red Yardley lipsticks instead of bullets ( i.e. make love not war ); and copywriter Cecily Durrant’s ( JWT, later Saatchi’s board ) delicious : ” Opal Fruits…Made to Make Your Mouth Water ”
Perhaps upper and working class English women had no need for radical feminism because they already, as their husbands would probably attest, enjoyed a balance if not ran the whole show ?
( One of my uber-male friends keeps a notice, in earnest, on his study chimney piece : ” Never mind the dog - Beware of the wife ” )
England had many strong female role model leaders throughout history. Elizabeth I was an absolute corker .
However, some interesting TV facts on BBC Newsnight last night
( including an increasingly impressive Sean Bailey, who begins to make gentle rubble out of Trevor Philips’ talentless brits theory )
http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsnight
http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/check/player/nol/newsid_4670000/newsid_4679900 redirect=4679986.stm&news=1&bbram=1&nbram=1&bbwm=1&nbwm=1 >