Mad? Average? Or False?

Last night, CTV premiered season 1 of AMC's Mad Men, a series set at the beginning of the 60's in the advertising world, exploring how the industry of that time shaped our current popular culture. This show's gotten a lot of positive buzz, so I was quite excited to be able to watch it for myself.

There's no question that Mad Men is well-played, with strong performances across the board (and for Angel fans, Vincent Kartheiser, who unfortunately plays another pitiable creep, but does it so well). And it earns easy bonus points for the original premise - how often do you get to say that, these days? The problem, aside from the rather disingenuous, meaningless titular play on "ad men", is that I am unable to know whether it is very heavy-handed or just capturing the normal ways of the era. In just one episode, we have characters smoking in virtually every scene, dealing with the new conclusive research that smokes aren't healthy, drinking hard liquor multiple times over the course of the business day and occasionally using it to chase pills, a gynecologist warning his client that the Pill may turn her into a whore, and, of course, the expected institutional sexism and anti-Semitism of the era. Now, since all these things are normal, accepted aspects of that time, it could just be that it seems heavy-handed to me because typically, when such behaviours are shown on current TV, they are used in a deliberately heavy-handed fashion to show how backwards people were then. The biggest obstacle to knowledge here has been the fact that I haven't been able to find a review or critique of Mad Men by someone who is actually old enough to have been involved in the business world back then - ie. someone who would actually know how accurate or sensationalized this portrayal is.

The other obstacle is, ironically, the fact that it's been picked up by a network. Mad Men is original to AMC, which doesn't air any commercials, so there's much to be lost by cutting a show that's not made with places for cuts. I think Mad Men may go somewhere very interesting, now that the first episode has (hopefully) gotten the glut of "look at all the crazy behaviours of the early 60's!" out of the way, and for that, it is probably worth renting to watch it as the creators intended. And, as I alluded to earlier, this cast really should be given a chance. It is uniformly excellent.


Were you involved in business in the late 50's or early 60's? Do you know someone who was? I'd love to hear what you/they think about how it is portrayed in Mad Men.