by rick grant rickgrant01@comcast.net
The American Movie Channel (AMC) has hopped on the bandwagon of cable-produced original shows with its high-quality hour-long drama, Mad Men. The show is set in 1960 in the powerful Madison Avenue advertising agency Sterling Cooper. Matthew Weiner created, writes, and produces the show. The stories involve the pervasive societal influence of this firm through its highly defined characters. The drama centers around how the agency influences trends as it skirts the health concerns of cigarettes and offers cocktails to clients while the core players of the firm behave like frat boys in heat.
The series’ art design and costumes meticulously recreate this naive bygone era when everyone smoked, drank booze at work, and the men had affairs with the willing women of the firm- sleeping their way to success. The series features a stellar supporting cast, including Jon Hamm (We Were Soldiers), Elisabeth Moss (The West Wing), Vincent Kartheiser (Angel), January Jones (We are Marshall), and Christina Hendricks (Kevin Hill), with guest stars John Slattery (Desperate Housewives), and Rosemarie DeWitt (Standoff).
Creator Matthew Weiner’s pilot script concept had been floating around Hollywood for years while he worked as head writer for The Sopranos. Weiner is an exemplary scribe and creator of this rarely exposed period in American history, which inspired today’s PC culture and led to ethical standards in the workplace, smoke-free environments, and sexual harassment laws.
The scenarios involve the sexual exploits of back-stabbing executives who built the foundation of modern television advertising with clever slogans that hid the real truth, like “Lucky Strikes are toasted,” obviously avoiding the health concerns altogether. The underlying message of the storylines illustrates just how advertising creates pop culture, and thus, wields great power in our society. Of course, women were treated like sex objects who were obliged to have sex with the top executives in order to get ahead.
Interestingly, the scenes of men and women smoking everywhere harken back to a different time that was ironically steeped in Puritan philosophy while seeming quite liberal in retrospect. After all, the birth control pill was just over the horizon, which ushered in the sexual revolution of the late 60s.
The series revolves around suave ad man Don Draper (Jon Hamm), a ruggedly handsome skirt chaser who has fits of brilliance that keep his clients onboard. When the new girl (Moss) comes into the office, the woman who shows her around tells her it’s part of her job description to sleep with Draper. “If you’re lucky, you’ll get invited to his beach house for the weekend.” It was a male dominated culture at that time, and the top ad men in New York City exuded an aura of power that seemed irresistible to sexually repressed women. Unfortunately, they were often scarred by being used and abused by these sharks in Brooks Brothers suits.
As Draper struggles to stay ahead of the rapidly changing advertising game, his younger colleagues are aggressively after his job. Like a piranha-infested pond, the young execs attack in groups, tearing their prey to shreds. This degrading rat race inspired The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. At the time, ad execs were driven mad by the combat in the workplace, and their only relief was booze and broads, followed by a heart attack in their mid-fifties. Was it all for an illusion of the American dream?
Even in the golden age of advertising, a kill-or-be-killed aggression was essential- framed in macho bravado. As the top gun at Sterling Cooper, Hamm effectively portrays Don Draper as a man trapped in the high-stress world of advertising. This tautly acted series is a fascinating time-warp window into the button-down, uptight world of Madison Avenue right before the onslaught of the counterculture revolution that ushered in an era of social and moral change in the late 60s.
Mad Men runs Thursday nights on AMC at 10.
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EU Critic’s Choice Awards
