Posted on 01/29/2012 3:20:48 PM PST by OrangeHoof
I didn't start watching the television series "Mad Men" until this past September. I had heard things about it from Rush Limbaugh and others and decided to watch the first few episodes online to see if it was worth my time (and because ensemble series always require that you start at the beginning to understand the show). I eventually watched all four seasons on DVD and often went back and listened to the audio commentary to catch the director's perspective.
For those not familiar, the series is about a small advertising firm at the turn of the 1960s and centers around the character of Don Draper (played brilliantly by Jon Hamm). "Mad Men" seeks to show us the unvarnished life of that era, careful to rewind the social and ethical clock back to the way people thought and behaved then. To my mind, the smoking and drinking is excessive but so much of the rest of the show truly takes you back to how it was.
As a point of reference, I was born in 1957, in the middle of the "Baby Boom" as the middle child of five to a middle-class and upwardly mobile New York City bank executive. Don Draper looks a lot like how I remember my dad in the 1960s, adorned in coat and tie with a hat often atop his head, the neck and chin shaved but the five o'clock shadow showing up almost by noon. Don's voice is authoritative yet tender to his children yet he's somewhat distant as a parent, just the way my father often was. There's one major difference - I'm quite sure Dad was faithful to my mother or, if he wasn't, this was never shared with me even later in life.
Dad would come home each weeknight, have a martini and recline in his strat-o-lounger and watch tv. I suspect Don often did this too yet it doesn't survive the editing room. My mother was a full-time homemaker who cleaned the house and made the meals except when Dad could afford to have an African-American help with the "chores".
The racial divide was evident in the North as well as the South. Blacks often had menial jobs as maids and doormen even in the "tolerant" North. Ethnicity, as well as open racism were out in the open then. It was not cloaked in political correctness the way it is today.
While my gender and age are closer to Don and Betty's son Bobby (heck, I was "Bobby" when I was that age), the one who most represents the viewpoint of the children is the older daughter Sally. If you are old enough to know the real Sixties, it means you were probably young enough then to see the world of the Sixties as a child like Sally.
As Don and Betty fight and eventually divorce, Sally is us. She ran around the house inside a plastic bag from the dry cleaners. She flopped from front seat to back seat with no seat belts as Betty drives. She learned to steer the car at the encouragement of her sometimes-senile grandfather. She mixed Don's favorite liquor drink for him when he got home. All of this by the age of nine!
What today might be considered borderline child abuse (certainly child endangerment) was a fairly normal Sixties childhood for Bobby and Sally and, I suspect, most of the other kids in their suburban neighborhood. Nobody really saw any problem with the behavior and extremely few sought to lift a finger to object to any of it.
But, by Season Three, Sally is already rebelling. Her grandfather dies. Her parents are fighting. She decides to cut her own hair and consider make-up. She gets into a fight at school (where Don begins an affair with her teacher - and, yes, we had some hot elementary school teachers when I was a boy, easily singled out because they were referred to as "Miss (blank)", not "Mrs. (blank)."). She watches tv even as the content becomes less suitable for children. She starts hearing about "doing it" from other kids and even tries to do herself one day at a neighbor's house, leading her exasperated mother to send her to the school psychiatrist.
Sally is quick to point out her mother's hypocrisy as Betty indulges her own fantasies and takes up with husband number two. Betty gets angry because Sally is growing up to be a young Betty right in front of her and Betty doesn't like what she sees.
The children of the Sixties, whom I guess are the chief target audience of "Mad Men", were trying to understand and adjust to the changing mores and forces that would define that decade in the only way children know how - by imitating. While the series probably won't extend into the early 70s, one could easily picture Sally growing up to be a long-haired "free love" hippie chick, maybe one who poses in Playboy.
We can see the path Sally's life is taking because many of us saw this all too easily in our neighbors and family. While the exploits of Don, Betty, Peggy, Peter and the others take center stage in this drama, it is Sally who is perhaps the most poignant because Sally mirrors the experiences of most of those watching who remember how it really was and may possibly wonder if it was the proper direction for her generation to take.
I always thought Betty's real problem with Don was that she was tired of being treated like the perfect little wife, stuck in her comfortable surburban "cage". She wanted someone to look at her and treat her with raw passion, but Don never did.
Personally, I think it's inevitable, but we'll see.
One thing that made me chuckle was when the Drapers were having a picnic in the city park. When they finished Don just picked up the blanket they had put on the ground for a cover and chucked all the trash onto the ground.. They left without so much as a glance at the mess they had left.
And that’s exactly the way it was.
If I’m wrong about the shoe...
The “shoe” was what Ed Sullivan had.
I was a young man living in the greater NYC area during the Mad Men era, and I can assure you series absolutely nails life as it was back then. I can’t think of another TV series that my wife and I have enjoyed more. Can’t wait for the new season.
Doubly so :)
The Walking Dead is one of the best shows on TV. The story is so good, the zombies are almost extras. Right now my husband and I are re-watching the first batch of episodes from this season.
Great post. I think my very first FR post was asking what the deal was with Freepers who do not watch tv.
Those good folks are missing out on great things like Mad Men, Breaking Bad (which amazingly is somehow even better than Mad Men and even Walking Dead (this year’s season finalewas one of the best finales I’ve seen - and otherwise made an average season pretty fantastic).
I work in a corporate law firm and Mad Men has done the best at portraying what it is like working in an atmosphere like that - even though MM is an ad agency.
I watch Hell on Wheels, but the biggest shortcoming I see is the historical inaccuracy. They depict the construction of the first transcontinental railroad as a rich man’s hobby with few problems. In reality, it was an enormous undertaking (think Alaska Pipeline) that required tacking huge logistical problems, enormous amounts of rolling stock, labor problems, engineering problems, organizational problems, finance problems — you name it. Just raising the capital alone was an enormous undertaking. The show instead focuses on the side-stories and demeans the overall project. Yet, I still watch.
I watch Hell on Wheels, but the biggest shortcoming I see is the historical inaccuracy. They depict the construction of the first transcontinental railroad as a rich man’s hobby with few problems. In reality, it was an enormous undertaking (think Alaska Pipeline) that required tacking huge logistical problems, enormous amounts of rolling stock, labor problems, engineering problems, organizational problems, finance problems — you name it. Just raising the capital alone was an enormous undertaking. The show instead focuses on the side-stories and demeans the overall project. Yet, I still watch.
I thought the same thing. Why would I want to watch a series about meth? I starting watching the series on Netflix and now I'm hooked (on the series... not meth!).
“Mad Men” bump!
Love, LOVE this show ... missed the reruns watching the Australian Open tennis early this morning. (What a match!)
http://www.amctv.com/schedule#series/Mad%20Men
I thought tossing the litter after the picnic was completely unrealistic - my family NEVER would have done anything like that. But then my dad organized a clean-up for the very first Earth Day. The point is, the whole neighborhood participated.
Tossing litter was a low-class thing to do, and I’m pretty sure Betty at least would have thought so.
I see both sides. City parks, by that time, often had trash cans but a lot of open spaces like meadows didn’t. However, I definitely remember crushing beer cans (a greater challenge then than today) and simply chucking them into the wilderness as far as you could throw it without the slightest concern about what would happen to it.
Lady Bird Johnson started the “Beautify America” campaign in the mid-60s. Before then, our highways had a lot of litter along the road. Still does, but not nearly as bad.
I saw the the world of the Sixties as Eddie Haskell (my parents’ constant reference to me).
Its full of social engineering, like an ‘interpretive museum’ about the past.
It’s garbage.
You’re right. The show is about social engineering to make the morally bankrupt of our time, feel like there was no one better in the past. It’s a shame viewers cannot discern the purpose of this program.
excellent!
I understand your point. I suspect that’s partially true. I watched an extra feature in the DVD set from womens studies types on the subject of divorce and their point was that 40s-60s was aberrant because there were so few divorces. Instead of praising the social forces that made more marriages stick, their conclusion was that we shouldn’t expect a low divorce rate to be normal.
But I also believe that more things went on than we’d like to admit because it was kept quiet. There wasn’t gay pride marches or Jerry Springer shows to glorify perversions.
The historical inaccuracies are atrocious. In just the first episode, they made it seem as if the Union Pacific was being built with black labor. Far from it. Go back and have a look at historical photographs of any of the railroad projects and see how many black faces you can find in the work gangs. They went off the historical rails so that they could make racial points against the ex-slave overseer bosses. I wasn’t impressed.
Another departure was their caricature of a railroad baron firing an engineer - and threatening to have him thrown off a moving train - merely for having the temerity to suggest a more direct routing than the one favored by the magnate to maximize the route length. That was simply a ridiculous slur.
I have no doubt that overall length was a factor in route setting, but so was the terrain and the expense of building on it. There would have been no point in selecting a longer route to enhance payment from the government if the cost of building out the route spent all that revenue and more.
And railroad barons simply did not throw their engineers off moving trains to express their displeasure.
I just couldn’t take the show seriously. Just too much utter absurdity.
Now, Mad Men, the real subject of this thread, is another matter entirely. That one gets a big thumbs up from me.
As does Justified, Boardwalk Empire, and Breaking Bad.
Re. Breaking Bad: if you like the show have a look online for the “minisodes” or “webisodes”. Look for one called “Wedding Day” and download it. It’s hilarious.
To save you time, here’s a sample link:
http://www.hulu.com/watch/66160/breaking-bad-wedding-day
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