Daniel Foster has a friendly, good-natured rebuttal piece which may be found below...
and Jonah Chimes in with his assertion that Breaking Bad is the best show on TV, not Mad Men.
He makes some good points, and clearly Breaking Bad is an excellent show. It's too bad both shows share this far too uncommon trait amongst television scripted dramas - excellence.
Conservatives by and large don’t look at such Hollywood fantasies to justify their worldviews. Liberals do. That’s the real fundamental divide.
PS It is a decent show.
The Greek word for hypocrite means “actor.”
I’m just saying.
“The show explains why the ’60s had to happen.”
Just as the French Revolution was “an idea whose time had come”. Why do center-lefties take umbrage at being labeled communist? They, perhaps unknowingly, embrace all of its principles and methods.
I don’t have tv, but a friend of mine loaned me the firs Season DVD package. I watched part of a DVD and I was done. The show has some amazing technical qualities and incredible sets.
That said, it is not about the 60’s so much about a tiny subculture living in the 60’s. I was there and I remember that era. The disrespect that guy showed to his wife when his boss came on to her would never have happened in my circle. I know, because a similar event happened and it was the BOSS that was chastized.
I like to say there are as many subcultures as there are people. The show did a good job of making fun of some of the sensibilities of the time, but it doesn’t mean we are “better” now. As someone pointed out a couple of years ago, nowadays you would be shocked if, after eating, a dinner guest simply lit up a cigarette at the table, yet you wouldn’t think twice about them using mild (and sometimes not so mild) “adult” language. In the early 1960’s and before, the opposite was true. So, which is better?
I think people enjoy Mad Men because it harkens back to a time when people weren’t afraid to be what they were: men, women, drinkers, smokers and whatever else they wanted to be without the Godforsaken hours of self-loathing and introspection.
These writers have all seemed to have forgotten that Don Draper is a fraud, his life, his name, everything is pretense. He is really Dick Whitman, who assumed Don Draper’s identity to escape from the Korean War.
I enjoy the series, and I admire many of Don’s virtues, and none of his vices.
I haven’t seen Mad Men, I have trouble focusing on too many shows at once, and I don’t really like much on TV. I like to watch as a diversion at times, and my husband has his shows that catch my attention (Burn Notice, NCIS Ice Road Truckers). But aside from those, it is all dreck, bread and circus’, morally vacuous.
Except Breaking Bad. I cannot remember a scripted show that has had me so captivated. The show is well written, expertly acted, has creative camera work, but most of all it has a moral undertone. The road to hell really is paved with good intentions. People can try to say that it is commentary on the WO(s)D, health care, etc, but really it is a show on how we all are vulnerable to temptation, and once you take that first step down that slippery slope there is no turning back. Actions have unintended consequences. Oh what a tangled web we weave.
Oh yeah don’t forget South Park!
I agree with Mr. Foster that Ms (Miss? ...heh) Simmons really and truly hates Don Draper. I would also observe that if Miss Simmons actually met a real Don Draper, perhaps over a bourbon in a smoky bar somewhere... she would (I bet) be invariably drawn to him.
While there are several destestable things wrong with him, the image he projects around a room is precisely the sort of “real man” self-confidence that newly “liberated” women have for so long claimed to despise, yet even in their outward dismissal still find inescapably attractive.
To start with, remember that even at the time, Madison Avenue was under the microscope in several ways. Even in the stage production of ‘Brigadoon’ in 1947-’48, the intensity of post-WWII New York was the focus of the play: an escape to quietude and peace in the rural Scottish countryside.
They did a smack up job in the movie version in 1954, making busy New York seem like a frenetic and stressful ant farm.
By the time MAD Magazine came around in 1952, Madison Avenue was one of their primary targets—easy for them, because their offices were on Madison Avenue. And the last gasp of the period was seen in the TV sitcom ‘Bewitched’ in 1964.
But importantly, Madison Avenue burned out on its own. Advertising shifted to a great extent to California, and was far more television oriented than print oriented.
Associating it with the cultural change in the US though is a stretch, because TV was very far behind the power curve. By the time mainstream TV was depicting the “love bead era” hippies, it was downright embarrassing. The hippies themselves had moved on to the “dirty, stinky hippie”, and were unpleasant and violent.
Perhaps the biggest pitch was not from them, but from the White House, with first lady Lady Bird Johnson’s joining the “Keep America Beautiful” campaign, with lots of advertising.
Yes, the Garden of Eden didn't exist and anyone who attempts to strive toward the good, to reclaim some of what is lost, anyone who holds objective standards is a hypocrite. This is why lefties are unhinged over Palin, why they hate Norman Rockwell and 50s sitcoms. Families aren't supposed to try to be honorable and decent. People are not supposed to admire those who pull it off. Families should be dysfunctional and people reduce to the level of cattle.
The collapse of America as a People started right around 1960 and has continued up to date. America is now approaching the state of being a mere demographic. Soon to come; a mere zoological struggle for survival as various groups seek the division of the wealth previously accumulated.
Oh, yeah, no hypocrisy and no facades in the decades that followed, none whatsoever! Does these people ever listen to what they are staying out loud? They are as self-aware as those people pitching stuff on the shopping channels.
I like that there is never any really graphic sex. In fact, although there is a lot of sex, the scenes are just part of the story, rather than being exploited for sensationalism.
Mad Men is like a time capsule. It takes you back to a time you once inhabited, not for nostalgia's sake, but to learn from the fresh perspective. For example, in the episode called, I think, "The Jet Set," Don and Pete Campbell fly to LA to court defense contractors. In one presentation given by one of the contractors, the brand new MIRV technology is illustrated with a slide show. The atmosphere in the room is crackling with the potential that is about to be unleashed in Silicon Valley at the dawn of the electronic age. It was California before it all went bad. All was fresh and new and full of promise. Then the 60's happened, and it all went to hell.
In a way the people who find a pronounced liberal agenda in the show are right. You can see that in the commentaries and special features on the DVD, and indeed the show can be heavy-handed sometimes, but I don't really think it matters.
First of all, it was all so long ago. To take sides now would be like Draper's generation passionately arguing about what was going on in the 1910s. There are definitely serious questions involved, but they aren't our own.
Disagreements about the 1950s and 1960s could be heated in the 1970s and 1980s. But by now, it's all long past and what's gone -- good or bad -- isn't coming back. I wonder if casual, entertainment-oriented viewers aren't more sophisticated in their approach than people who try to make the series propaganda for one monolithic view of the past or another.
Secondly, even people who were around back then would agree that there were problems then. They remember the good things and the bad and recognize the duality of that era.
Third, for there to be drama there has to be conflict. AMC's first original series Remember WENN was a sweet nostalgic look back at 1940s radio. Everybody was nice. They felt sorry about the way the world was and commiserated with each other. There was nobody you could hate or disagree with. And nobody watched the show.
Fourth, it's an open question just what is the surface content and what is the hidden agenda. People assume that what they disagree with must be the buried, "real" meaning of the program, that Weiner's appeal to nostalgia is the shallow manifest content and a feminist agenda is the "real" meaning of the show. Listening to the DVD commentary supplies some justification for this.
But sometimes I wonder. Maybe love for the era and its style is what's "really" at the heart of the series, and the liberal or feminist stuff is what had to be thrown in to make the show nowadays.
In any case, would viewers really want a series that gave an anodyne, lifeless view of the era? Isn't Weiner's show something we can argue about and thus get more engaged in than something that ducked controversy?
Anyway, thanks for giving me an occasion to type all this up. I've been enjoying the show and pondering what it means for some time.