Television: Mad Men

Madison Avenue Revisited

By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ
The Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/public/us
July 13, 2007

"Mad Men" -- an old term for the fevered cadres who made Madison Avenue advertising run -- is the title, now, of a new AMC series (Thursdays, 10-11 p.m. EDT) that is, like its subject, not modest in its ambition. To embark on an effort to re-create a time 50 years in the past -- an attempt at once exuberant and scholarly as it works out here -- is no small trick. Nor is it a small achievement that creator Matthew Weiner (a former writer for "The Sopranos") and company have managed in this 13-part opus -- one of the best-written, all-around sparkling works to come along in many a summer season.

That's not to say it's not without its flaws and false notes, which don't detract much from the sparkle -- but they are there. And there perhaps inevitably, given this effort to re-create the tone and color of the period -- the year 1960, but essentially, the 1950s -- and of the advertising world it produced. The Madison Avenue of this series emerges as roughly the same corporate universe that has been portrayed in novel after novel, film after film, as the enemy of all that is human. In this handy microcosm a generation of writers found a place to hang grievances about the false gods of capitalism, the corporate man -- the list is long.

The Old Grimness

It's not easy, today, to shake either the '50s or that old Madison Avenue free of all the fiction hung on them, and it should be said that "Mad Men" doesn't try. It is instead an updated version of that fiction, which is to say there's very little of the old grimness in it, or depictions of life-draining, heart-attack-giving cruelties of big business and all its cutthroat competition, of the sort portrayed in Rod Serling's darkly powerful "Patterns" which first appeared on Kraft Television Theatre (1956) and went on to become a feature film, or in Sloan Wilson's novel, "The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit" (1955). "Mad Men" is infinitely more concerned with entertainment, an effort at which it succeeds, thanks mostly to its first-rate cast, disarming humor and period detail.

That humor appears as a kind of undercurrent in all the jabbing reminders we get about all that has changed since 1960. The series takes place in an era, as the script maintains in one of the early episodes, when it was possible to smack the face of the little boy next door, as one dreadful adult male does, to teach the child a lesson about behavior. (The boy had knocked over a glass while running around the house during a birthday party.) And it was possible to do this, we're shown, without objection from the child's father, standing by.

As the writers clearly understand, everybody watching this scene knows what would happen today to someone who felt entitled to discipline a neighbor's child with a slap in the face. A less brutal scene about the food served at the party offers an especially mischievous moment in which the hostess rattles on about the food to be served to the children. Their menu includes peanut butter because, she notes comfortably, they'll all eat that. The adults at that suburban birthday party also get to eat date-nut bread and Waldorf Salad, we're told, which may be going a bit far even for satire.

Line after line the intended reminders of that past come, none so sharp as those involving the humiliations visited on women. Women, especially, who have to work daily in the environment run by these Madison Avenue males, most of them nonstop jokers on the make who see in every woman at the office -- every woman, that is, so unfortunate as to walk about the universe unmarried -- an opportunity to pounce.

In the society of "Mad Men," the women accorded protection are those who have won a husband. In one cruelly convincing scene, Peggy, a young office worker (played by Elizabeth Moss) who has had a fling with Pete, a spoiled jerk of an ad exec (deftly portrayed by Vincent Kartheiser), watches, in pain, the queenly status accorded the newly married Pete's bride when she visits the office.

Smart Talk

Even the leading man of this series, the rare thoughtful, not to mention haunted, ad man Don Draper, (played by a heroically gorgeous Jon Hamm), can't abide being contradicted by an important prospective customer, and storms from the meeting because, as he rages, he is "not going to let a woman talk that way to me." The line has a ring of truth that is unmistakable.

It is, however, a ring decidedly thin in most of the other portraits of these ad men, who joke mirthlessly about women, and talk nonstop, smartly cynical talk all day long. Even in the '50s in a Madison Avenue ad agency, their gender notwithstanding, men surely had a human exchange or two.

In this series, as in all those aforementioned treatments of the '50s and Madison Avenue, the writers have their eyes on a connected target -- the suburbs, invariably portrayed as a swamp of uniformity, loveless marriages, where the executive boobs live and covet their neighbors' wives, while their own are busy elsewhere.

Betty, Don's wife, is for instance busy seeing a therapist. This leads to one of the more sharply etched period scenes -- the ever-silent therapist taking notes as the patient on the couch casts nervously about for some word from this silent figure, which of course, never comes. She was brought up to think it impolite to talk about one's self, she explains. Not to worry. Betty soon gets the hang of it.

Her husband has the hang of the ad business but not his place in it. Though there are hints in the first episodes of some mysterious past, none of it detracts from this character's defining identity -- he's a man with a quest, an ad man, who spends the most intimate moments with women, not all of them with the one he's married to, searching for an ad man's answer. What does a woman want -- that is, what does she want to buy, what will appeal? For all its ventures into social satire, this is, above all, a story of career and ambition, a focus in which "Mad Men" remains steadfast -- one good reason, among several, for its compelling power.