Mad Over Mad Men
by Inigo C. Pieraz
In this age of predictable television dramas, mindless reality shows and uninspired game shows, it’s pretty rare for a novel show to be both intelligent and fresh. Yet the new dramedy Mad Men, which comes form the creators of The Sopranos, manages to ooze with both charm and grace–all while never failing to be totally thought-provoking.
Set against the backdrop of 1960s Manhattan, Mad Men revolves around advertising topdog Don Draper (Jon Hamm, 30 Rock). He has almost everything going for him–he’s smart, a popular ladies man, and a powerful figure in one of New York’s top advertising agencies. Yet behind this seemingly spotless image are inner demons that Draper is battling.
All around him are changes that any man during this era had to contend with: women were slowly discovering their thirst for liberation, capitalism was beginning to rear its ugly head, and the public was slowly losing its faith in the American government.
There are many things that make Mad Men such a fascinating television show, among them is its great concept of both time and place. Set designers and cinematographers take advantage of the fact that the show is set in 1960s New York.
Characters are decked out in stylish outfits straight out from GQ–men wear sharp suits with skinny ties and fedoras, while women wear short, colorful dresses and expensive jewelry. Sets are bright and airy, accented by large wooden furnitures and huge glass windows. It’s a stunning–and most especially, authentic–piece of visual work. There’s really nothing quite like it anywhere else on television.
But perhaps what makes Mad Men such a captivating drama is how it is able to tackle a wide array of fascinating themes, explored by equally fascinating characters. Jon Draper is at the center of all the action. What makes Draper a great character is seeing how he interacts with the various individuals within his advertising agency, particularly the women and his various bosses.
Internally, he is also forced to contend with the unethical practices inherent in advertising agencies, where your main job is trying to convince Americans to buy products that can and will kill them eventually. There is a wonderful sense of enigma that surrounds Draper, as well as the other characters of Mad Men, that it becomes difficult to not get involved in their stories.
Mad Men takes character development even further. Unlike other television shows that are content with letting their characters merely interact with one another, Mad Men goes above and beyond this by making the characters interact with their environment.
Thanks to the ad agency setting, the show is able to explore themes as diverse as racism, women’s roles, cigarette-smoking and sexual politics. Obviously, the decision to pick the 1960s as the setting was not an arbitrary one.
This was an era of great change. America was both forging ahead in terms of new technologies–much to the disappointment of the older generation who seem to be desperately holding on to a simpler pre-capitalist, pre-advertising era. It’s a fascinating tension, and the show explores it to great effect.
The cast, fortunately, gives justice to their characters. Jon Hamm does a fantastic job of capturing Draper’s many complexities. He is able to capture Draper’s unsympathetic qualities, but at the same time, his charm and natural charisma makes us want to root for him anyway. John Slattery, who plays Draper’s boss Roger Sterling, never fails to fill the screen with his undeniable presence. It’s a great character to begin with, but Sterling’s spot-on acting makes it even more interesting.
The real triumph of Mad Men, however, is in its writing. The dialogue of Mad Men is always crisp. It’s an incredibly clever script filled with dark, sly humor that never feels forced. One line goes, “They look like they’re asking for a secretary, but most of the time they’re just looking for a mother or a waitress.”
The script also has a lovely sense of irony, as the writers play around with 1960s norms that are most certainly no longer present today; “I had to pay 35 cents for a cup of coffee!” Mad Men truly has one of television’s most intelligent scripts, resulting in a show that beautifully treads the line between dark humor and intense drama.
Viewers looking for a lot of action will be hard pressed to find any here. And this in fact may be the show’s greatest flaw. It revels in its naturally quiet nature, where characters unfold slowly and subtly. But it sometimes moves a bit too slowly, almost to the point of it being dragging.
There’s obviously nothing wrong with a show that consciously aims for subtlety–but there are definite moments when the show would have benefited from a bit of action.
Still, these are very minor complaints that does not negate the rest of Mad Men’s brilliance. Mad Men, no doubt, is one of the finest new shows to arrive in television in the last year. Stylishly shot, fantastically acted, and intelligently written, it’s pretty easy to see why so many are going mad over Mad Men.
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