In light of the recent Emmys sweep -- a brave and brilliant voting organ that's never given a single Best Show award to the likes of Have Gun Will Travel, The Fugitive, Columbo, Bob Newhart, Rockford, WKRP, SCTV, Miami Vice, Seinfeld , Curb Your Enthusiasm, or The Wire(!) -- a repost.
Look at this asshole. Does this feel like 1963 to you? Or, does it seem like a shot from a Sex and the City out-take wherein the cast all dressed up for a Days of Wine and Roses party?
Mad Men – a perfectly shallow and narcissistic show – bears as much relation to the emotional, psychological, moral and political moods of the early 1960s as does Twitter, So You Think You Can Dance? (no you can't), the iPhone, and places like Salon.com. Far more a version of Sex and the City with much cooler clothes and cars and music (and girls), what's left out of this piece of plastic is everything we truly know about the time, which is everything its smarmy Yuppie audience has had a major hand in exterminating in our current culture: earnestness, optimism, a sense of community, grace, complexity, self-deprecation, hatred of the rich and big business, a refusal to demonize others and puff up ourselves, and (perhaps most important) the assumption that people are basically good.
Not only were slick and shiny dime-a-dozen ad-men no one's idea of a role model in the early-1960s, they became the embodiment of everything corporate, compromised, materialistic and oh-so-1957. ('Course one of the wonderful things about that time is no one thought along the lines of "oh-so-1957".) Take a look: Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Lilies of the Field, the Beach Boys, Stanley Elkin, David Janssen, Jasper Johns, the 1962 Dual-Ghia, Steve Allen, Ornette Coleman, Rosemary Clooney, The Hustler, The Ladies Man, the TWA Terminal at Idlewild, and of course Jack Kennedy himself.
What we get here, rather, is the same old campy, self-referential "I gotta go right out and buy that tie!" mutant elite ass-kissing. Creator Matt Weiner tries very hard (and very successfully) to pull the wooly over the eyes of the self-enchanted mind-travelers who read/watch/listen in order to feel even more self-enchanted, for this glamorama soap opera has all the subtlety of a Bloomingdale's store window. (Come to think of it, Mad Men is the ultimate Bloomingdale's store window.)
Just take the role models. We have the ubercompetent corporate drone. The hysterectical stay-at-home worthy of Desperate Housewives. The frail, tremulous heroine buried under an avalanche of agency problems. (With the coming gravy of sexual harassment ladled over her. Abortion anyone?) The porcine connected jerk invulnerable to retribution because of his seniority. The burnt-out case, with bad job, bad marriage, stacks of unpaid bills. And everyone always chirp-chirp-chirping at those oh-so-important client meetings. (My kingdom for a cell phone!)
Sure smells like 1963 to me. Or is that the Starbucks down the block?
What’s most repulsive about Mad Men is how this time (the “last time before America became a slave to anxiety,” as Mailer put it) is seen through the Weiner-ish prism of contemporary Yuppoid self-congratulation. Yeah, sure they had the music and the cars and a real man as President. But we’re so much smarter now. So much more dedicated to our work, our appearance, our health, our environment. So much more civilized about race, and gender, and sexual preference. So much more educated with so much more knowledge right at our fingertips. And how ‘bout that clunky and pathetic old technology?!
An incredibly stupid show for its appropriately stupid audience. How is it possible to make a series about a time that seems more golden as the years go by, especially from the POV of the emotional and cultural cesspool America has now become, without so much as a glimmer of regret, sadness, or melancholy toward what's been lost? But then, what narcissist is capable of regret?
Back to the top: which one feels like 1963 to you?
