Despite not knowing much about this show I've heard a lot of good things about it and thought it looked cool so I wanted to check it out. Around Thanksgiving I found the first season on blu-ray for $9 and decided to give it a chance. Mad Men is a period drama set in the 1960s around Donald Draper, a businessman working in advertising on Madison Avenue (hence Mad in the title) in New York City. The show focuses on many themes that were present in the 1960s, including smoking, drinking, sexism, feminism, homophobia, adultery, and racism. The show has won many awards, including Emmy and Golden Globe awards, and is well known for its accurate portrayl of the 1960s. The show's creator, Matthew Weiner, worked with David Chase of Sopranos fame so you can imagine that the writing is excellent.
Everything from the family make-up to business practices seem quite different in the 1960s than in current day America. The two things that amaze me the most are the amount of smoking and drinking that takes place and the blatant sexist treatment of women. First of all, these people smoke everywhere and all of the time. They smoke on the trains. They smoke in the office. One scene shows a lady at the Ob/Gyn and the doctor is smoking while doing a pelvic exam. The drinking is absurd too. Every guy who works there has a mini bar in his office and they routinely drink booze throughout the day. It is really quite bizarre to see people drinking and smoking all day long.
A woman's place in society is another major theme of the show. For the most part, the men do all of the business and the women are the secretaries (or housewives who stay at home). The guys blatantly hit on most of the secretaries or make out of line comments right to their faces. Don Draper is an over-the-top womanizer and uses his "abilities" to sweep women off their feet in order to land clients. It's called business according to him. It is a bit amusing on the surface but the attitudes are much different today. One of the show's main plot themes is about a female character who is trying to transition from being a secretary into the world of writing for the advertisements. Despite being quite good at her job she really struggles to be accepted in the male-dominated world.
As already mentioned, Mad Men is superbly written. The show does a great job of character development and telling the story of how life in this era affects people, all the way from the big business man Don to his stay-at-home wife Betty (January Jones, see below). The sociological climate of the 1960s was quite different than today and it is interesting to see how things have changed. I obviously wasn't alive 50 years ago but the show has won awards for its authenticity so I am assuming it is at least mostly accurate. It is a well put together period drama that is similar to the Sopranos in terms of quality of writing but without the violence and cursing. Sarah and I are in season two currently and we have both enjoyed watching thus far. I'd recommend checking it out.
Quite frankly, I'd spend a lot more time at work if I could smoke and have my own mini-bar in the office. It would be liking getting paid to do what happens after I leave work.
ReplyDeleteOh yeah, it is really amazing to see how much stuff has changed since the 1960s, which really were not that long ago. I'm not a history buff by any stretch of the imagination, but I'd say there probably hasn't been a century in history where more advancements in every facet of life were made than the 20th century.
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