"Small Screen" Savour: Mad Men Season 1 (2007)

Created by Matthew Weiner / Channel: AMC / 13 episodes, 616 mins.


Although the focus of this blog is film criticism, with the Emmy Awards this weekend I couldn't resist discussing the AMC original series Mad Men, one of the most cinematic television shows I've seen in a long time. (And besides, the differences between film and television sometimes can feel like the differences of name and medium only; when a television channel devotes itself to the production of a well-crafted and intelligent series, the result is certainly worth its weight in savour and can be considerably more entertaining than most of the fare hitting theaters. )

Perhaps the connection between Mad Men and the movies is drawn most clearly by the series' creator, Matthew Weiner, who has openly acknowledged the visual style of the show was influenced by the work of Alfred Hitchcock. The opening sequence of the series is certainly inspired by the Saul Bass title sequences in Hitchcock's works of the late 1950s, particularly Vertigo and North by Northwest. The cinematography emulates Robert Dirks's glossy Technicolor work, and the show's theme song – "A Beautiful Mine" by RJD2 – is oddly reminiscent of Bernard Herrmann wrapped in electronica.

But more than its mere visual elements however, Mad Men is also concerned with many of Hitchcock's favorite themes: manhood (particularly cowardice versus bravery), mistaken identities, manipulation, guilt, betrayal, and objectification. Office politics are bloody, brutal, and highly sexual. In fact, setting the series at an advertising agency almost begs of the question: Is this what would have happened to Roger Thornhill in North by Northwest if he had just stayed in his office instead of running cross country?

Set in early 1960 when the series opens, the show centers around Sterling Cooper, a fictional advertising agency on Madison Avenue in New York (thus one of the many interpretations of "Mad" in Mad Men). The cast is mostly unknown and mostly spectacular, letting the show pulse as a compelling character-based drama. The protagonist, if you can call him such, is Don Draper (an amazing Jon Hamm), the creative director at Sterling Cooper. Draper faces conflicts at his office, particularly from an ambitious sycophant named Pete (Vincent Kartheiser), and at his home, where his passive wife Betty (January Jones) is raising his kids while remaining oblivious to his extra-marital affairs. Other characters in the supporting cast include a woman who goes from secretary to copywriter (Elizabeth Moss), the numerous men in the office, and the agency's namesakes, Roger Sterling (the silver-haired John Slattery) and Bertram Cooper (the timeless Robert Morse).

Weiner drafted the pilot episode in 1999, but the production of the series was sidetracked by his involvement with The Sopranos (hired there by David Chase, who had read the pilot script). Much of the show's success depends on the adherence of irony to its plots. It's no secret (and hardly an original conceit) that the 1950s and early 1960s – the years in the last century of U.S. history most closely associated with traditionalism and family values – was just as dirty as any other time in history: adultery, murder, lies, blackmail, substance abuse, misogyny and sexism, homophobia, and racism. We grin and grimace as the irony weaves its way through nearly every element of the show, including excessive smoking (in one episode a young child says, "My eyes are burning, mommy," and as she waves her cigarette she replies in a snotty tone, "That's impossible"). The series is rich in satire and dark elements; many of the plotlines grow and deepen as if they had been given film noir as a fertilizer. At their strongest, the plots of Mad Men allow developed themes to transcend every layer of the story, but at their weakest they have a tendency to be as neatly ordered, and predictable, as the well-oiled hair on Don Draper's head.

In the last year Mad Men has been honored with a Golden Globe for Best Drama and a Peabody Award, as well as numerous honors from the Television Critics Association, the Writers and Directors Guilds, and the American Film Institute. It is set to make history this weekend as the first basic cable television show to win an Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama, and indeed, it should win. In 2007 it was one of the best shows I watched on television (but, granted, I don't watch much television). The second season, which began in July, has unfortunately been less engaging and more lethargic due the "complicating" all second-season plots seem to require; but this doesn't diminish the power of the first season.

What it evident now more than ever is that we are ready to click over into another era, as each post-war decade in U.S. history has demonstrated. The stiff-lipped men who returned from World War II in '40s became adults in '50s, which begat the loose rebellion of the '60s, which then begat a pessimistic and drug-filled '70s, which then begat the clean optimism of the Reagan '80s, which then begat the rinse-cycle tech-liberalism of the '90s, which has culminated in the shaky, truth-splintered, terror-filled reactionary tension of the 2000s. Entertainment of the last few years has focused us on varying degrees of this post-WWII America nostalgia – most prominently through VH1's I Love The ... series – and even current events seem to expose our desire to fill empty holes (Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama draws endless comparisons to that great shepherd of the sixties, John F. Kennedy).

But the best television shows and films that look back on bygone eras do so while poking us in the ribs. Good Night, and Good Luck, the canceled comedy Freaks and Geeks, and now Mad Men are complex enough to evoke our nostalgia and courageous enough to ask, "What was it exactly that you liked about this time period?" Their respective creators draw our eyes backward through the illusion of comfort and irony, and once we're there, the subject matter is all too relevant to our contemporary culture. We're doing what humans have done since history began to be recorded: looking into the past to see the direction of the future. And any form of entertainment that can accomplish this deserves to be commended.

(Mad Men: Season 1 is available on DVD.)