Over the course of two seasons and twenty-six episodes, Mad Men has received the most rapturous set of notices of any television series since The Sopranos concluded its run in the spring of 2007. “It hits a deep place in you, like a straight-up Martini made of memory and desire,” wrote the New Yorker’s Nancy Franklin in a typical paean. “Mad Men is smart and tremendously attractive.” The scrapbook of its fourty-three-year-old creator, Matthew Weiner, is bursting with magazine cover stories that all but anoint him the successor to David Chase, the creator and guiding hand of The Sopranos, as the medium’s foremost creative talent.
Mad Men is set in an advertising agency at the outset of the 1960’s, and every episode represents an extraordinarily detailed effort to re-create the New York City of a half-century ago, down to the last ash dripping from the end of an unfiltered Pall Mall. The show luxuriates in the artifacts of a lost world, crammed into the edges of every frame. We gasp at IBM Selectrics and their dust covers, Cycladic sculptures turned into lamps, table lighters, women wearing white gloves and girdles, men with hats and cufflinks, telephones with dials, and small children bearing six-shooters who wander freely about the inside of a gigantic automobile while their mother negotiates suburban cul-de-sacs.
As the plot develops in the foreground, our attention is distracted by the antique rituals in the background: the complicated grammar of cigarette lighting, a young boy stuffing himself inside a dry-cleaning bag and being scolded not for endangering himself but for wrinkling his mother’s dress, a child’s birthday party during which a drunken adult slaps a child not his own and it is the child who is forced to apologize.
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The “Mad Men” of the title are executives working for the Madison Avenue firm of Sterling Cooper, whose complex hierarchy the show diagrams in stately procession. Black people open the doors, run the elevators, clean the floors. The “girls” come next, as secretaries and telephone operators. Next march the white men, with their own internal hierarchies: no Jews at all, Italians permitted in the art department, college men among the executives, Ivy Leaguers among the partners.
The flawed protagonist is the agency’s creative director, Don Draper (played adequately by Jon Hamm). Draper is the agency’s resident genius because he creates ads that evoke emotion and aspiration and thereby create a fantasy that only consumption can fulfill. As the first season concludes, he and his team are trying to close a deal with Kodak to promote its new slide projector. Draper comes up with the idea of naming it the “Carousel,” to conjure up a sentimental, nostalgic impression of an idealized American past. The skeptical Kodak execs are captivated by the slides Draper uses to talk up the project. They show Draper’s own family life in Westchester County, with a dazzlingly beautiful blonde wife named Betty (January Jones) and two adorable children.
But we, the viewers, know the truth. From the opening scene of the first episode, we have seen Draper betray his wife with many other women and propel her onto the analyst’s couch, disappear from his little girl’s birthday party, and work so hard to obscure his true identity—he has, for reasons we still do not understand after 26 hours in his company, taken the name of a Korean War buddy who died on the battlefield—that he bribes his loving, longing younger brother to go away and never contact him again. The next we see of the brother, he has hanged himself. Not for nothing do Don and Betty and their friends live in the town of Ossining; it is also the home of Sing Sing Prison, and we are meant to think that the quiet desperation of all the marriages we see is a jail for husbands and wives alike.
In the slide show, however, Don is dependable and secure: he appears to adore Betty, and to have created a safe and loving world for his darling children. Draper’s brilliant presentation touches the clients and his colleagues, and is so potent it causes even him to shed a tear. We are unmoved, though, because we understand that it is all artifice, even if Draper forgets it for a moment.
Mad Men is little more than a slide show itself. Each image, saturated with color, has far too many period touches to absorb in a single viewing. But when the shots are assembled into an hour-long narrative, the result is deadening. Mad Men is a diorama, not a drama, its author a visionary of the peripheral. Weiner may wish to be David Chase, but achieves instead only what John D. Rockefeller, Jr. did with Colonial Williamsburg—something meticulous and lifeless.
The characters and plotlines dull even when Weiner is determined to take us by surprise. Draper’s beatnik mistress is always conveniently ready for sex. The ambitious girl from deepest Brooklyn—who lacks a Brooklyn accent—wants to be a copywriter. The villain is a preppie account executive who reveals his villainy by opening other people’s mail and setting his clients up with call girls. The fey art director is gay, but no one can even imagine such a thing, and his friends keep trying to set him up with women.
Weiner fills his own Carousel tray with hundreds of slides illustrating the moral failings of our distant 50’s ancestors. Coffee was weak but men were strong—or to be more exact, they were cowardly bullies and misogynists. They were strong only in the eyes of the women of the 50’s who, without the benefit of 70’s feminism, submitted willingly to male enslavement. (Perhaps because he actually believes this about women before feminism, Weiner expects a higher standard of performance from the male actors in his cast.) If a man was white and Protestant and had gone to college, he could become a junior executive. A woman with a college degree qualified merely to be a wife—otherwise she was doomed to be a handmaiden, serving the men in the typing pool, in the windowless room with the switchboard, or, if she was agreeable, on the office sofa.
Mad Men invites us to congratulate ourselves for having found solutions to every failure of the decade. Dry-cleaning bags now carry warnings on them, and car seats are mandatory. Smoking is not only illegal in many public places; it is uncool. We have developed a new abstemiousness about alcohol, so we can marvel as we watch the characters drink in order to forget what decade they live in. We visit the gym regularly, unlike the suburban housewives of Mad Men; they ridicule the neighborhood divorcée who walks for exercise.
Above all, Mad Men teaches us, the triumph of feminism has raised all of us to a higher plane. It has liberated the modern-day counterparts of Mad Men’s secretaries and housewives from their thralldom to male sexuality, and it has freed men from their otiose masculinity and combativeness.
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Its flattery of its audience may explain the overestimation of Mad Men. The show’s message is that we owe nothing to the past. It assumes that we will be delighted to measure our excellence against the faults of the world in which our parents and grandparents lived. We will find them wanting. We know, as Don Draper did not, that we men should not be permitted to feel that our gender makes us stronger or that it places particular demands on us to protect our wives and children. We know, as Betty Draper does not, that women should not be permitted to feel that the particular circumstances of their sex entitle them to special respect and protection, to “be treated like a queen,” as Betty demands.
Mad Men creates an implicit hierarchy to replace the imperfect hierarchy of Sterling Cooper. We of the 21st century stand at the apex, from which we can direct our gaze downward with contemptuous satisfaction at our forebears in the 50’s and the moral squalor in which they lived. We are better than they were.
Matthew Weiner appears to believe that the people of Mad Men really are different from us because their view of life was different; that because they had opinions he dislikes and lived in a manner of which he disapproves, they were less capable of love, crueler to their children, ruder to those they felt to be their social and racial inferiors, and more susceptible to comforting illusions than we are. The character of Sterling, the firm’s self-satisfied managing partner, exemplifies this aspect of the show. After a near-fatal heart attack, Sterling says a final goodbye to his sexy mistress: “I want you to know,” he says without irony or humor, “that you’re the best lay I’ve ever had.” He tells his only confidante that he’d rather that his teenage daughter die in a car accident than recover with a facial scar. Sterling is meant to be a charming cad, but Weiner does not seem to know that a cad can be charming.
By turning his characters into symptoms rather than permitting them to be human beings, Weiner gravely impedes the dramatic force of his show. No wonder, then, that Mad Men is a failure as a work of popular art, and, despite the praise and the awards and the aggressive advertising campaign mounted on its behalf by the cable channel AMC, is a ratings disappointment.
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Next year, in 2010, American writers, critics, and artists will have spent fifty years trying to make sense of the 50’s—sixty, really, if one counts the efforts to do so during the decade itself. Tastemakers and opinion leaders seem unable to escape the gravitational pull of this decade long past. Judging from their understandably cool response to Mad Men, and their preference for the recognizably human (though often pathologically criminal) characters of The Sopranos, most Americans have long since moved on.
