August 26, 2007
Mad Men Posted by Ellen Feldman at 08:45 PM EST Perhaps it is blasphemy to say this, but I was never a fan of The Sopranos. While I found some of the earlier episodes intriguing and fully realized, the progressive exploitation of America’s love affair with the Mafia—all that violence and endless shots of strippers pole dancing in the background—soon put me off. But now that Tony Soprano has either retired or been whacked, depending on your interpretation of the final scene, the race is on to crown a successor. Last Thursday, August 23, The New York Times ran two articles citing Mad Men, an AMC series about Madison Avenue admen, their secretaries, wives, and mistresses, set in 1960. One piece in the Entertainment section reported that HBO had lost its preeminent position among cable channels and added that it, as well as Showtime, had turned down the new hit series, Mad Men. The second, in the Style section, swooned about the period sets, clothing, and artifacts. If character was plot for Henry James, crystal highball glasses and nifty lighters tell the story here. I would be the last to deny the importance of the accurate prop in fiction, whether on the screen or on the page. John O’Hara said reams about a character merely by describing the click of her Delman pumps as she crossed the concourse of Penn Station. But he said even more by letting those accurately accoutered characters talk and act. While I too am in thrall to the ambiance of Mad Men, the real strength of the series lies in the characterizations. The men and women who prowl the agency offices bear a greater resemblance to the characters in nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels than to their two-dimensional predecessors in television sitcoms. I am not an authority on the genre, but it seems to me from the few I have seen that even the best sitcoms relied on disturbingly single-note characters. One was obsessive about cleanliness, another was pathologically insecure; one man constantly denigrated women, one woman was always on the prowl for a man. The laugh track only intensified this harping on one or two qualities. Each week the situation changed and the actors faced a new challenge, but their responses remained the same. There were no surprises, but there was plenty of familiarity and a high comfort level. In Mad Men the characters’ reactions are less predictable. They make be unlikable—many of them are—but they seem to be doing their best to figure out who they are and how to navigate the world in which they find themselves. The series is not flawless. Much of it is broad and over-the-top. I worked in an advertising agency for a single year approximately a decade later, and while there was a great deal of drinking and smoking, bottles did not usually come out of bottom drawers until after five and not everyone in the office breathed smoke like a dragon every time he or she opened his mouth. And while I suspect the sexism of the men in the show is fairly accurate, the lack of ambition in the women was not nearly so universal. As for the sex, as opposed to sexism, affairs, like alcohol, may have been rampant, but few women were as cavalier about them or as determined not to have them turn into marriage as the playgirls in Mad Men seem to be. And no reputable psychiatrist would have called a patient’s spouse to deliver a diagnosis. Nonetheless, the series has a lot more to recommend it than horsehair crinolines, chrome cocktail shakers, and tailfins. The hungry, striving, confused men and women who inhabit this half-century-ago world have more in common with Anthony Trollope’s creations than with their forebears who dominated the small screen for so many years. And oh, yes, the series has one more attraction, not despite, but because of the rampant sexism and anti-Semitism. (Forget about racism. There is not a person of any color but lily white to be seen.) The other night while I was watching the most recent installment, my husband, who is not a particular fan, looked up from his book and observed, “I guess we have made some progress after all.”
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