Call me Mad, but ’60s ad show a masterpiece

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 18/07/2009 (6265 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

With the Winnipeg Fringe Festival on this weekend — and that strange yellow orb having returned to the sky — it seems vaguely dirty to talk about television.

But those Emmy Awards nominations released Thursday provide a good excuse.

I was heartened to see that my favourite show of the moment, Mad Men, copped 16 nominations, the most of any hour-long drama.

In case you have gone back to rabbit’s ears (as a valid protest against too much change in the broadcast world), Mad Men is American writer-producer Matthew Weiner’s specialty cable masterpiece set in an upscale Manhattan advertising agency in the early 1960s.

The second season aired last year on the AMC network (available only to Shaw Cable customers, for reasons unclear to this MTS customer), and has been repeating on Bravo!

It was released on DVD just the week, with the timing to the Emmy nominations obviously planned to the hilt. Season 3, by the way, premieres Aug. 16 on AMC.

There are certain perks that accrue to aging entertainment journalists. A DVD set of the second season landed on my desk a few weeks ago.

I knew the fringe was coming up, so I said to my wife: "We’ve waited this long; we can wait until the fringe is over and we have a block of time." (Yes, I often use semi-colons with my wife.)

Alas, frisky couple that we remain, passion overtook us. It was well after dark, a week ago Friday, when we popped Episode 1 in the DVD machine.

Who can control these impulses? By Tuesday, we had watched six hours, fully half the season.

I don’t want to ruin Season 2 for people who’ve yet to catch up with it, but I will say it is as all-enveloping as Season 1.

The set design and costuming are enough to keep you fascinated. They give the series the look of retro-porn. Over all, the production may be the most distinctive thing on television since Star Trek 40 years ago.

Meanwhile, all the main characters — the moody anti-hero Don Draper, his sad blond wife Betty, the preppy account executive Pete Campbell and, of course, the striving secretary turned copywriter Peggy Olsen — have been given intriguing story lines.

They have been developing slowly, but the quiet deliberateness of the show is a good part of its allure.

Like last year’s movie adaption of the Richard Yates novel Revolutionary Road, which covers similar ground, the highbrow knock against Mad Men is that it is too self-congratulatory.

Viewing Weiner’s world from our progressive perch almost half a century later, we are meant to be smugly horrified by the characters’ behaviour: their chain-smoking and martini-drinking, not to mention their casual sexism, homophobia and racism.

But all artists view the world through the prism of their own time and place. Even period dramas like the Into the Storm (about Winston Churchill) and John Adams (about the second U.S. president) reflect the biases at people judging their actions with 20-20 hindsight.

One of the side pleasures of Mad Men is the opportunity it provides for reflection on how much things have changed.

The ’60s, when you look back on them, were truly amazing times. So much happened: birth control, the atom-bomb, JFK’s assassination, the Beatles, Vietnam, pot and LSD, the Summer of Love, the moon-landing.

(In Canada, we had our own modest excitements, from the introduction of medicare to Expo ’67 to the election of Trudeau.)

But time does not slow down. Since 2000, we have also experienced astonishing change. Digital technology has revolutionized the way we communicate; women outnumber men in the workforce and in universities; gays and lesbians can marry legally; our children travel to distant parts of Asia and Africa the way we backpacked through Europe.

Another big change is the way we consume TV. Watching a season of Mad Men in a concentrated fashion on DVD has made me reflect again on this.

It will be fascinating to see how the conventional broadcasters, who still depend on advertising (created by the Mad Men of today), will adapt to the new reality as online delivery takes hold.

morley.walker@freepress.mb.ca