There were seven deadly sins practiced at the dawn of the 1960s: smoking, drinking, adultery, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism and racism. In its first few minutes “Mad Men” on AMC taps into all of them.
This new drama set in the golden age of Madison Avenue serves as a bridge to a faded and now forbidden world.
Men wore white shirts, drank Manhattans and harassed compliant secretaries in the elevator. Everybody read Reader’s Digest. Jews worked in Jewish advertising agencies, blacks were waiters and careful not to seem too uppity, and doctors smoked during gynecological exams. Women were called “girls.” Men who loved men kept it to themselves.
The magic of “Mad Men” is that it softly spoofs those cruel, antiquated mores without draining away the romance of that era: the amber-lit bars and indigo nightclubs, soaring skyscrapers, smoky railway cars and the brash confidence that comes with winning a war and owning the world. It’s a sardonic love letter to the era that wrought “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” and “The Best of Everything,” but homage is paid with more affection than satire.
The advertising executives, who called themselves “mad men,” were at the front of the consumer rat race, hypnotizing the American buyer with huckster campaigns created off-the-cuff in smoky meeting rooms or on a cocktail napkin at El Morocco. The advertising business was flush, blissfully unburdened by aging readerships, failing newspapers, DVRs or the Internet, and only barely accountable to the federal government or public opinion.
And that kind of unbridled freedom is the series’s one speck of sentiment, evoking nostalgia for a time before the current audience-knows-best rule of business, in which viewers vote on who gets to become a pop star, publishers ask readers to choose their authors, and politicians ask viewers to decide what issues they should discuss.
In recent years there have been a few movies set in the late ’50s and early ’60s and directed in that vintage style: before “Good Night, and Good Luck,” there was “Far From Heaven” in 2002, a loving tribute to the full-throttle melodramas of Douglas Sirk. In 2003 Renée Zellweger and Ewan McGregor were paired in “Down With Love,” a sendup of Rock Hudson-Doris Day comedies.
“Mad Men” is both a drama and a comedy and all the better for it, a series that breaks new ground by luxuriating in the not-so-distant past.
