The theme started showing up in my friends' Facebook status feeds a few weeks ago. "Please, let us not over-anticipate Mad Men. Perfect way to wreck it. On the other hand, I CAN'T WAIT!" This post actually had half a dozen exclamation points, but I try to refrain from too much punctuation. "Sally Draper: American Hero," wrote another friend a few minutes after the end of the season 5 premier on Sunday night. "Who is Don Draper?" said another, in an echo of the episode's opening line. Of course, it could have been a nod to the flattest of literary heroes, John Galt, but knowing that particular friend, I seriously doubt it.
The first responses to these posts were from the clueless; "who's that?" or "why?" Really, I thought, there are people who don't watch Mad Men?' Now, I don't watch too much TV so I'm usually the one asking (or ignoring) the thing everyone is talking about. My kids love Gossip Girl and that other show about promiscuous young people in New Jersey so I have a smidgen of knowledge about common denominator popular culture. But, with a few exceptions over the years, (Deadwood, The Wire, Arrested Development, Stewart, Colbert, and most recently, Modern Family) I'd rather read a book or play scrabble on my phone than get involved in a television show.
So what is it about Mad Men that has me firmly in the "I have to be home on Sunday at ten" camp? Mad Men is not about my life, not on the surface anyway. When I first moved to New York City I had a fleeting thought about working in advertising, and by fleeting I mean I passed the offices of Olgilvy and Mather and thought, Hmmm, Advertising. In the mid 1980s my husband opened a restaurant in midtown, a few blocks from the offices of BBDO, Ogilviy, and Doyle Dane Bernbach. Our bar, or maybe our waitresses, attracted a lot of ad men with unlimited expense accounts. They came in for lunch with clients or colleagues and returned for drinks after work. Though they earned heaps of money, they seemed, on the whole, angry and bitter. And they drank. A lot. The more successful they were, the more they drank. As far as I could tell from my conversations with the more successful ad men (and they were all men), their bitterness stemmed from the fact that they wanted to write novels, not advertising copy. We would talk about books for hours.
Did I mention that all my mad about Mad Men friends are writers? It's true. Real, published writers. At least one has a Pulitzer, a few are write for gold standard magazines. I doubt any of them ever wanted to be in advertising.
Okay, back to my question. What is it about this show? I have plenty of ideas and opinions. Maybe I'll find a way to express some of them in my next post. Until then, any ideas?
