the (red) set*

Smoking, Drinking, Cheating and Selling why do people love madmen?

Launched on free to air (SBS) on April 16 Mad Men is generating a bit of buzz – with strong word of mouth already swirling around the industry – after its recent run on pay TV the Weekend Australian Magazine, jumped on board last weekend with a piece on the show’s appeal:

“Mad Men is a marketing campaign: what it sells is a sense of superiority, and it sells it brilliantly. Personally, I can’t get enough of it.”
Clive James quoted in the Weekend Australian

Mad Men is set in the golden age of Madison Avenue advertising in the 60s and like the The Sopranos the writing is tight and the subject matter provides a glimpse into the world of ‘other’ – albeit a sexist, homophobic and racist time – but nevertheless it’s engaging…..

As the New York Times wrote of it back in 2007:

“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.”

Mad Men works because it balances irony (and a post colonial eye) with the nostalgic appeal of that era. Technology is a central plank in Mad Men as is the role of women in an era that predates feminism. In the first ep. one secretary advises another: “Try not to be overwhelmed by all this technology,” as she removes a plastic cover from an IBM electric typewriter. “It looks complicated, but the men who designed it made it simple enough for a woman to use.”

Both drama and comedy Mad Men breaks new ground by relishing the not-so-distant past and Matthew Weiner, who was a producer and writer on The Sopranos, has brought his trademark touches of; wit, perfectly chosen music and slick production values to Mad Men.Weiner said his main interest in writing the show was the character of Don Draper played by Jon Hamm – an anti hero informed by characters that inhabited the fictional works of J.D. Salinger and Norman Mailer and the non fictional work of etiquette gurus Helen Gurley Brown and Betty Friedan.

As Lynn Smith, writing in the Los Angeles Times in 2008 noted, the women in Don Draper’s world “might seem to conform to 1960s gender stereotypes – but the show invites viewers to look deeper” and therein lies the appeal.

In Smith’s piece Weiner says: “He’s (Don) unable to express himself; he wants to be a different kind of person than he is. His image of himself is not really who he is. All these women are like that: If you buy into something, you have to live by the consequences.”

Apparently Weiner wrote Mad Men while he was still working as a writer on The Sopranos and the pilot sat on a shelf for a year . Interestingly Weiner has stacked the production team with quite a few of women including Lisa Albert, supervising producer; Robin Vieth, staff writer; Marti Noxon, consulting producer; and the husband and wife writing team of Andre and Maria Jacquemetton, as supervising producers….

maybe that’s also what gives this show another more subliminal level of authenticity ???

post script:

Monday 20 April, 2009 : The premiere of ‘Mad Men’ delivered an outstanding result for SBS with an average of 410,000 viewers last Thursday 16th April, according to figures from OzTAM. The episode achieved almost double the average viewership for the same 8.30pm timeslot in 2008.

pic: publicity still for Mad Men