Reviewed by Charles Arthur
Stars Jon Hamm, Elisabeth Moss, Vincent Kartheiser, January Jones,
John Slattery, Christina Hendricks, Robert Morse | Written by Mathew Weiner & Tom Palmer
UK certification 15 | UK RRP £29.99 | DVD Region 2 | Runtime 592 minutes | Directed by Andrew Bernstein & others
We're getting used to TV series with huge, complex arcs: The Sopranos (spread over eight years), The West Wing, Lost, Heroes, and now the latest to pull into the station is Mad Men. But instead of wilfully confusing us (thanks, Lost), losing us in wonk-speak (that's you, West Wing) or featuring superhumans whose origins are imponderable (hello, Heroes), Mad Men — the self-named advertising kings of Madison Avenue at the start of the 1960s— deals with a time that we already know about. Or think we do.
Yet it's still shocking, from the first scene, set in a lounge bar. A seated man is offered a cigarette by a black waiter. And a camera pan shows that everyone is smoking. Everyone. Haven't they heard of lung cancer? But of course, it's 1960. (Not "the 1960s", as even the publicity material insists. It's set in the year when Nixon fought Kennedy for the presidency.) And everyone did smoke. That's a little frisson of cognitive dissonance right there. It's true — yet we can't find it true.
Unlike the people of Lost and Heroes, where we're as confused as them, and The Sopranos, who are far more ruthless than any of us could ever be, we think we have power over the Mad Men: we know what will happen to them. But as Matt Weiner — a former writer with The Sopranos, who had the pilot episode sitting around for five years waiting to get it greenlighted — shows, though we know generality (Kennedy will win!) we don't know what happens to individuals. We're seeing people who have stories, complex stories, and Weiner uses the fact that we think the 60s were simple times to come back and bite us again and again. The ad agency is dominated by WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) who have to rummage in the mailroom to find someone Jewish when a rich (Jewish) client comes in. Women are as much an inferior race as blacks (though at least you see women's faces in the offices of Sterling Cooper, where the series is mostly set).
As Don Draper, the strong, not entirely silent, tall, dark and handsome hero, Jon Hamm is perfectly cast; he looks drawn from a comic. And the other characters flit around him, with complex lives that interact in ways that are set out in plain view - yet we can't always understand them, because they're talking in the language of the time. (It's beautifully observed: "Swell!" they say. "I've come to get my squash racquet restrung," another says.) Everything is familiar, yet new: the pill; washing machines (and their masturbatory uses for housewives). And some is forgotten: "I'm not going to let a woman talk to me like this," Draper fumes in the first episode. Mark Lawson has already described in The Guardian the elegant genius of Weiner's scriptwriting. Some men, it's reported, don't understand Mad Men (no guns, no killing, no car chases); but take the time to immerse yourself in its subtleties — Draper, who creates the aspirations and slightly false realities of advertising is himself the product of aspiration and a false reality he has created; and our picture of him as the hero is shattered by his obvious infidelity. Nothing is what it seems.
That's not to say there aren't some things for the guys. Most of all, as we move through the series, the clothes that the office's queen bee secretary Joan (Christina Hendricks) wear go from an iridiscent green dress that says "Kindly notice my bosom," to one with orange spirals that lead to her nipples — which could be subtitled "HAVE YOU SEEN MY BREASTS YET?" It is the most extraordinary outfit you'll see on TV — until the next series, I guess. And that next series (which has also been greenlit) will face an interesting challenge: will Barack Obama be the president-elect when it airs? This series was fortunate (or perhaps very far-sighted) in having a telegenic candidate against an old grinder as its backdrop, for Weiner must have known it would appear in a presidential campaign year. How though will they deal with the unknown — who's going to win this year? — and compare it to the known, of Kennedy having won? That's probably the only thing giving the hugely talented Weiner pause. Everything else, though, feels just right. Savour it like it was your last cigarette.
EXTRAS *** Disc 1, episode 1 has a commentary by Weiner, describing the making of the pilot; he admits the typewriters in the agency aren't period correct ("they came out within 11 months of when the pilot is placed") and how he tried to avoid conversations-while-walking, to not be West Wing-ish. There's a thoughtful film on the role of advertising — after all, "the American dream" is a piece of advertising: it's aspiration, something for you to want — in American life. "There was a lot of hanky panky went on," says one (female) survivor of the times. "Behind closed doors. I don't want you to think that I hanked and panked. Well... maybe a little bit, but it was always elegant."
Disc 2 has an episode commentary by Hamm and others (Hamm suffered a broken hand, dislocated shoulder and seven stitches in his head shooting one scene — a sit-down at a table in a boardroom), plus a segment on choosing the music — which had to have that 1960s feel. And Disc 3 has a commentary by the director of episode 10. It's all that little bit more depth without having to wander the internet looking for clues (thanks, Lost) or watch hour-long explanations of how they got someone's eye to grow back using 90 petaflops of processing power (sure, Heroes). Man Men harks back to a simpler time — but when people were no less complex than now.