Stream On: ‘Mad Men’—Society talking to itself
‘Mad Men’ is about those who worked in advertising from 1960 to 1970—a decade which saw societal change as never before.
Under capitalism, consumers are alerted to new products through advertising, which reflects the zeitgeist of society at large. Advertisers would like to be also able to influence society, to create markets, and occasionally they do. Mad Men, about those who work in advertising, is set from 1960 to 1970—a decade which saw societal change as never before.
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In 2000, while working as a staff writer for Becker, Matthew Weiner wrote the first draft of a pilot for what would later be called Mad Men. Television showrunner David Chase recruited Weiner to work as a writer on his HBO series The Sopranos after reading it in 2002. “It was lively, and it had something new to say,” Chase said. “Here was someone [Weiner] who had written a story about advertising in the 1960s, and was looking at recent American history through that prism.”
Mad Men is about the men—and the women—of the ad agencies (that were then mostly grouped on Madison Avenue, hence the “Mad”) in the 1960s, who had to keep a weather eye on the times, which were very soon to be a’changing. In the third episode the guys at the Sterling Cooper ad agency come across an early minimalist Volkswagen ad that was itself to change advertising: it featured a picture of the VW “beetle,” that was new to America, with the headline “Lemon.” Don Draper (John Hamm) tells his colleagues that he doesn’t know which he hates more, “the ad or the car.” But after discussing Volkswagen's strategy at length, he’s forced to concede, “Love it or hate it, we’ve been talking about it for the last 15 minutes.”
Don is the focus of the show: He embodies and represents the ad man in a post-war society that will need to change soon. Viewers today might be shocked at the casual, unremarked and unintended sexism and racism on display; be assured that the entire series and most of the characters have a huge growth arc that encompasses the civil rights struggle and equal rights movements. The earliest episodes show how bad things were. They will change, mostly for the better, but not always.
But back to Don Draper. He was partially inspired by Draper Daniels, a creative director at the Leo Burnett advertising agency in Chicago in the 1950s, who worked on the Marlboro Man campaign; and by Bill Backer, an advertising executive at McCann Erickson who created the “I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke” ad in 1971. Don, the “golden boy” at Sterling Cooper, is a zen master of advertising, who preaches that advertising is “all about [selling] happiness.” But he himself is unhappy, unfulfilled in spite of having a prestigious job and a beautiful wife and family in the suburbs.
The secondary focus of the show is Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss), a wide-eyed innocent from Brooklyn (when she reports to work, one of the copywriters only half-jokingly asks if she’s Amish) who is thrilled to work in Manhattan. She is to be Don’s secretary; all of the women in the office are secretaries or telephone switchboard operators. That will change, too. And those changes come on the back of the prodigious advancements already of “the American century.” When an elderly secretary dies at her desk, she’s eulogized by Bert Cooper (Robert Morse), the owner of the agency: “She was born in 1898 in a barn, she died on the 37th floor of a skyscraper; she's an astronaut.”
Mad Men isn’t as splashy or violent as The Sopranos or Breaking Bad, but it is sexier, in a repressed sort of 1960s way, and it is an imporant slice of turbulent history. It received widespread critical acclaim throughout its run, and is generally included on critics’ lists of the greatest television shows of all time. Mine, too.
Sources include The New York Times; Entertainment Weekly; and Chicago Magazine.
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