Authentic, smart, MAD
The year is 1962.
It’s 2 in the afternoon.
Don Draper (John Hamm), the head of the creative department of a New York City ad agency, walks to his sideboard. He pours himself a large drink of liquor.
The suit on his back is worth more than most men make in a year. The cufflinks on his wrist were a gift from a woman who isn’t his wife.
Don Draper isn’t real. But he and the rest of the Sterling Cooper Advertising Agency sure seem like it to the millions of viewers of ‘Mad Men.’
When ‘Mad Men’ took home six Emmy awards this year, AMC went from a basic-cable wannabe to the forefront of the television world. The drama enjoys a life free from what kills most time period series. It actually feels, looks and acts real.
Set designs aren’t cheesy and don’t appear to suffer from a 1960s meltdown.
In fact, it’s just the opposite. The choices of color and costume in the show are drop-dead gorgeous. Even the traditionally mundane trips to the supermarket showcase the series’ sparkling use of color.
But it’s the brilliant strokes of characterization that are applied unequally to the characters that make the show. The show is totally driven by the characters, there’s only a hint of overall plot. But that’s fine. Each character is fascinatingly complex, thanks to writer and creator Matthew Weiner.
Some of the characters we think we know a lot about. Others we know we don’t. Don Draper looks like he has a life of luxury.
He has a corner office, appears to be an advertising genius, drives a Cadillac and leaves when he wants, usually to go carry on one of several affairs.
Other times he goes home to his two children and his beautiful wife (January Jones). Mostly, though, he seems to spend his afternoons and evenings romancing nearly everything in a skirt.
And through flashbacks, which started in last season’s episode ‘The Hobo Code,’ we also know that Don isn’t exactly who he says he is, and his past hasn’t been the easiest.
Apparently there is more to Don than we originally suspected.
Viewers are getting to know Don, but they’re still left dying to know more about the other equally intriguing characters on the show, including Elisabeth Moss’ character, Peggy Olsen, a junior copywriter whose out-of-wedlock child (a major no-no in the 1960s) threatens her future in the men’s world of advertising.
The best thing about the characters’ storylines is that none seem particularly forced or historically improbable.
For the most part, the series has managed to keep itself in the realm of realism.
Weiner has had plenty of practice at creating larger-than-life characters and stories. He wrote for ‘The Sopranos’ – a show that knew everything about sucking viewers into the lives of characters – during the final three seasons.
Tony Soprano (‘The Sopranos’), along with other HBO characters Carrie Bradshaw (‘Sex and the City’) and Vincent Chase (‘Entourage’) are memorable because of the way the audience falls in love with them and the way writers carefully portray them.
We end up wanting to live their lives. Their lives look too good to be true.
And in the case of the characters of ‘Mad Men,’ that’s the truth. Their lives are too good. Many are hiding something from either themselves or their friends and coworkers.
Thanks to Matthew Weiner, we’ve entered Don Draper’s world and the rest of Sterling Cooper.
It’s a foreign and exotic land to us – but no one wants to leave.
Published on October 26, 2008 at 12:00 pm
