TV is the New Reading

‘Mad Men’ explores the

darker side of advertising

Offhand, it would be hard to say exactly what is it I’m enjoying most about “Mad Men,” the 1960s advertising drama airing Thursday nights on American Movie Classics. But I do know that I’m enjoying it.

Now in its third week, some things stand out about the operation at the Sterling Cooper ad agency, where the show is set, amid all the “mad men” — the term Madison Avenue ad execs coined for themselves in the heyday of advertising.

First, there are the characters themselves. Don Draper, played majestically by Jon Hamm, is the king of the mad men. The junior executives flocking around him are expendable lickspittles with no clear idea of how to sell products to consumers, but one of them is making a name for himself. Newly married Pete Campbell, played by Vincent Kartheiser, is on Don’s radar as a slightly more ruthless lickspittle who is actively out for his job. Draper knows how to read people, however, and Campbell’s going to need more than ambition and sneakiness to dethrone him.

Meanwhile, Joan Holloway, played magnificently by the glamorous Christina Hendricks, is queen of the steno harem. Her newest charge, the otherwise colorless Peggy Olson, played by Elisabeth Moss, has no idea how to dress for success, by which Holloway (and everyone else) means shorten those skirts and tighten those sweaters.

Then there’s the writing. The show shoots right out the gate with Draper spending the night with Midge, a graphic artist played by Rosemarie DeWitt, for a tryst and to discuss problems he’s having with his Lucky Strikes account. It’s not until the closing moments of the pilot episode we find out for sure that he’s married to someone else – Betty, played by the delicate January Jones – a woman who is young and beautiful and the mother of his two children.

We learn later that Draper does love her and care about her but almost more as a sister. She’s sickly and a bit dithery and hasn’t developed her intellect sufficiently to carry on much of a conversation. The graphic artist seems like more of Draper’s intellectual equal, but prefers to think of Draper as being single. Discussion of his wife, she said, makes her feel cruel.

Cultural shift

The very casual and matter-of-fact infidelity is presented as just one more part of America’s cultural history, like racism and other forms of sexism. Prior to the Civil Rights movement and the demands for equal rights, it would seem that there was quite a lot going on that would spur them on. As depicted in the show, sexism and racism were just so pervasive. It’s fascinating to me how free these characters are with their prejudice and assumption of privilege.

For example, when Draper engages a black waiter in a conversation about his preferred brand of cigarettes, the establishment owner walks over and asks him if the employee is bothering him. “He does tend to get chatty,” the owner says, a warning implicit in his tone.

As for sexism, the vast majority of the women on screen are secretaries, and they’ve completely bought into the conventional wisdom that they are inferior – reassuring the new girl at one point that the electric typewriter might seem overwhelming at first, “but they’ve made it simple enough for even a woman to use.” That being said, it’s clear from some of the behind-the-scenes exchanges that the women do have a certain amount of power in the context of the operation, but mostly they serve at the pleasure of the leering male executives.

The disparity is so entrenched that when the female executive of a department store approaches the agency about putting together an ad campaign to expand the store’s customer base, Draper kicks her out of the conference room because he’s “not going to be spoken to like that by a woman.”

Nature of advertising

While the show is a period piece – and a beautifully realized period piece at that – show director Alan Taylor pointed out, that the show isn’t being written in a vacuum, merely to be dismissed as the distant past.

“You can look at these men and say, ’My God, how sexist they are! How racist they are! How anti-Semitic they are!’” Taylor said in a making-of special. “The darker point is ... we haven’t changed that much. We’re just better at being polite.”

Also, from the pilot episode, the show discusses something that doesn’t often come under direct scrutiny in mass media: The nature of advertising, the nature of mass manipulation. The discussion of the president of the United States, for instance, as being just one more product peddled to a consumer public.

Blunting some of the edge of this cynical discussion — AMC and “Mad Men” is ad-supported, after all — are bits of trivia woven into the commercial breaks. For example, before a hotel ad will come on, for instance, a graphic will flash saying that hotel ads date back to colored rocks in Roman times. Or a short list of other spokespeople a nationwide exterminator service has used in its previous ad campaigns.

These little snippets are sometimes pointless (and I have no reference for the accuracy of their claims) but I will say that in reading them, I’ve seen more commercials during “Mad Men” than I’ve seen of anything else airing these days.

And even if the show is only that insidious ... well ... I guess it’s already having some sort of an impact, isn’t it?

Features Editor Terry J. Aman compiles the Best Bets for The Minot Daily News.

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