TV is the New Reading

‘Madmen’ is pure art

Beautiful world, ideal lives mask troubled characters filled with quiet desperation

This show is art.

Last season’s “Mad Men” introduced a collection of characters steeped in the best and the worst of the early 1960s, focused on an environment where social norms were stressed and fraying in the face of quiet desperation. Men and women forced themselves into socially acceptable boxes, because social stigmas were pronounced and rigidly enforced.

So men had their affairs and maintained their loveless marriages because the alternative in loss of status and position would be worse. They spent as much time as they could in an alcoholic fog to avoid thinking about abusive relationships. And God forbid you have a child out of wedlock or a homosexual urge or a disreputable past or a black girlfriend because people will find out and use it as a weapon against you.

Some manage a veneer of happiness, but in the image-driven world of Don Draper, advertising executive, it was easier to see where the cracks in that veneer were because he was actively involved in covering them up. “Mad Men” refers to the ad agencies on Madison Avenue and the men who bent reality to their will.

By one estimation, Draper’s life is a breezy dream. He’s got the beautiful wife, the great kids, the great house in the country, the exciting career, enormous talent and respect of his peers and colleagues.

Examined more closely, he’s unable to escape a wife he no longer loves and may never have loved. He rarely sees his children because he’s working so hard and truth be told, he’s never at home because he’s maintaining a string of affairs in the city with other women with exciting minds and ideas, charismatic and stimulating in ways his wife is not. He’s also on the fringes of a nascent counterculture. He’s above it, of course, but he’s intrigued as well.

And at work, there are always hungry, younger ad agents jockeying for his position day in and day out. He’s being actively challenged by an accounts division that’s trying to take a new, more mercenary, less relational approach to clients, and it’s impossible to ignore anymore how crass and unrespectful the next generation of ad executives seems to be.

“Mad Men” features richly appointed sets in beautiful Technicolor that present an existentially merciless view of the past. Conventional storylines are virtually absent in favor of tons and tons of character development. A lot of the story plays out inside the characters’ heads. This makes it a bit harder to get into. Viewers have to pay attention and engage in active viewing.

But even experiencing the show as a telephoto playing out a specific social history exploring gender and status roles through the middle of the last century, this show is, as I said before, art.

Second season episodes of “Mad Men” air Sundays at 9 p.m. on AMC.

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