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The Unofficial Mad Men Companion
Why Mad Men?
Mad Men ended in 2015, but it still stands out as one of the absolute best examples of prestige TV. The writing, directing, cinematography, and performances still hold up to illustrate how television as a format can match, and in many cases surpass, film. Why? For the same reason that a show taking place in 1960s New York about advertising resonated with not just modern American audiences, but people around the world.Great drama is universal.
Hamlet is not a story about a Danish prince on a quest for revenge, it's a psychological drama about someone grappling with a life that seems meaningless and brief. Mad Men isn't a story about advertising, it's a story about all of us, and things we still deal with. The entire point of great drama, especially the theatric tragedies, is that we can see some part of ourselves in the characters.Mad Men premiered in 2007, and it was truly the height of the "TV Recap Blog" boom. Sites like Gawker, Vulture, Jezebel, Onion AV Club, Slate, fashion blog Tom and Lorenzo, and even IGN would provide a virtual water cooler conversation describing the events of that week's episode in excruciating detail with a varying degree of "snark." Of course, the reactions and feeling people have to shows like this are part of the experience, and sharing those with friends is a fun part of "event television."
But I watched Mad Men just a few years after this, and with the benefit of hindsight, there was something lacking when I tried to go back and catch up with these blogs. The focus on emotional reactions and the surface level plot twists created an atmosphere like they were covering a pro wrestling match. The need for constant snarky jokes to keep a blog reader from clicking away became its own performance, detracting from what the text was actually trying to say. The focus was suddenly less on what each episode was trying to say, and more about the soap opera developments of "I can't believe character X did Y!" or "I liked this episode because my favorite character is WINNING!" This is a huge generalization, but a lot of recap blogs were doing less analysis or criticism and really just doing emotional reactions and summaries (in fairness, there are in-depth critical breakdowns done by Scott Eric Kaufmann on his blog Acephalous that I think go far beyond this surface-level critique).
Detractors
"You've Come a Long Way, Baby"
Certainly Mad Men isn't a perfect show: On Disliking Mad Men by Jason Mittell"You'll Love the Way it Makes You Feel" is an essay that borrows a tagline created by one of the characters in the show to describe a condescening undercurrent in Mad Men where it sometimes falls back on a "progress narrative," flattering modern viewers with the writers basically winking at the camera with how clueless, backwards, and regressive the characters' attitudes, or prevailing social mores were at the time.
Ironically, this essay criticizes Hamm as playing Draper as a "hollow, fearful" shell "underequipped to convery male menace," which absolutely hits the nail on the head of who the characters turns out to be. Don Draper is not an angry alpha wolf; he is a frightened, cornered fox. Even further, one of Mad Men's central premises is that the myth of the Alpha Male is created by society to make men feel just as inadequate as the women in the show are made to feel about themselves by sexist advertising. If people feel scared and awful about themselves, you can sell them not just products, but the lie that if they just work a little harder, then they'll have all the material substitutes that they think will fill that void in their self-esteem.
TL;DR Mad Men is my favorite show, and I believe it is an outstanding character study and story about who we are, and wish we were. But it is not without its problems, and I absolutely acknowledge that. Liking it or anything is really just a matter of taste.