What Mad Men does very well I think is to give you a lot of different angles from which to view the characters without being overly celebratory or sympathetic to any one or even narrow group of characters. You get a sense from taking everything in various levels of context that all sorts of behaviors traditionally considered undesirable are to some extent understandable. Notice I didn’t say they were justified, only understandable.

The 2nd season really added a lot of subtle (and some not so subtle) causal layers, priming the audience for deeper dialogue on sexual orientation, racial and sexual relations, corporate and artistic cultures, and family.

I am personally attracted to the near nihilistic philosophical underpinnings and the coldness of many of the situations doesn’t bother me at all. It is closer to how I view life than almost any other show I’ve watched. Another series I like for some similar reasons is Showtime’s Californication but there are some big differences in that Californication has a veiled moralism to it (even if it is a hedonist, rock and roll morality) that is not pushed in Mad Men. Even with its coldness though, I think to see Mad Men only for the challenging ethical and moral strife is selling it short. In many ways it is a very romantic and sentimental body of work thus far.

By the end of the 2nd season, it becomes quite clear that every character they choose to deal with past the very surface is experiencing either some deep longing for something they can’t have or something they taste that is fleeting and hard to pin down.

I admit it isn’t for everyone and with all things there will be haters. I didn’t live in the 50’s and 60’s (born in ‘69) so I didn’t come into this series with any hang-ups related to that period. Maybe that’s the problem for some viewers of that era – either it’s too close to home or a blatant misrepresentation of their memories of that time.

I choose to see the themes in a more timeless way. There is nothing in Mad Men that I don’t feel I have some exposure to today. It’s all here today just to lesser degrees or naively / intentionally glossed over.

Mad Men has given me some comfort in that it makes me feel it is OK to be confused about meaning or purposes in life well into your adult years, unhinged by inevitable generational cultural change, bothered by a sense that you’ll never accomplish some pinnacle state of being that you or others think you should, nostalgic for things that never really existed, alone in the sense that no one can live your same life and hence never really know you, almost ridiculously driven by habits and assumptions, painfully aware that family isn’t something you pick but something you inherit, self-doubting even when others think you are on top of the world, and intrigued that nothing is cosmically important and the things you want to think are deep and meaningful can be reduced to utter silliness if viewed with an indiscriminant sense of humor.

I heard him confirm on NPR that, in fact, he identifies with the show’s main character, Don Draper. Not a surprise at all.

This show will not stand the test of time. It’s just a fluffy fantasy under the guise of Art.

(past) margaret: Thank you so much for this comment. I think you’ve really nailed the problem with shows like these and indeed any show/book/song/whatever that navigates the line between critiquing and reproducing a particularly appalling time & place or set of beliefs or whatever. Thank you!

I’ve had the same uncomfortable feeling when talking about my love for the movie Starship Troopers. I see it as a pisstake on fascism and the 90210ification of the universe but some ST fans worship that part of it and wish we lived in such a world. And which point I can only back away slowly.

However, even though I haven’t given up watching it, I get the same squicky feelings you do, because while *I* watch it and think “Man, thank god it’s not like that any more” I think MANY of my male friends watch it and think “Man, I wish it were still like that.” And there isn’t enough inherent criticism in the show’s depiction of things to make me feel like my response is any more valid than theirs.

It’s like when Ben Folds plays “Bitches Ain’t Shit” at his shows, and all the frat boys go nuts– it doesn’t seem to me like they’re engaging with the song’s misogyny ironically, and it doesn’t seem like they get that a soft rock cover of a black rap song is kind of racist. It leaves me feeling pretty alone and attacked in the crowd where a minute before I felt at home. It’s the same with Mad Men fans– one second, we can be talking about how great Joan is and everything’s great, and then the next, we’re talking about Don Draper and that fanatical gleam of adulation appears in their eyes and suddenly the conversation is no fun anymore. Because suddenly I feel like they aren’t rooting for Joan, Peggy, et all to make it out, like I am, but for Don Draper to win it all. And that just makes me queasy.

I was ultimately so annoyed by the series that I blogged about it at inordinate length, and was of course rewarded with inordinate responses.

I can certainly deal with unsympathetic protagonists, having have written a few myself, but Draper just left me wanting to scrape him off the sole of my shoe.

I think I can best be reconciled to unsympathetic protagonists of they can be shown to enjoy what they’re doing. Tony Soprano and Harry Flashman, for example, both =really enjoy= their work, and the viewer is free to be both delighted and appalled at the consequences. But I can’t tell why Draper does what he does— he doesn’t seem to have any fun at all. If he =enjoyed= demeaning women and backstabbing his colleagues and selling Lucky Strikes, I could maybe strike up a wary friendship with the character, but he doesn’t seem to enjoy himself, ever.

It’s a series about self-deception, and Draper is as deceived as anyone else. It’s very well done, but I don’t see why there has to be 13 hours of it, let alone 26.

But I do understand you not wanting to watch it. I’ve never been able to watch The Sopranos, because I just can’t be interested in gangsters, no matter how well-written and complex they are. Sorry.

Agh. Sorry for confusion. I think Justine’s blog is great too.

We here at SF Signal headquarters were thrilled to be asked by Blogs.com to contribute a list of 10 Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Author Blogs. It was much more difficult than we anticipated since there are so many author……

i like the author’s writing style

I think she simply has a beautiful mind with interesting things to share

And the fact that it doesn’t deal with race — well, that’s not what this show is about. It’s about the lives of white upper-middle class people in the fifties (at least season 1 is), and unfortunately those people’s lives just didn’t do a lot of intersecting with the lives of people unlike them. As the show moves into the 60s when people like this became forced to confront these issues, the show will follow suit.

My sister, however, feels the same way you do, and stopped watching after episode 2 despite my constant “I LOVE THIS SHOW” rants.

if you don’t like my comment, you can delete it

I think your post is spot on, though. There was a kind of plastic feel to it.

I suppose the show is reflecting the values of the times, but the writers could have done so much more with the raw material to show the real impact those values had on people’s lives.

Oh, and for everyone who liked the UK version of Life on Mars, check out Red Riding if you can. Brilliant, challenging TV, but a hundred times darker and grittier than LoM. Gripping stuff, if a bit puzzling at times.

I was so disappointed when I learned that Mad Men will not be aired in my country. But after reading your post and those comments, I am convinced that I shouldn’t be sad about it.

Thank you and cheers!

Mad Men, on the other hand, seems to be all about showing these little glimpses into the weirdness of the time period (pregnant ladies smoking! bohemians doing drugs! women stuck in suburbia!) with no actual storylines. Nothing ever seemed to HAPPEN. I’m sure if I cared about the characters, I’d have kept watching. But I didn’t need to be reminded every episode that man, those fifties people sure smoked a lot. Seriously, that’s all I can remember, except for the fact that the main dude had a few mistresses and lied about his past and his wife was half crazy, whereas with BBC costume dramas, I don’t actually remember the cultural touches — I remember the stories.