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Nostalgia is tricky for TV, which tends to render it as camp, sap or clichéd commentary. Mad Men could have been another index item in the boomer-centric '60s-history textbook that includes We Didn't Start the Fire and The Wonder Years. The New Frontier. The social upheaval. The same old times a-changin' again...
Unlike the typical '60s reminiscence, Mad Men doesn't have a baby-boomer perspective. (Creator Matthew Weiner, 42, was born after the boomer cutoff.) Its sensibility is closer to artifacts of its time like The Apartment or John Cheever's Wasp-character-study stories. In Mad Men, the boomers are a market for Clearasil or the children of the Drapers and their friends, largely unseen and unheard. (In a new episode, Don instructs his grade-school-age daughter how to mix a Tom Collins for guests...
...though change--beatniks, integration, feminism--percolates at the edges, Mad Men is mainly about people who stand outside that change. The early '60s was a time of creative ferment in the ad industry, but Don and his old-school ad shop, Sterling Cooper, resist the trendy smirkiness of the revolutionary Volkswagen "Think Small" ads of the period. "There has to be advertising for people who don't have a sense of humor," he scolds an underling. In Season 1, Sterling Cooper got involved in the 1960 election. It backed Nixon...
...inversion of the usual '60s-retrospective equation (J.F.K. + space = optimism). But what makes Mad Men great TV is how it subverts our expectations. Thus the philandering Don turns out to be Peggy's biggest backer in the sexist office. Thus Peggy in turn is not a persecuted saint but competent, focused--and sometimes cold. And thus a surprise twist in the second episode reveals Pete to be both opportunistic and sympathetic...
...concept: for the first time in history, two major enemies have kept the peace by keeping themselves vulnerable. Not that either is comfortable with that vulnerability. But previous attempts to seek defensive protection from nuclear delivery systems have merely spawned new types of such systems. In the 1950s and '60s, the superpowers threatened each other with bombers and defended themselves with antiaircraft installations. But air defenses only stimulated the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles. Then both sides developed antiballistic missiles, but they soon learned that these could be overwhelmed by missiles with multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles, known...