Word: boomer
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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...
...they were rewarded with Haagen-Dazs and Saturday Night Live. Three decades ago, the Beatles' crude, cheerfully anarchic exuberance came as a revelation to the adolescents of the day, who proceeded to make an ideology and then a mass-market sensibility out of a certain high brattishness. Adolescent baby boomers were by turns passionate and sullen, angry at the world in general and grownups in particular, certain, above all, that they were uncompromised, pure. In the mid-'70s, as prosperity finally ebbed and a generalized post-Vietnam enervation set in, much of rock turned merely slick. But along came...
...supposed to ride into the Beijing Games on a pony. And not just any pony, but Teddy, a pint-sized fighter who was rocking the equestrian world. Karen O'Connor's story had all the elements: a 50-year-old baby boomer shooting for gold, an undersized competitor taking on the big horses, and a touching relationship between, not just a rider and her horse, but a rider and her pony! The NBC suits were jumping in their suites...
...respondents who have tried tobacco and alcohol). As for the popularity of cocaine, the reason may simply be the close proximity of South America, the world's only coca plant producer. And finally, Anthony notes, it's a matter of culture: the U.S. is home to a huge baby boomer population that came of age when experimenting with drugs was a part of the social fabric. "It became a more mass-population phenomenon during a period when there were a large number of young people who were in the process of creating a culture of their own," Anthony says...