Word: mads
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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...
When season 2 begins (AMC, sundays, 10 p.m. E.T.), it's Valentine's Day, 1962. Chubby Checker's Let's Twist Again plays over an opening montage of the main characters. Sounds like a party, but like The Sopranos (for which Weiner was a writer), Mad Men uses its sound track ironically. Don's wife Betty (January Jones) has taken up horseback riding as an escape, after learning that Don was cheating and--a more intimate betrayal--secretly getting reports from her psychiatrist on her therapy sessions. (She used a session on the couch to relay a message...
...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...
...Mad Men can do all this because its characters do not stand in for Important Social Milestones. The changes in society serve to illustrate the characters, not the other way around. Don is right. In the end, no one is nostalgic for fashions or fads or furniture. We're nostalgic for people. And that, for all its sexy Eames-era perfection, is what Mad Men gives us. Not the fiery explosions of pop history, but the throbbing, persistent ache of time...