Word: mads
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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...
...fact, it's something very different, and beautiful. It's true that Mad Men, which with FX's Damages is the first basic-cable drama to have been nominated for a Best Drama Emmy, is deliciously curated, from the omnipresent cigarettes to the rocket-cone brassieres (and casual sexism) to the cool modernist sets. But the subtle, deliberately paced drama has a wider sense of history. Don is not defined by his time. He's an American archetype of self-reinvention: a Gatsby or a Huck Finn, who lights out for the territory but cannot escape from himself...
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...