Advertising in 1960s America--"Mad Men" Season One

I recently looked at Season One, the first 12 episodes of "Mad Men", a very good series centering around the employees and executives of a mid-sized New York advertising firm. (The show has been on for to seasons with another season of twelve episodes to start this Summer on American Movie Classics Channel.) It has received good reviews.

What I Like about the show is how it captures how I imagine mid-century pre-Vietnam War America was: a place of High Renaissance Smugness. All the men on the show engage in generally loutish behavior. Don Draper is one of the worse of them, but as the lead character we see there is a great deal more to his psyche than just being a Type-A Male. Sexism is rampant at the firm, a place where women are expected to be stuck in the typing pool until they "catch a man" and "retire" to the suburbs to become housewives and start popping out kids and driving station wagons to PTA meetings.

The mid-level "ad men" are boozy, chain smoking, louts, status climbers and suck-ups, feigning confidence but often sweaty with anxiousness when the rat race leaves them alone. It's dog-eat dog for most of them, with a couple hot shots breathing down Draper's neck to take his place if he stumbles along the way. At the same time, it's seems an interesting and invigorating time and place to be living and working in if one could maintain a level of detachment. Jobs seem plentiful, and I doubt there is less stress now--possibly more--in American business.

There are three or four strong parts for the ladies here as well, including a secretary who cracks the "glass ceiling" of the all-boys club to write advertising copy. It'll be interesting to see how she'll do next year.

The male characters are all trying to ride the all-white tiger of success. The female characters are making the best of a world where their status is more determined by their looks and relationship to men then what intelligent women would stand for today.

In this scene the main character, Don Draper, the main 'Mad Man' at his firm, tries to land the Kodak account for their new slide projector system. To do this, he incorporates scenes of his own family life. The irony is that these earlier photos he shows his clients are now a lie, just as advertising plays on gullibility and flat-out lies if the "campaign" can get away with them.

Draper's home life is cracking up. His wife is in serious therapy, his earlier identity-switch with a dead man is coming back to haunt him (I hate when that happens!) , and he's hiding a complicated affair with a rich woman client who heads a successful Jewish-American clothing store looking to update its image. The deceptions accumulate and now seem beyond his powers of corporate-honed persuasion to control.

Don Draper is played by Jon Hamm.