I rarely watch television. However Mad Men has been one of the most deliciously dark, original and complex shows I have had the pleasure of watching all of season one in a very short space of time. These days, I doubt I would have the patience (or the time to schedule) a single episode a week. The little free time I’ve had recently has been taken up with back-to-back binge sessions of Mad Men.
These ad men live in a world dominated by cigarette smoke and three-martini lunches, where their wives lead highly partitioned lives from their husbands. It’s this really knowing, retro and sexy look into the era when America was this great beacon of hope and consumerism, before racial and sexual equality and before the Vietnam war.
The characters all suffer with the weight of living the myth of their lives, Don as the wunderkind ad man and perfect husband, always trying to do the right thing but always a moment too late. His constant indiscretions make him this captivating anti-hero. Peggy lives with the secret result of her deeply unsexy relationship with the smarmy Pete Campbell.
I have a mad fascination with Betty Draper at the moment. She lives as a caged bird, she was a model who married a man because he seemed good on paper. Now as a housewife, married essentially to a stranger, she realises that his attentions will only last as long as her beauty does, they’re not even holding that well now. She has become so disconnected from the rest of the world, that she wonders to her analyst: “now that I’m married what else is left? Just sit around and smoke and wait till I die?.”
The best image from season one was a shot of her, this Grace Kelly beauty in her nightgown with a fag hanging out of her mouth shooting at her neighbour’s pigeons.
The sexual politics in this show are amazing, the men are just outrageously chauvinistic. Even Joan, tells the budding copywriter Peggy to smarten up so she can find a husband. Written by one of the writers from THe Sopranos, this show has that same seething undercurrent to it, and its wonderful. If you get a chance make sure you watch it.