The 1960 of AMC's new series Mad Men is not so much about the end of poodle skirts as it is about chasing them. Set on the brink of the sexual revolution, the civil rights movement, and ‘Nam, the show presents a decidedly non-Hollywood look at America's nostalgized innocence, one in which Ozzie is most certainly stepping out on Harriet, and, as creator Matthew Weiner (The Sopranos) says, “all the ashtrays are full.”
The men of the title are Madison Avenue executives at Sterling Cooper—and dinosaurs in the making. From inside their firm's sharp-angled, art-strewn offices, they peddle cigarettes, package Nixon, and plot secretarial takedowns. In their workplace as in their watering holes, racism is a default setting—as if the market insisted on it. Life may seem to favor the white guys, but history is not on their side, and happiness is beyond their grasp.
Jon Hamm plays Don Draper, the ad agency's crackerjack creative director who is by turns the show's moral compass and moral litmus test. “What you call love was invented by guys like me,” he tells a female client. The chain-smoking Draper is Manhattan's answer to the Marlboro man: Heroism is merely manliness, and though his suit might be gray flannel, his sense of self is black and white.
Others around him, though, are not so fully formed. A younger adman, Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser), wants a hug from Draper or his job or both, and toggles between sycophant and psychopath. Draper's secretary, Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss of The West Wing), is the picture of wide-eyed dewiness and career-girl can-do, or so it seems. Sal (Bryan Batt)—the olive-skinned art director and lone exception to the firm's ivory aesthetic—is a consummate man's man whose bravado is a mask. In the end, we discover even Draper is not unsinkable as he feels the need to drop anchor in multiple harbors. In other words, nothing is as advertised.
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