Faint Praise for Mad Men

I can't really say that anything Sacha Zimmerman says in her diatribe against Mad Men is precisely wrong, but the tenor seems way off base to me. The show exhibits the flaw of not having any interesting stories. And this really is a serious flaw. Indeed, it's fatal. People will never look back on Mad Men as one of the peaks of human aesthetic achievement. That said, the show is acted decently enough and the storylines aren't stupid to the point of enragement, they're just dull. And it is, as Zimmerman says, gorgeously designed with a meticulous eye for detail.

At the end of the day, it's not as if there's some huge roster of better period dramas from the current issue of quality television. HBO and the BBC took a stab with Rome and now AMC's giving it a shot with Mad Men and both combine some real virtues with some significant flaws. Someday someone will do it better, and they'll probably look back on these shows as important precedents. In the meantime, it's not as if the Summer of 2007 is providing a bounty of alternative televised entertainment -- it seems like an eminently reasonable thing to keep on one's DVR.

Comments

If you like the 1950s Madison Avenue milieu, then Steven Soderborgh's segment in the trilogy movie "Eros" is quite funny with Robert Downey Jr. as a creatively blocked account manager on an alarm clock account and Alan Arkin as his dirty old man psychiatrist. Together, they invent the snooze button.

Posted by Steve Sailer | August 25, 2007 2:45 PM

I have enjoyed the twists and turns in the first four episodes of Damages with Glenn Close on AMC.

Posted by Jim | August 25, 2007 2:50 PM

Let me add "The Bronx is Burning" to the list of period dramas that manage to have dull story lines. The fact that it's making the Billy Martin/Steinbrenner/Reggie soap opera dull is quite damning.

Posted by Chris | August 25, 2007 2:55 PM

As you kind of said: story matters.

Perhaps they are practicing a form of concept art by reinforcing the vacuousness of the period by also not having any real plot...as did the lives of their subjects.

As for Rome; it succeeds not only in capturing the grittiness an extravagance of the period, but in having a clever character focused story angle, so the plot lines are there much more so than Mad Men.

Posted by Thunderlips | August 25, 2007 2:56 PM

Um, hello? Have you seen the Tudors on Showtime? It's awesome, and Peter O'Toole is joining the cast next season as Pope Paul III.

Posted by Thomas Boleyn | August 25, 2007 2:57 PM

Peter O'Toole is still alive? How is that possible? I guess he's like Keith Richards.

Regarding, the Tudors. That show is soft-core porn. The story line is all about violence, fellatio and frustrated virginity. As evidence, I offer the season two finale. It's Superbad meets Braveheart.

Posted by Unreal Veal | August 25, 2007 3:05 PM

What a crappy piece of criticism by Zimmerman. There is no attempt to develop any structure to the argument and the "review" comes down to a series of subjective impressions each of which could have seemingly been punctuated with an exclamation point.

Bad pieces like this are useful, however. Now I know that I can ignore Zimmerman along with several other members of TNR's "professional" class of writers.

Posted by jonm | August 25, 2007 3:14 PM

I think it may be a bit early for the judgment that the show lacks interesting stories, although I have only seen three of the episodes. It strikes me that the show has spent a good deal of time simply laying out some background on the relatively large set of characters, and starting up and introducing several ongoing plot lines, while letting viewers drink in the settings and get accustomed to the conventions and mores of the social world in which the characters move. And yes, to develop characters in a drama you often have to be a bit obvious about some things - for example by having characters communicate a few things out loud that might more naturally be revealed by actions and omissions over a long period of time. It could be that this is setting the stage for more riveting stories as the plot lines are allowed to progress and tangle together, and more layers of secrecy and social complexity are revealed.

The show is not just soaked in period design, but period cultural allusions which play a thematic role - and I don't just mean the cute jokes that refer to a future event we know is coming but the characters don't. There are more interesting illusions to the writers, arts, politics and social movements and structures of the time, and these are thematically connected to the shows preoccupation with the sources of human desire and identity, particularly gender role identity.

Zimmerman says:

Sometimes it seems that what Weiner wants you to get is that we were dumb as rocks in 1960.

This just doesn't seem right to me at all. In fact, the strongest impression I have received is that the most interesting features of the show call attention to the ways in which the way we live now is similar to that era, and also ways in which that society was in certain way more open, less dumb and less repressed than ours. It's avoided that cloying and conventional sort of Peyton Place/Summer Place view of the postwar era: raging sexual passions roiling beneath the repressed picture perfect postwar exteriors. Interestingly, the sexuality in the show doesn't lie "beneath" anything. Rather life seems to be compartmentalized and departmentalized by a collection of social truces and unspoken understandings about turf and sanctuaries. Within particular departments everything is quite out in the open; but what happens in that department is not spoken of very openly in the other departments.

Zimmerman recounts the scene where the characters joke:

"Your wife and your lawyer are drowning. Who do you save? Neither!"

And responds "Get it? Marriage itself is a joke."

I don't think she gets it at all. In the first episode, after Draper's character is developed as a somewhat cynical and jaded competitor and womanizer, he goes home, and I was expecting to see a classic portrayal of the loveless and sullen postwar "fake" marriage. But instead it turns out Draper is quite tender, and obviously in love with his wife. So the point about that marriage joke is the conflict between bluff, masculine bravado and conventionalized misogyny and the actual nature of their relationships with women. While Draper tells one character over cocktails "what you call love was invented by guys like me, to sell nylons," the reality of his emotional attachment to his wife seems a bit more complicated.

Also, her comment that the little powder room scene was "apropos of nothing" seems off the mark. Surely part of the idea was a further indication that Draper, with his still mysteriously hidden and rough childhood background, and later experience of war, feels out of place in the beautiful domestic world his wife has constructed, a world which is filled with the products he himself probably advertises.

I've found the show reasonably interesting so far, and can imagine it becoming even more interesting.

Posted by Dan Kervick | August 25, 2007 3:20 PM

"Now I know that I can ignore Zimmerman along with several other members of TNR's "professional" class of writers."

Right. But what is it that spurs people on this site to denigrate TNR at every opportunity. There is no doubt that Martin Peretz is way, way out there and worthy of criticism. And there is no doubt that the magazine has taken conservative turns, most recently in the lead up to the Iraq War. I don't apologize for TNR's content or tone in that respect. Not at all. But some good journalism comes out of there. Health care reform gets a generous read at TNR. Hell, was it Chait that wrote about the reasons to hate George W. Bush? There is something to be had from reading it.

Posted by Unreal Veal | August 25, 2007 3:21 PM

"In the meantime, it's not as if the Summer of 2007 is providing a bounty of alternative televised entertainment".

Perhaps not "a bounty", but F/X has two excellent shows: Rescue Me and the new series Damages. Also, VH-1's reality show about the pick-up artists and the dorks is entertaining.

Night owls (or those with DVRs who aren't easily offended) should check out Red Eye at 2am weekdays on Fox News Channel. Truly odd and often hilarious.

As for Mad Men, a few minutes of it had me struggling to stay awake. A better idea for a period show about advertising execs would have been to make Whit Stillman an offer he couldn't refuse to create a series out of his ad exec characters from The Last Days of Disco.

Posted by Fred | August 25, 2007 4:37 PM

"Together, they invent the snooze button."

That reminds me of Robert Downey Jr.'s line from "Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang" where a girl at a party asks him what he does for a living and he deadpans that he "invented dice".

Posted by Fred | August 25, 2007 4:49 PM

What's with the faint praise for Rome? That was about the awesomest show ever.

Posted by too many steves | August 25, 2007 5:10 PM

Might I suggest trying Turner Classic Movies? (disclaimer: I'm the head of programming); today is devoted to Broderick Crawford and the films tonight include "Born Yesterday" ('50) and "All the King's Men" and tomorrow is devoted to Kirk Douglas including "Ace in the Hole," "Gunfight at the OK Corral," "Champion" and several others. Please forgive the plug but there is some great stuff out there.

Posted by Charlie | August 25, 2007 5:14 PM

Charlie,
Thanks for the heads-up on 'Ace in the Hole.' The DVR is set. TCM is the reason we have cable.

As for 'Mad Men,' I like the pace; the only thing I don't like is the occasional "look at how naive we were then!" moments that are too on-the-nose. Like when the kids were running around playing in a dry-cleaning plastic bag. Some of the stuff is dead-on - I can still remember my mother smoking while preparing dinner, or in the supermarket check-out line.

As far as period pieces on TV go, nothing beats 'Deadwood.' Al Swearengen craps guys like those 'Rome' douches every day after breakfast. I hope Milch makes those movies now that 'John From Cincinnati' has been put down.

Posted by Woody Bombay | August 25, 2007 5:42 PM

I kind of don't understand Matt's criticism. Or rather, I'm not sure why it's a criticism. It seems to me that Weiner & co. simply aren't making a plot-driven show. It's not as if the show is dedicating a huge amount of time to the overarching plotlines and just failing to make them interesting; they spend a few minutes on, say, Draper's relationship with Rachel Mencken and the rest on character exploration, the world they live in, et cetera. That might not be your preferred kind of TV show, but it's not really an objective aesthetic flaw.

Posted by S. Tarzan | August 25, 2007 6:54 PM

Also, to follow up on Dan Kervick's post, it's notable that Sacha Zimmerman gets at least one thing completely wrong:

Then there are so many references to how none of the characters--even pregnant women--seriously believe cigarettes are bad for them (insert annoying "we know better now" coughing fit here), it's maddening. I get it: It's 1960! Now move on.

That's not true at all. Don Draper is quite aware of the health risk--he mentions it to his bohemian mistress IIRC--and we have no reason to think that anybody (except the people from Lucky Strikes) are any less uninformed about it. The characters smoke constantly and know all the while that it causes lung cancer.

Posted by S. Tarzan | August 25, 2007 7:02 PM

It isn't hard to see why TNR wouldn't find any of MAD MEN's storylines interesting. For the left, the only story to be told about "repression" is How Terrible It Was.

But for people who prefer manners and modesty to liberation, there's plenty of meat on the bones of the show's plots. For example: what do you get when you raise an ten-year-old kid in a sexually liberated home? A sexually liberated ten-year-old. This revelation yields a very unsettling scene in episode three.

Posted by Girl Friday | August 27, 2007 1:08 PM