Mad Men raising ire
Many viewers are mad about Mad Men, and not in a good way. Even longtime believers in the emotionally complex, deeply drawn drama about a Madison Avenue ad agency during the heydays of Pan Am, Playtex, Life Cereal and Lucky Strike cigarettes are baffled and bothered by what has become a hard-to-read, and even harder-tolike, season.
Complaints about one of TV’s most honoured, critically acclaimed dramas of the past six years have grown louder in recent weeks, as it’s becoming increasingly evident, especially in recent episodes, that Mad Men’s dapper adman Don Draper, as played by Jon Hamm, isn’t as swell as many thought. He’s being exposed as a coolly calculating liar and cheat, hiding behind a facade of charisma and He-Man good looks. He’s cheating on his wife and ruining the marriages of friends and acquaintances, with an almost wilful disregard for the consequences to himself, let alone the pain and hurt it causes others.
Draper is not alone in behaving badly, either. This is a season of bad behaviour on Mad Men, where the men are behaving badly for the most part, and the women are no longer willing to suffer in silence. This weekend’s episode, the ninth of a projected 13-episode season, follows on the heels of last week’s risky, risqué outing, co-written by Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner, in which the staff of the newly merged ad firms SCDP and Cutler Gleason and Chaough worked through a long weekend on a difficult ad campaign — with the help of recreational pharmaceuticals. There was much bouncing off walls, literally in some cases, along with a lot of nervous energy and ratcheted anxiety, but not a lot in the way of productive work, as a pained Peggy (Elisabeth Moss) pointed out at the end, moments before Draper collapsed on floor and passed out from excess and bad living.
Mad Men has always held a mirror to American society and culture during the turbulent ’60s. Episodes this season have touched on the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy, while reflecting the pop culture of the times. The April 28 episode, which focused on King’s assassination, ended with Draper taking his young son Bobby to see the 1968 movie classic Planet of the Apes, with its pithy, portentous dialogue — written by TV legend Rod Serling, from the like-titled novel by Pierre Boulle — about a post-technological society lying in ruins. Everyone is complaining about Mad Men these days. The truth is, though, this is the show it was meant to be. Mad Men is based in the world of advertising. As with any ad, what you see on the slick, glossy surface is not a true reflection of what lies underneath. (AMC — 8 p.m.)