In Progress

Don’t get me wrong, Mad Men, the second season Emmy winner from AMC, is incredibly well-done. It’s been getting a lot of buzz in my circle, so I thought I would check out the show, hoping I’d find my next Deadwood to obsess over. I watched the first episode a couple of months ago and was rather surprised by the strength of the gender politics in the show. I expected it to be a large part of the show, but I didn’t realize it would dominate every scene.

Mad Men belongs to the new and vastly improved breed of television series where they take advantage of the long-form to tell a complex story that is allowed to unfold over months rather than minutes. While the episode has a clear beginning, middle, and end, the narrative threads presented are strongly woven into a continuing arc that clearly extends beyond this episode. One of the strongest aspects of the show is its visual style. The show has a distinct and complete vision for the setting and period, with a loving attention to detail lavished on matters of fashion and style. The sets are gorgeous, and every shot is composed impeccably. The show oozes glamour, and multiple people have mentioned to me that the show makes them want to smoke. Badly.

Despite all of these standout elements, I’m still not sure how much I want to keep watching. The style of storytelling, while strongly structured and full of momentum, is firmly hitched to a modern sensibility. The way that the stories have been structured reveal the contemporary assumptions underlying them—the shocking reveal at the end of episode two is a case in point. We find it appalling and unexpected that a woman’s psychiatrist would tell her husband about their session, but the fact that it is used to create a climactic conclusion by the writers reveals that they expect us to and are banking on it to increase the impact of the episode.

The focus on gender politics is another way that today’s cultural norms color the show. Gender politics are the focus of nearly every single discussion—sometimes as subtext, but often as overt text. While I don’t think that 1960s Americans were entirely unconscious of the conflict at the time, the magnification of the issues in this show seems to be more consistent with the values and assumptions of today.

The producers went to extensive trouble to recreate the period and setting flawlessly, but I can’t watch the show and forget that it is being told in 2008. This is not necessarily a bad thing, and in many ways, it adds a strong flavor to the show. But I’m not sure what it achieves in the bigger picture. The relevance of the characters and stories to current life is somewhat diminished by the didactic judgments embedded in the writing and story structure.

Posted on October 22nd, 2008 by DeepthiW
Filed under: Media, School, Uncategorized