Friday, January 3, 2014

What Is The Secret To The Success Of The Mad Men TV Show?

By Mickey Jhonny


All popular culture is the shared dream of our times. It's an expression of something that resonates in the psyches of many people at the same time. To use a rather fancy German word, it captures the zeitgeist - the spirit of the time. This is basic to all popular culture, especially that which crosses over into the domain of genuine fad. The stuff that, in modern lingo, goes viral.

For all that, the particulars are missing in this explanation. How in fact do we explain the specific popularity of a TV set a half century earlier than the zeitgeist that it captures, as in the case of the Mad Men TV show? This is another matter.

Well, I don't claim to have the credentials of social psychologist or modern anthropologist -- that one might claim necessary to provide a definitive explanation. I will share a few thughts with you, though.

First off, those who claim Mad Men's appeal lies in capturing a simpler time have me baffled. Are we watching the same show? That's not what I see weekly on my television screen. Surely no one is mistaking this for Leave It to Beaver or Ozzie and Harriet. We have here a fifties and even early sixties that usually are pretty much invisible to the standard, mainstream cultural depiction: full of adultery, narcotics and ennui. Likewise, the show hardly downplays gruesome iconic political assassinations, the racial problems, gender inequalities nor the gradually approaching disaster of the Vietnam War. The popularity of the show could well in part be precisely the unusually candid depiction of such aspects of the era.

That doesn't seem though to provide a sufficient explanation. If that's all you want, you can watch PBS (if you can stomach it). There's something else cooking in the secret recipe of the Mad Men TV show's success. Yes, of course, there are all the great production values: the spectacular writing, full of insightful character development and the presentation of adult conflicts; spot on precision acting; and of course it looks incredible, with finely detailed attention to the art work, settings and costumes, and the gorgeous cinematography. Still, true as all that is, there's still something else to be explained.

What's missing is an appreciation of that special something called, on this blog, the old school cool of Mad Men. It's so subtle initially that it can fly right under your cultural radar. But it's there; the most endearing accuracy in Mad Men's great inventory of 60s era authenticity is its illustration of a time before the colonizing of our modern world by the therapy gurus.

Whatever their challenges, the characters of Mad Men do not whine about how unfair life is, they don't complain that daddy didn't love them or mommy was too mean (though in some instances, that might well be the case). They take on life's challenges free of our contemporary fixation on communicating, expressiveness, finding ourselves and fretting over emotional IQ. This show captures the last great era of American life, before the guidance tyrants, emotion police and relationship regulators took over the culture.

Yes, it's true, this colonization of the culture by the "experts" was already beginning at this time, as hinted at with the story line around Betty's breakdown. The child psychologists, the prying school counselors, the know-it-all therapists, talk show emotional snake oil salesmen and big brother policy makers, even at this time, were rearing their ugly heads. But Mad Men shows a time before these sanctimonious do-gooders had succeeded in hijacking our society and reducing it to the current state of therapeutic culture and rampant, suffocating paternalistic political correctness.

It was a time before men were feminized, women were androgynized and children were pathologized. No one would say their life was perfect, that's not the point. The problems they did have, though, they dealt with on their own terms, free from the peeping toms and patronizing nannies poking noses into their lives. They didn't make their choices constantly inundated with judgments and accusations about the legitimacy of their feelings, ridiculing their choices and regulating their hopes and desires.

The Don Drapers and Peggy Olsons were the last of a generation who didn't have or need their emotions monitored, validated or otherwise administered by the therapeutic class. Despite all their problems, they were free in a way strangely foreign to us. And we can't help being a little fascinated with them because of it. That above all is the greatest secret to the old school cool of Mad Men.




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