Mad Men

On Friday, the red Netflix envelope arrived with the first three episodes of Mad Men. Steve and I have been working our way through various shows that we missed when they were first on TV. After the kids go to bed, we'll watch an episode or two and stagger to bed after midnight. We're squeezing years of shows into a few weeks of intense gorging. Now that we're done with The Wire and the Tudors, it's time to catch up with Mad Men.

We're finding Mad Men more disturbing than drive by killings in Baltimore and the rat filled Tower of London.

Set in the early 1960s in an advertising agency in New York City, the show would seem to be about men and their job coming up with clever ways to sell cigarettes and laxatives. The obvious gags are about how much things have changed. They chain smoke. They drink at noon. They ogle the secretaries in a way that would bring a multi-million dollar sexual harassment suit today. They let their children put dry cleaning bags on their heads. Their kids bump around in the back seat of the car without the restraints of a car seat. They don't like Jews and divorced women. They slap other peoples' kids across the face when they misbehave.

Oh, swoon. We're so much better off today is the first reaction to the quaint Lucky Strikes and crude sex jokes. If that was all the show was about, the show would still be good. The clothes alone would hook me. But the show is better than that. Because after power watching three episode of the show this weekend, you start to wonder whether things have changed all that much. Suburban middle class life still has the gossips, materialism, rigidity, and conformity. Urban single life is conformist, too, in its own way. A woman's appearance still buys her power. Glass ceilings. All that.

The other surprise about the show is that the show really isn't about men. The most interesting characters in the show are the women. There's the wife, who is so completely repressing her depression and fears about her husband's infidelities, that her hands turn numb. There's the bohemian mistress who sleeps around with abandon. I particularly love the client, an owner of a department store; she is desperately lonely and vulnerable and regal at the same time. The real stars of the ad agency are the secretaries who put up with the crude advances by the men, while looking for a way to advance themselves either in the company or at the altar.

The guys are all pretty much the same cookie cutter pigs. The women are much more complicated and desperate.

Caitlin Flanagan
has an article on Helen Gurley Brown in this month's Atlantic. Fast
forward to the end of article for her analysis of the Edwards family
and Rielle Hunter. Flanagan tries to pin Hunter's aggressive man hunting on Brown, but I'm not buying it. Remember, we watched the Tudors, and Anne Boleyn didn't stop flaunting her ivory cleavage out of respect for old Catherine. But Flanagan's description of Ken doll John, long suffering Elizabeth, and angling Rielle is worth sticking around for.

She writes, "John Edwards– whose intelligence we
are supposed to accept as an article of faith—has managed not only to
wedge himself between two exceedingly powerful and angry women, but
also to have scorned both of them. Nice one, John!"  

How did Edwards get himself in this mess? For the same reasons as Don Draper and King Henry VIII. Domestic relationships haven't changed.