Since The Wire wrapped up early last year, Mad Men has become the new “it” show for critically acclaimed television. It’s smart, it’s unique (how many other shows are set in a sixties advertising agency?), it’s well written and well acted. It’s a show to which non-television websites devote serious attention. Sunday night it finished its third season run with its characters still reacting to the recent assassination of John Kennedy.
That the show is crafted with extraordinary care goes almost without saying, but the main hook is the fact that it takes place in the early sixties. If it were set in an ad agency amidst chirping Blackberries and edgy “Web 2.0” campaigns it would garner but a small fraction of the attention it does. The late sixties and early seventies, with everything from Vietnam, hippies, Black Power, feminism, and all the rest, are a story that’s been told, retold and mistold a thousand times already. But the early sixties, when the cracks in the post-war American dream began to show, is an almost blank spot in our cultural memory, as such it is ripe for fiction.
But our easy fascination with this mostly unknown era isn’t only due to the fact that it was overwhelmingly overshadowed by the political, cultural and social fireworks that followed it. It’s also just a result of timing. Like Westerns during the 1920s dawn of Hollywood, Mad Men is set in a time that is rapidly passing out of living memory. Less than one in five of today’s Americans were born before the Eisenhower-Kennedy era ended in Dallas. Consider that Don Draper, who is what passes for the show’s main character, fought in the Korean War. Korean War vets today are all in their mid-seventies at least, and most of them are older. People who can actually remember the time portrayed on the show are a small and shrinking minority.
But they are with us still and it provides some startling context when you think about it. How many in the show’s audience know someone who could’ve been career woman Peggy Olson four and a half decades ago? She’d be about seventy now. A doting grandmother with an early career her descendants barely know about, perhaps? Or committed corporate type who, as the odious phrase goes, “had it all”, or tried for it, anyway?
Or what about Salvatore Romano, the deeply closeted commercial director? Stonewall is less than six years away from the current time on the show. His career path could’ve made him similar to guys like Harvey Milk, prosperous men who tired of the closet and formed the nuclei of the first openly homosexual communities.
Paul Kinsey, the show’s resident bearded liberal, might be a bit too old to have become a hippie dropout. But perhaps he ended up as one of those discouraged, old line lefties who shook their heads sadly when Ronald Reagan was elected and wondered what the hell happened. Carla, the Draper’s housekeeper and nanny, might have been one of the wizened old colored ladies who cast her vote for Barack Obama with tears in her eyes, never having thought the chance would come in her lifetime.
Of course there are also the Draper children. Sally, the oldest, would be getting to college just in time for the Summer of Love, and to rebel against her spoiled, emotionally distant parents. Bobby would be close behind her, though he’s probably just a few years too young to get drafted for Vietnam. Gene, the baby, would be graduating high school right as the early 80s recession was hitting, today would be in his late forties.
Speculation like this, conscious or not, is part of the attraction of Mad Men. (Is that really what childhood was like for people who are in their forties and fifties today? Did grandma seriously have to dress like that to go to work?) It is set in a time that most people cannot remember, and yet not so far back that we cannot see in it the outline of things to come, the forces that shaped the world that exists today. Obviously only the show’s creators know what will become of these characters, but whatever happens to them they are recognizable as people that are all around us still. It’s history on the cheap, well told and well executed. That, more than anything, makes it stand out from the vast wasteland, makes it demand attention, and gives it extra layers in which each viewer can place themselves and others.
