"Mad Men" Review: The Alternate Universe That Was 1960 America

For some time now, I've been a proponent of television's qualitative ascendancy over mainstream film... if you know where to look. That's why it's a little embarassing that I haven't gotten around to "Mad Men" until now. A Golden Globe and an Emmy later, it appears I've missed a caravel-sized boat (of course, "Everybody Loves Raymond" won plenty of Emmys, and I feel quite proud of having been absent from that particular cruise). Of course, one has to remember that the series began life as the first ever original series on AMC, a channel I had previously mostly thought of as an inferior substitute for Turner Classic Movies, so there was little to initially catch my attention. In any case, after the unfortunately stultifying Emmys last night and weeks of urging from sources I trust, I set out to download the series' award-winning pilot, "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes."

"Mad Men" is a hard show to review. Its drama, at least in this pilot, is nearly entirely internal. We are presented with a series of characters that feel like real people, and who are placed very well-realized, well-defined world, that of New York, Madison Avenue to be exact, circa 1960. And oh, what a world! For someone like myself, a proud member of the digital generation, this feels less like a historical drama than one of those alternate universes where adventurers ride around in dirigibles. It's a culture that looks remarkably like our own, with car-filled streets and executives clad in expensive suits sitting behind desks... but it feels completely alien.

In the great recent HBO series "Rome," set in the famed formative years of the Roman Empire, the historical touches feel very authentic, but the sense we were left with was that people of all eras are essentially the same, and have essentially the same concerns. Ancient Rome is made to feel as modern as possible without sacrificing believability. In "Mad Men," we are instead repeatedly have the point driven home that life in 1960 was incredibly different than it is today.

This is a place where absolutely everyone smokes, all the time, everywhere. It's amazing they didn't all die of lung cancer by the time they were 35. This is a world where feminism is barely a shadow on the horizon, where men routinely call women "honey," where one woman says to another, without irony, that the men who designed a typewriter "made it so simple a woman could use it." A doctor prescribes birth control pills as barely an afterthought in the middle of lecturing a girl not to be a "strumpet." Businessmen are expected to drink alcohol while at work, and what looks like a closet conceals a team of busy female switchboard operators.

The milieu nearly overwhelms the story, but it never quite does. We are led with a sure hand into these people's lives, and halfway through the opening episode I was suffienciently at ease to sit back and enjoy this story, to listen to these people talk. They all come across, by modern standards, of above-average intelligence, coming from a time when conversation was still among the chief forms of recreation. Their speech isn't flowery, but after a while one starts to hear a sort of subtle poetry in it. Jon Hamm, doing a fine job as ad exec Don Draper, gets a final speech that may be the emotional center of the episode, about how the traditional notion of romantic love was "invented by people like me, to sell nylons."

There isn't a sour note in this first episode, and its Emmy for writing was well-deserved. I can tell you that this is a show worth seeking out on its obscure cable network, and that this will not be the last episode I'll be watching.