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.
Yet, as true as all that is, the particulars are missing from such an explanation. What is it in fact that a show set in a time a solid half century earlier is so perfectly capturing of the zeitgeist that it goes viral in the way that has the Mad Men TV show? This is another question.
I don't have the job description to qualify as providing some definitive explanation: I'm not a social psychologist or modern ethnographer. But I do have a few ideas.
Strangely, some people suggest that Mad Men captures a simpler time. Fooled me. That's not what I see each episode on my TV. We're not talking about Leave It to Beaver or Ozzie and Harriet, here. What we see on Mad Men is a 1950s and even early 1960s often unacknowledged by our contemporary mass media: it's rife with adultery, narcotics and loneliness. Also, it doesn't gloss over the uglier parts of the era: tragic political assassinations, the difficulties in race relations, sexual discrimination nor the mounting fiasco of U.S. intervention in Vietnam. If anything, perhaps one of the show's charms is precisely its far more realistic presentation of the period.
If it's just period accuracy you want, though, you can stop your dial at PBS. There is a whole other dynamic at work in the recipe for success of the Mad Men TV show. The production qualities can be itemized: yes, the writing is enthralling, full of profound character development and depicts real life adult conflict; the acting is superb; and the show is a constant delight visually, with meticulously accurate art work in settings and costumes and the luscious cinematography. That is of course perfectly true. There remains though something further, not accounted for in such descriptions.
There's still that something called, on this blog, the old school cool of Mad Men. The charm, the glamour, the charisma of lives lived with intention and absent cloying introspection. It's so subtle at first that it easily slips by your cultural radar. But it's there; the most compelling accuracy in Mad Men's great arsenal of period authenticity is the depiction of a time before the inundating of our society with a therapeutic ethos.
However great may be their daily challenges, the characters of Mad Men are not found whining over the unfairness of life; they don't wallow in self pity that father show them affection or that mother was bitter and cruel (though that may have been precisely so in some cases). They confront the obstacles of life unfettered by the present-day obsessions with communicating, expressiveness, finding ourselves and hand-wringing over one's emotional IQ. Mad Men offers us a window upon that last time in American life when our sense of self had not been corrupted by professional navel gazers: before the feelings tyrants, thought police and relationship regulators captured the culture.
Certainly, the social colonization of these so-called "experts" was already beginning at the time that Mad Med is set. This is gestured toward in the sub-plot of Betty's breakdown. The child psychologists, the local school snoops, the know-it-all therapists, talk show mental health snake oil salesmen and social engineering public policy savants, even then, were rearing their ugly heads. Mad Men though preserves for us a glimpse of an era before these self-righteous do-gooders had managed to hijack modern culture, reducing it to the current state of incipient therapeutics and runaway, claustrophobic paternalism.
It was a time before men were feminized, women were androgynized and children were pathologized. Sure, they weren't living anything like perfect lives. They had as many problems as we do. Whatever problems they did have, though, they dealt with free of today's peeping toms and patronizing nannies, poking noses into their lives.
Don Draper and Peggy Olson were the last generation who could live their lives free from having their emotions monitored, validated or otherwise administered by the therapeutic class. Their very real life problems notwithstanding, they were free in a manner peculiarly foreign to us. And we, I suspect, where conscious of it or not, can't help feeling just a little fascinated with them because of it. That above all is the greatest secret to the old school cool of Mad Men.
Yet, as true as all that is, the particulars are missing from such an explanation. What is it in fact that a show set in a time a solid half century earlier is so perfectly capturing of the zeitgeist that it goes viral in the way that has the Mad Men TV show? This is another question.
I don't have the job description to qualify as providing some definitive explanation: I'm not a social psychologist or modern ethnographer. But I do have a few ideas.
Strangely, some people suggest that Mad Men captures a simpler time. Fooled me. That's not what I see each episode on my TV. We're not talking about Leave It to Beaver or Ozzie and Harriet, here. What we see on Mad Men is a 1950s and even early 1960s often unacknowledged by our contemporary mass media: it's rife with adultery, narcotics and loneliness. Also, it doesn't gloss over the uglier parts of the era: tragic political assassinations, the difficulties in race relations, sexual discrimination nor the mounting fiasco of U.S. intervention in Vietnam. If anything, perhaps one of the show's charms is precisely its far more realistic presentation of the period.
If it's just period accuracy you want, though, you can stop your dial at PBS. There is a whole other dynamic at work in the recipe for success of the Mad Men TV show. The production qualities can be itemized: yes, the writing is enthralling, full of profound character development and depicts real life adult conflict; the acting is superb; and the show is a constant delight visually, with meticulously accurate art work in settings and costumes and the luscious cinematography. That is of course perfectly true. There remains though something further, not accounted for in such descriptions.
There's still that something called, on this blog, the old school cool of Mad Men. The charm, the glamour, the charisma of lives lived with intention and absent cloying introspection. It's so subtle at first that it easily slips by your cultural radar. But it's there; the most compelling accuracy in Mad Men's great arsenal of period authenticity is the depiction of a time before the inundating of our society with a therapeutic ethos.
However great may be their daily challenges, the characters of Mad Men are not found whining over the unfairness of life; they don't wallow in self pity that father show them affection or that mother was bitter and cruel (though that may have been precisely so in some cases). They confront the obstacles of life unfettered by the present-day obsessions with communicating, expressiveness, finding ourselves and hand-wringing over one's emotional IQ. Mad Men offers us a window upon that last time in American life when our sense of self had not been corrupted by professional navel gazers: before the feelings tyrants, thought police and relationship regulators captured the culture.
Certainly, the social colonization of these so-called "experts" was already beginning at the time that Mad Med is set. This is gestured toward in the sub-plot of Betty's breakdown. The child psychologists, the local school snoops, the know-it-all therapists, talk show mental health snake oil salesmen and social engineering public policy savants, even then, were rearing their ugly heads. Mad Men though preserves for us a glimpse of an era before these self-righteous do-gooders had managed to hijack modern culture, reducing it to the current state of incipient therapeutics and runaway, claustrophobic paternalism.
It was a time before men were feminized, women were androgynized and children were pathologized. Sure, they weren't living anything like perfect lives. They had as many problems as we do. Whatever problems they did have, though, they dealt with free of today's peeping toms and patronizing nannies, poking noses into their lives.
Don Draper and Peggy Olson were the last generation who could live their lives free from having their emotions monitored, validated or otherwise administered by the therapeutic class. Their very real life problems notwithstanding, they were free in a manner peculiarly foreign to us. And we, I suspect, where conscious of it or not, can't help feeling just a little fascinated with them because of it. That above all is the greatest secret to the old school cool of Mad Men.