Mad Men: Season One – out now
I missed out on Mad Men when it first aired on BBC Four earlier this year, despite several friends and my better half urging me to check it out, and so I recently decided to invest in the Season One box set, which I’ve been watching in between episodes of The Wire. All this great telly to watch with long, complicated overreaching narrative themes and interlinking storylines… there’s just not enough hours in the day! A guy’s got to get some sleep sometime. Moving on…
It’s fitting that I should mention The Wire; much like that series, Mad Men is a very finely crafted and executed series which is of a commendably high calibre in terms of writing, acting and presentation. And just like The Wire, the initial pace of the series is glacially slow, but once things get moving…
Set in New York in the early 60’s New York, the show is concerned with the fictional Madison Avenue advertising agency Sterling Cooper (chiefly one Don Draper a high-powered ad exec) and the changing social backdrop of 1960’s America, (chiefly relationships and the shifting roles of men and women in western society).
The central character Don Draper (Jon Hamm) is a complicated one to say the least; he’s a rich, successful and handsome advertising director gifted with a talent for knowing what consumers want, is married to the beautiful Elizabeth “Betty” Draper who is, quite literally, a model housewife (and is fittingly played by real-life former Abercrombie & Fitch model January Jones) and has two children, but he ultimately feels detached from his life and is not altogether happy with his life or who he is. He frequently seeks solace in the arms of other women; sexual pursuit and conquest is considered to be normal behaviour by the majority of his peers, whether they are married, engaged, spoken for or otherwise.
Don’s co-workers include Peter Campbell, an ambitious young junior exec who embodies the old guard of New York society and frequently relies on his familial ties to remain in good standing at the company. He’s something of a cad and a bounder, and manages to succeed in getting into the pants of Don’s secretary Peggy Olson (The West Wing’s Elisabeth Moss) and impregnating her, despite his impending marriage. As it turns out Don is something of a dark horse with a rather shadowy past, and Peter tries to blackmail his associate, which backfires pretty badly.
Throughout the series we get to see Betty slowly unravel as her Stepford Wives-style existence begins to take its eventual toll, and Don struggle to keep his duplicitous behaviour under wraps. Peggy succeeds in keeping her pregnancy a secret from her bosses; tellingly, most of the Sterling Cooper staff are ignorant as to the real reason for her extended ‘time off’.
As you would expect from a drama series set in an industry which is pretty much entirely founded on stereotypes, sexist, racist, religionist, and classist jibes and stereotypes come as thick and fast as the highballs and shots of JD – chain smoking cigarettes is as normal as having a string of affairs.
Smoking is heavily featured throughout the series, and in the pilot episode, we get to see reps from Lucky Strike approaching Sterling Cooper looking for a rebrand after a report linking smoking to lung cancer is published.
The DVD box set that is available over here unfortunately doesn’t come shaped like a huge Zippo lighter like the Region 1 US release does, but you do get 3 discs crammed into a neat little package, with audio commentaries, and a couple of neat little featurettes.
It has today just been confirmed that Mad Men will return to BBC Four for a second series later on this year. Not really sure why the Beeb have decided to bury such an acclaimed and highly enjoyable show so deep in their schedule, but at any rate, now is the perfect time to check out the first season on DVD and Blu-Ray in time for the next one.
