Has Everyone Gone Mad?: Mad Men

Posted by Maggie July 24th, 2007 at 10:21am In Has Everyone Gone Mad?

It is purely a coincidence that the first entry into this new segment, Has Everyone Gone Mad?, also has the word “mad” in the title. This segment is dedicated to bucking conventional wisdom and delivering the hard truth about television trends. Or at least questioning some widely-held critical judgment and offering a small, shaded distinction of opinion. (I’m trying to make that not sound like “complaining.”)

Drinking at the office: Yet another way that Times Have Changed.

Mad Men is a show that thinks it’s bucking conventional wisdom and delivering truly edgy period drama (ad execs in the 50s! cigarettes! busty dames!), and many critics seem to be under this delusion, as well. But for some reason, everyone is blinded to an obvious truth: Mad Men is terrible. It’s full of “oh ho ho, look how backwards people were in the past!” moments, obvious sexual dalliances, and very little actual drama to speak of. And yet, Heather Havrilesky and Scott Tobias, normally paragons of taste and judgment, both recently praised it. Lavishly.

What the hell? Has everyone gone mad?

This is show where a character tells his rival he knows the rival stole something from his wastebasket, because “there’s no magical device that can make instantaneous copies” (paraphrase). Hardeehar. They don’t have Xerox. Those ignorant fools!

The thing is, as M.T. Anderson said far more eloquently in a speech I was lucky to hear recently, period drama often falls into this trap. It’s the trap of thinking we’re smarter than people from long ago, just because they smoked while pregnant or were sexist jerks. Isn’t it fun, to look back at those poor saps and laugh at all their mistakes? Aren’t we clever, knowing so much more than them?

I don’t know about you, but taking down easy targets like misguided historical people makes me feel icky. Everything that happened on Mad Men was so obviously Informed By the Characters’ Ignorance, it was impossible to feel for the characters as human beings. Compare this to an awesome show like Deadwood, that treats its uneducated, rough-and-tumble, fairly provincial group of whores, profiteers, and honest folks as multi-dimensional people capable of true insight. Just because they know nothing about Xerox machines and the internet doesn’t mean they don’t have compelling problems of their own.

It felt like every problem on Mad Men was only there because they didn’t have Xerox machines and the internet (and a little bit of gender equality and accurate health stats on cigarettes). That’s not drama. How are they supposed to know that they’re lacking those things? They know nothing about them! It’s just pointing out how things have changed; it’s not actually getting into the nitty-gritty of a time and place to see how things are actually the same. People are people. There should be something we can relate to, and not just sneer at.

I suspect that these critics are giving Mad Men a pass because the writer had something to do with the Sopranos at one point. I can’t understand why else they’re praising it, unless the whole world really has gone mad.