"Mad Men" -- my new favorite show

Given how little TV I watch, being Rod Dreher's Favorite Show is like being the best ballerina in Galveston, as the saying goes. But a colleague last week suggested that I watch "Mad Men," the acclaimed dramatic series set in a Madison Avenue ad agency in 1960, and I ended up picking up the first three episodes at our local video store on Friday.

I'm really glad I did. My friend advised, "The great thing about this show is that nobody's all bad, and nobody's all good. They're all very human." After three episodes, that judgment seems sound, and I'm surprised by how quickly I got involved in the emotional lives of these characters. What I find most compelling about it is that the drama is set in a world that's about to collapse, and nobody knows it. (You know what a sucker I am for decline-and-fall narratives). That is, the Sixties ("the Sixties") are just around the corner, but the news hasn't reached the suites at Sterling Cooper agency, nor to the suburbs. The characters are all like ancien regime figures on the verge of a revolution they can't see coming.

Don Draper, the main character, is a successful ad man, a creative director whose gifts, we learn, come because his outward Cary Grant-ish good looks, conceal a hollow man who believes in nothing. That is, he can sell just about anything because he has no moral anchor. And yet, he is by no means a monster, or even wholly unsympathetic. You pity him, because he's lost, and doesn't seem aware of how lost he is, because he is such an outward success.

Aside from the constant smoking -- which I remember was a feature of adult life in the 1970s, in my childhood; and yes, there's a scene in which a visibly pregnant woman smokes, which I wouldn't have believed except I've seen a photo of my mother, circal late 1966, very pregnant with me, smoking -- I was struck by how sexist the office culture of the day was. People like me, who didn't live through it, might think the show's portrayal is badly over the top, but it reminds me very much of the stories our friend Rawlins tells about his mother's working in offices back in that era. And I've heard from older women myself saying that that's how it really was in many offices back then -- women subordinated and sexually harrassed. But see, the thing about "Mad Men" is not that all the women are victims and all the men are beasts. Some women learn how to work the system. But it's a corrupt system, one that corrupts those who join in. And it's not just a liberal fantasy: in a big NYT Magazine story about the show (don't read it if you want to keep spoilers at bay), some top ad men who worked on Mad Ave back then say that yes, that's how it was.

Feminism came from somewhere.

Despite feminism's obvious excesses, I am glad that because of it, no daughter of mine will ever have to work in that kind of atmosphere -- or no son of mine, either.

Ross Douthat hadn't seen "Mad Men" at the time, but was put off by this review in The Nation which makes the show come off as a standard leftie critique of capitalism. To be fair, the Nation piece is essentially correct in its description of the show's stance -- there's a lot of "American Beauty" here -- but I resist the usual conservative reaction to any criticism of the sainted 1950s (the liberal version is to resist any criticism of the sainted 1960s). I hope that "Mad Men" will, in time, develop a more detailed understanding of the era, including its strengths. (Remember, I've only seen three episodes; if you've gone further, you know whether or not I hope in vain).

But even if it doesn't, there's a lot here for conservatives to think on; after all, as astute conservative Catholics acknowledge, in trying to make sense of how quickly the strong American church of the 1950s fell apart, the collapse wouldn't have happened so abruptly or so completely if everything had been fine all along. Just because the 1960s were so disastrous on so many cultural fronts, at least from a conservative point of view, doesn't mean that the 1950s were idyllic. It's important to understand where the rebellion came from, if we post-Sixties conservatives are to put the pieces back together in some reasonable, sustainable way. Insofar as the world depicted in "Mad Men" is accurate, people ought to have rebelled against that order. (As Maclin Horton observed, in his way, in his interview for my book.) Certainly most cultural conservatives reading this blog would agree. The problem is what came after, and the values that took the place of those that were defeated.

Anyway: it's cultural politics aside, "Mad Men" is a great drama, and I look forward to watching more episodes.