Mad Four You
My feature about the new season 4 of Mad Men in Weekend magazine from today’s Irish Independent
Having reached a point in its creative life-cycle when most TV shows start going into decline, the 1960s-set drama Mad Men, which starts its fourth series next week, has arguably only begun to hit its stride.
When the latest season debuted in the US last month, some 7,000 fans crowded into New York’s Times Square in the sweltering summer heat – many decked out in their best 60s-influenced outfits – to watch the opening installments on specially-erected giant TV screens.
Such was the intensity of the buzz around the fourth season of the show that ‘The Guardian’ decreed that Mad Men was now a “cultural phenomenon”, on a par with The Sopranos or Sex and the City, which, in purely popular terms, is high praise indeed.
What’s most remarkable is that despite being one of the most critically adored dramas on TV, and collecting dozens of awards (including three Golden Globes and two consecutive Emmys for Best Drama; at the time of writing the show had 17 nominations for this year’s Emmys), Mad Men remains something of a cult, rather than a mainstream, hit.
Produced by, and aired on, the US cable channel Showtime, Mad Men’s ratings only ever average around 3m viewers. That, however, doesn’t take into account the amount of people who record it to watch later on and/or download it from iTunes or file-sharing websites.
As a matter of fact, the BBC felt compelled to start showing the latest series earlier than planned as a pre-emptive strike against (il)legal downloaders (at the time of writing, RTE is planning to screen the show in the New Year). It’s that very slow-burn nature of its success, perhaps, that accounts for the show’s enhanced visibility and popularity today.
For the uninitiated, Mad Men is set in the world of 1960s New York advertising, the show’s deliberately playful title serving as a reference to the Madison Avenue ad men at the core of the plot, as well as providing a telling insight into their growing psychological and existential despair.
On the surface level alone, the show is beautiful to watch, oozing classy and classic style in everything from its Hitchcockian opening credits to its 60s fashion and cultural references, not to mention its meticulous attention to period production detail.
The series is the brainchild of Matthew Weiner, a one-time staff scribe on The Sopranos, who originally wrote the pilot episode on spec, seemingly influenced by Billy Wilder’s classic movie The Apartment.
At the heart – for want of a better word – of the show is Don Draper (played by Jon Hamm), a dashing, successful, square-jawed exec with movie star looks but a murky past. For those still playing catch-up on the last few series, beware that there are several spoilers ahead.
As fans will know, season three ended with a brave, game-changing narrative leap that saw Don, Roger Sterling (John Slattery), Bert Cooper (Robert Morse) and stiff-upper-lip Brit Lane Pryce (played by Richard Harris’ son Jared) break away from the company to form a new advertising agency, with all four as equal partners.
Luckily for us, the quartet managed to poach some of the show’s most compelling characters to come with them on this new venture, including slimy, ruthless upstart Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser), prim, ambitious secretary-cum-copywriter Peggy Olson (Elizabeth Moss), and office manager Joan Harris, played by the glorious Christina Hendricks, she of the most famous and scrutinised curves, bum, and bosom in all of showbiz.
It’s just the sort of creative shake-up that the show needed entering its fourth year, and one, on the evidence of the first five new episodes aired in the US thus far, that continues to reap benefits in terms of the narrative arc and character dynamics.
The action has moved forward a year from the sombre timeline of series three, where JFK’s assassination cast a long shadow over the world of these characters. It’s now November 1964: America is caught up in Beatles-mania; President Lyndon Johnson has just signed the Civil Rights Act and, at the same time, is escalating the number of US troops in Vietnam; the cigarette industry – the life-blood of the advertising economy – is coming under more pressure to be open about the addictive and dangerous nature of nicotine; and the counter-cultural revolution is gaining traction in mainstream American life.
Aside from the professional re-jig, the other major storyline that needs to be picked up from series three is Don’s divorce from his young wife Betty (played by January Jones), a woman whose glacial, Grace Kelly-esque blonde beauty has barely concealed the piecemeal nervous breakdown smoldering away inside her.
As series four kicks off, Betty has re-married another older man, Henry Francis, and is struggling to adjust to her new life. Don himself seems to be slowly coming apart at the seams; rather than living the high-life of a swinging bachelor, he seems to be drowning ever more in the depths of self-loathing.
Meanwhile, Betty and Don seem to have come to a chilly rapprochement concerning the welfare of their two children, Bobby (Jared Gilmore) and doesn’t-miss-a-trick Sally (played by the wonderfully instinctive child actress Kiernan Shipka). Indeed, one of Mad Men’s guiltiest pleasures is watching the dreadful parenting of the self-involved Betty and, going on what we see in the first episode, Betty is still in no fear of winning any Mother of the Year prizes.
As always, Mad Men uses its characters – especially the women – as prisms through which to explore the issues and fissures that we now know will convulse American society in the 1960s: namely sexuality, feminism, politics, and race.
The beauty of the show has always been that it has the benefit of (some) historical distance to approach those themes with a knowing, deftly ironic wink of the eye. For instance, the ad men chain-smoke indoors, while every meeting is lubricated by copious amounts of whiskey, scotch and martini, regardless of the time of day.
Most prominently, the sexism shown towards the female characters is staggering, though that’s beginning to change as the series progresses, reflecting the advances of feminism in wider society at the time.
For this reason, the show’s female characters have always been the most interesting: season two and three, in many ways, were all about Betty, Peggy and Joan, three archetypes of womanhood that continue to provide Mad Men with its soul.
True to form, season four looks set to create even more turmoil and drama for its leading ladies: Peggy, sporting a new fringe, becomes more involved with New York’s underground culture (there’s even the suggestion of a lesbian dalliance), while Joan seems destined for further heartbreak as her doctor husband (and, let us remember, rapist) gears up to ship off to Vietnam.
Whatever lies in store, the dearth of decent TV dramas of late, coupled with Mad Men’s confident recalibration of its artistic mojo, means that there is no better time to become immersed in a show that is, in the words of its 2007 Peabody Award citation, “as sharp as the creases in the two button suits, as precise as a narrow-knotted necktie, and as wry as the rye on the bar.”
*Mad Men series 4 starts on BBC4 on September 8.
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