July 28, 2008
Corporate Types
AMC's Mad Men returns this week for another season. I haven't been watching much television this summer, but my TiVo stands ready to record these new episodes. Set in 1960 New York and its bucolic suburbs, the show takes a magnifying glass to a Manhattan ad agency; its executives, pitch men, and secretaries. And through their stories, we see a country that is making the transition from the buttoned-down, conformist Fifties to the freewheeling, iconoclastic Sixties. The writers are particularly good at exploring the sexual politics of the era. It's fascinating to watch these ad men discuss how to sell a brand of soap to America's wives while they brazenly demean and exploit their own female colleagues. It's equally fascinating to watch the show's women chafe against their expected roles as wives, mothers, and sexual objects.
The show is cloaked in a perpetual fog of smoke. Seriously, every character seems to have a cigarette glued between his or her fingers. And while I have no desire to see the skinny tie make a comeback, I'm all for serving bloody Marys at meetings.
Posted by wintermute2_0 at July 28, 2008 09:45 PM