Mad Men: AMC's Brilliant Series and the High Cost of Nothing

My father, on those gratefully rare and unnerving occasions when he was even around, used to do it, too, like the protean Don Draper (played with great subtlety and nuance by Jon Hamm) in Mad Men: take out his Lucky Strikes, shake one out, and tamp either of its unfiltered ends against his Zippo. One, two, three, then magically flip it into his mouth and fire it up. The short and then extended click of the Zippo opening and closing possessed a familiar and yet exotic kind of music.

My father would often speak after his first or second inhale, again like Draper, and the smoke would spurt and kick from his lips like some odd but powerful animation — gauzy Morse code, as it were, from a magical stunted burning stem. It was a frequent ceremony during every day of my father's short, demented life, and it suggested power and mystery.

Power and mystery: the squat pack itself, white with a red circle, and the words 'It's Toasted,' underneath the brand, in quotation marks no less. Whatever it meant, it had to be a good thing, right? Don Draper, by the way, being an ad man, created that slogan (fictively, of course). Don Draper himself — note his name — is fiction; not only does he create the fictions from which we consume our goods, circa 1960, but his whole being is fiction. He is, literally, not Don Draper. If there is genius lurking about this wildly addictive show, it's all bundled into the Draper character: he's many beings to many people, and yet he doesn't really exist, or else he exists in a unique way to everyone — depending.

Thanks to Entertainment On Demand I just completed viewing all 13 episodes of Mad Men in two sessions. It was apparently first pitched to HBO, which passed, thankfully. And it ended up, for the better, on AMC. With HBO, its creators may have been less inclined to fill it up with the buttoned down, repressed feel it possesses, and needs. Maybe, on HBO, Mad Men sex would be explicit — who knows? — but the fact that the couplings in Mad Men are merely suggestive gives it the truest kind of eroticism, the kind that promises but never delivers: naked legs intertwined; the tentative fingers walking up a woman's slightly raised skirt; brassiere and slip; garter; poodle skirts hemmed teasingly just at the knee.

Residing on AMC requires a presentation standard stricter than HBO's, and it's just that suppressed displeasure of its characters, or perhaps their only shyly revealed hedonism that makes the show work so perfectly. And yet it is one of the most adult television shows ever — every bit as real, harsh, sometimes funny, and intense as HBO's profane and openly violent masterpiece, The Wire. Mad Men's characters are real, even if some are built on caricatures. And its set pieces are stunning — simple and dead-on for the first season's time, 1960, and place, New York, city of dreams.

Article Author: Stephen Foster

Stephen Foster (no relation to the composer) plays the violin and piano, but so what? He doesn't play them well. So he writes about music, has written extensively about rock, soul, jazz, and all things alt. He goes to sleep listening to Portishead every Tuesday and Thursday. …

Visit Stephen Foster's author page — Stephen Foster's Blog