Truth in Advertising: Why Mad Men is the best show on TV

AMC's acclaimed show Mad Men finished its third season in early November, and I recently caught up with the series over break. It's a show I've been hearing about for a few years at this point, and it is almost universally praised from all the sources I trust. Ever since finishing HBO's amazing show The Wire last year, a show that I now consider the best show ever produced for the medium, I've been looking for a show that could match the scope and storytelling finesse that The Wire made seem so easy. Mad Men may not have a cast that nears triple digits, and the scope is much smaller in comparisons to HBO's opus, but what it does share in common with The Wire is an amazingly realized world filled with exceptionally interesting characters.

Mad Men is, at first glance, a show that seems fairly uninteresting. How interesting could a show about an Ad agency be? There is a reason most T.V. shows go back to the well of the cop, doctor, or lawyer for their profession of choice. These are high excitement jobs, easily adaptable to a weekly storytelling format. But Mad Men stands apart from other dramas because of this. There is simply not another show remotely like it.

The first thing that makes Mad Men special is the place. It takes place in one of the most tumultuous times in US History: The 1960's. These ad men smoke like chimney, start drinking at work, and the only women in their workplace are their secretaries. Admittedly, at first it seems like the show is being a little on the nose with it's depictions of smoking, drinking, and the place of women in society; whether at work or at home. But that is the brilliance of the show the show starting in 1960. These men are used to their 1950's post-war ideals, and the 60's is when these ideals will be questioned and changed. Cigarettes will soon be reviled as a health risk, women will become more and more independent, TV will become the medium of choice for ads not print, one of the youngest presidents in US history will be elected then assassinated before the end of his first term, the US will come within hours of a nuclear attack, we will land on the moon, and eventually start fighting the first war in US history that will result in a loss on our part. The show does a great job of weaving these events into the world of the characters seamlessly, it never feels forced, and in the case of the larger events (JFK's assassination, or the Cuban Missile Crisis) they dramatically change the show. The time period is key, but it is not a show that relies on stunning production design and setting for story.

The real strength of this show is its characters and the way the show constantly plays with expectations. The main character ostensibly (it's an ensemble show after all) is Donald Draper, a executive creative director at Sterling Cooper, an ad agency in Manhattan. Don is handsome, incredibly charismatic, and insanely good at his job. And yet when we first meet him he is loathsome. He has a beautiful wife, two children and a big house in the suburbs, and the first thing we see him doing outside of work is him sleeping with another woman. He is a deeply flawed character, and nearly every we come to sympathize with him, he shows his dark side again just to remind us. This makes following his life incredibly interesting, no matter what he does. There are a few other main characters that we follow in and out of the office and they are no less entertaining than Don himself. There is Peggy Olsen, a secretary the rises to the rank of the agency's first female copy writer (they write ad campaigns). The last major character in the show is Betty Draper, Don's wife who at first seems to be a typical housewife later becomes, in my opinion, one of the very best characters on the show. These characters are surrounded by scores of other equally well realized minor characters that help flesh out the world.

The last part of Mad Men I'll touch on here is the writing. Not necessarily the dialog (which is fantastic) but rather the structure of the show. The pace of Mad Men is leisurely, big action or drama does not fill every episode. The structure of the show is similar to a novel (much like The Wire) building tension over multiple episodes rather than weekly. It is a show that assumes the viewer is paying attention, and does not make concessions when a plot thread that could be weeks old reappears. The tension in Mad Men is built by unease, because every so often the show will break a seemingly normal scene with a shocking event. This makes every scene a potential time bomb, most scenes play out normally, but the longer a scene goes the less comfortable we become, making the rare surprise occurrence so valuable.

Mad Men is example along with shows like The Wire, The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Battlestar Galactica, and many others proving that television is not simply the smaller cousin of cinema. It is an equally viable, and in some cases better, way to tell stories. TV can now do what novels do, build rich characters and worlds over a long period of time rather than being limited to 2 hours stories. That is why I believe that in 50+ years from now these key TV series will be looked back on with the same reverence and interest as the films of this era.

I'll leave you with one of my favorite scenes in Mad Men, it deals with a part of the show I haven't mention thus far, and that is the ads themselves. Mad Men most certainly changed the way I look at advertising, and respect the profession much more than I ever would have. In this scene Don Draper gives a pitch to Kodak for their new Carousel slide projector.