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Mad For 'Men': Are You Missing One Of TV's Best Shows?

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By WALT BELCHER | The Tampa Tribune

Published: July 26, 2008

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. - It's 1962. Kennedy is in the White House. Chubby Checker is still doing the twist. Doris Day is starring in "That Touch of Mink." Cigarettes are romantic. White males rule the workplace. Women are bound by tight girdles and second-class status. Gays are deep in the closet. And everything is about to change.

Welcome to "Mad Men," a world of skinny neckties, three martini lunches, secret office affairs, neat suburban households and people trying to figure out why achieving the good life just isn't enough for fulfillment.

AMC's highly acclaimed but audience-starved drama returns for its second season tonight amid an avalanche of attention.

The winner of two Golden Globes, a prestigious Peabody and three Television Critics Association awards, "Mad Men" also has racked up a record 16 Emmy nominations.

In recent weeks, the show has been featured in Entertainment Weekly and The New York Times Magazine as well as GQ and Vanity Fair.

By all accounts, it is being hailed as the best drama on television. If you missed it, the first-season DVD is available.

Set in Manhattan in 1960, that first season took us into the professional and personal lives of executives and secretaries at the fictional Sterling Cooper advertising agency.

Created by former "Sopranos" writer Matt Weiner, "Mad Men" is about the past as seen from the present. It's also about questioning where we are by questioning where we have been. Weiner explores our culture through people who packaged it and sold it.

"And if you take away the costumes, the sets and the '60s' references, the issues and the characters are current," he says during a recent visit to the downtown Los Angeles studio where it is filmed.

At the center of the story is Don Draper (Jon Hamm), a 36-year-old creative rising star with a double life, a secret past and Cary Grant good looks. He's a charmer, a married man, a womanizer and an empty shell with a longing that he can't understand.

He fears that life is meaningless and he has to grab what he can before it all slips away. And yet he has flashes of brilliant insight into how to tap into consumers' deepest desires.

Draper's stay-at-home wife, Betty (January Jones), is trying to live up to her mother's comparison of homemaking to art: "In painting a masterpiece, be sure to hide the brush strokes."

Also haunted by a depression she doesn't understand, Betty is in a state of denial, Jones says.

"The most important thing to her is her marriage and her family and making them appear perfect," says Jones during a break in filming.

'The Girdle Is A Killer'

Like the other women in the cast, Jones spends hours in makeup and 1960s hairstyles.

"The girdle is a killer," she adds.

Draper's agency partner, Roger Sterling (John Slattery), is an older man who was shaped by the 1940s. He is a shallow, cynical, philanderer whose motto is "When God closes a door, he opens a dress."

During the first season, Sterling was cheating on his wife with the voluptuous manager of the secretarial pool. Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks) uses her sex appeal for power.

"I can't believe the hairstyles they had back then," she says. "There was one called the 'artichoke' with puffed up layers sticking out everywhere. I never want that one."

Hendricks, 30, sees her character as a master manipulator who today might be running a company but in 1960 is stuck behind a typewriter. Joan wants "to look like Doris Day in 'Midnight Lace,' and I want to be Kim Novak in anything."

The younger generation (who would now be in their 70s) is represented by Sterling Cooper newcomer Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser), a newlywed uncertain of his place in the male pecking order.

Kartheiser says there is humor laced through the darkness, especially when looking back at some of the little things about the 1960s. In one episode, for example, his character has to return a wedding gift, a newfangled "chip and dip" party dish that his co-workers find ridiculous.

Weiner, 42, says that since his childhood, he has been fascinated by the 1950s and '60s, which he sees as "America's Golden Age."

"I know it's seen as a repressed period, but it's really a culturally very open period; a lot of freedom and a lot of the ideas that we associate with the '60s were born in that period," he says, adding that he wanted to explore environmentalism, attitudes toward materialism, Bohemianism, art, plays, movies, books, sexism, racism and the works of philosopher Ann Rand.

Authenticity Is A Priority

Weiner oversees every detail from the selection and placement of the furniture to the costumes to the props. He has set decorator Amy Wells scouring Los Angeles for authentic 1950s and '60s artifacts.

Every prop — the ashtrays on Sterling Cooper desks, the candy in the office break room, the toaster in the Drapers' kitchen, the turquoise headboard in their bedroom — has been selected for a reason. Wells has even rounded up all the TV Guides from 1962.

About the only things that aren't authentic are the tobacco-free herbal cigarettes (Ecstasy brand) that double for Lucky Strikes, Camels and Winstons. In the early episodes, just about every character was chain-smoking.

Joel Murray, who plays Sterling Cooper adman Freddy Rumsen, says they go through dozens of the herbal smokes in every episode.

"I counted 40 one day for Jon in doing one scene," he says.

In addition to the painstaking detail, "Mad Men" has the same foreboding tone that the "Sopranos" had. There is a low-key underlying tension creating a feeling that something bad is going to happen.

The new season jumps ahead two years and begins on Valentine's Day, when much of the country watched a live telecast of first lady Jackie Kennedy showing off the White House.

Sterling Cooper had backed the losing candidate, Richard Nixon. The company has to regroup. Baby boomers are entering their teen years, and there is pressure to hire younger writers ("The Pepsi Generation") to tap into the country's growing youth market.

Draper is skeptical that young people know anything.

Weiner says the country and culture will soon be changing, and his Madison Avenue men and women will be swept along with the tide.

Reporter Walt Belcher can be reached at (813) 259-7654 or wbelcher@tampatrib.com.

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