Just as I was wondering what to watch on TV now that The Sopranos is gone, I struck gold: “Mad Men” on AMC channel, a drama in its 2nd season, is the show to watch for me.
There are so many reasons I’m captivated with this drama about “mad” men (and women) working for a NYC advertisement agency in 1960 that I actually went ahead and ordered the first season DVD set. The quality, care and intelligence that went into this Matthew-Weiner-created series was evident even from the packaging of the DVDs – they arrived in a box shaped like a Zippo lighter! Wow. I have nothing but the highest respect for the creative minds behind this whole production.
For one thing, this show nicely put to rest most of my apparent illusions about life in America in the 50s and 60s. Having grown up in Turkey watching too many John Wayne and “Pillow Talk” movies and listening to perhaps too many “Sing Along With Mitch Miller” LPs, I now realize the kind of skewed image of America I had while growing up.
Now I realize, compared with the standards of 2008, those were some though times indeed in terms of corporate pressures, social rules, gender expectations, and ethnic-race relations. I obviously knew all that at a book-knowledge level. But with every episode of MAD MEN, all that I knew as “data” started to sink in as “personal experience” and melded into something like “knowledge” at a much deeper level. And that’s the power and magic of art, isn’t it? It gives us the lives that we would otherwise never have.
Matthew Weiner, who also wrote for my other most-favorite show The Sopranos, is a bona fide genius who deserves all the accolades for this bold social drama that lays open the inner works of a curious era in American history. I hope the 2nd season (which started in July 2008) will be as breath-taking as the first one.
Ugur Akinci PhD, a Fortune 500 writer, is a hopeless fan of movies, and especially the thrillers. Feel free to visit his movie blogs http://writer111.blogspot.com and http://scriptboiler.blogspot.com today.
Il Buono, Il Brutto & Lo Zippo