Mad Men

I've been watching Mad Men, A new show on AMC about ad writers in the 1960s. Only two episodes into the series and I love it. It follows two characters in a major ad agency, one a rising star in middle management (played by Jon Hamm), the other his secretary, a naive girl just starting out in the field (played by Elizabeth Moss). The show seems to focus on the fucked up sexual dynamics of the middle classes at the time. It takes place at the moment before feminism began to finally push it's way into the mainstream. The main characters all play into the sexual roles society expects them to play, but all show a clear dissatisfaction with how it's working. The series is just starting, and shows glimmers of other social critiques of 60's society. It seems, if anything, a series about how much better society is now then it was back then. It focuses on things characters say and do and allow that would never fly today. With out mentioning modern times, we still automatically make the comparison. A child with a dry cleaning plastic bag over her head "playing space man" elicits shocked giggles at the sight of something the media has terrified us into never allowing. A gynecologist giving a woman a prescription for birth control pills and telling her that if he suspects that she is abusing them and "whoring" herself out, he'll revoke it, causes shock and outrage. A woman with obvious neurological problems is told nothing is wrong and sent to a therapist. The show pays homage to the social advancements of the last thirty years not by mentioning them, but by clearly demonstrating where we were before they came. It is both shocking and beautiful even to a cynic such as myself.

-Brandon