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Critics go crazy for Mad Men, you?

By fred | July 22, 2007

(S01E01) Even before it aired, AMC’s new drama Mad Men had received a lot of praises by pretty much every single critic who got to see the first episode ahead of time.

Now that the episode actually aired, I obviously had to see it, and, in all honesty, I do have mixed feelings about the show. Don’t get me wrong though, it’s a good show. It is, but it’s also missing something.

Yes, Mad Men is a pretty solid show. You could expect a high level of quality from Emmy Award-winning executive producer and writer of The Sopranos, Matthew Weiner, and the quality is there.

The show is well written, and pretty brilliant at recreating the atmosphere of the sixties, when the action takes place, with the white shirts, neat suits and hats men are wearing, sexual harassment “jokes” secretaries have to go through all day long, everyone smoking non-stop, and the recurrent jokes at ancient technology being described as overwhelming.

Everything is well done on the show, and while some of its “attacks” at the not-so-ancient society ways and morals are quite obvious, some are more subtle. Mad Men isn’t a parody though, and while it can be funny none of those remarks are ever exaggerated, the overall tone never crosses the line. It’s like a picture of how things were and went, by then.

By then, Jews only worked in Jewish advertising agencies, blacks were waiters expected to stay silent, and like everyone else even doctors smoked, always, even during gynecological exams.

And the Madison Avenue ad men, or Mad Men, as they were treating woman with the standards of the decade, rushing out of a meeting slamming the door behind them after taking care of yelling “I’m not going to let a woman talk to me like this” dared she not agree with men, trashing out fresh medical reports without even reading them, they also realized something else : they were living in a great time, a new golden period for the advertisers they were :

It wasn’t about telling the truth to the American public, it was about selling them whatever they were ask to sell them, and they could just say about anything they wanted to in order to do so. Truth didn’t matter, it was everything but, the truth.

But as good as the show’s atmosphere can be, I just didn’t feel any kind of excitement watching it. I never really got attracted to either the story or any of the characters.

Posted in Reviews
Shows: Mad Men