Why aren\'t we mad about Mad Men?

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American television critics were breathless with anticipation lastweek as the second season of the drama series Mad Men began —and immensely relieved that the season premiere lived up to theirincredibly high expectations. “Every bit as inspired as youhave heard,” says Ray Richmond, of The Hollywood Reporter.“And getting better all the time.”
Mad Men, set in the luxuriant, retro dream world of a MadisonAvenue ad agency on the cusp of the 1960s, was an instant criticalhit when it began last year. It snagged 16 Emmy nominations,unheard of for a series in its first season, and won two GoldenGlobes: for best drama series, and for best actor, Jon Hamm. Hammwas the show’s breakout star, playing the archetypicallytall, dark and handsome, but still mysterious and conflicted,advertising executive Don Draper.
Critics adored Mad Men’s guiltless immersion in an age beforepolitical correctness. Men — and women — wreathethemselves in cigarette smoke, in a time before people knewcigarettes led to wreaths. Three- martini lunches are de rigueur.Blatant sexism and casual racism are so ingrained as to seem almostquaint and innocent. Feminism is a notion barely formed in BettyFriedan’s mind. And America, still busting with pride fromits triumph in the second world war, bestrides the world on thestrength of its booming economy and with the righteous power of itsideas: freedom and 30 brands of washing powder. Those are forgedinto trenchant catch phrases at agencies such as Sterling Cooper,depicted in Mad Men.
What gives Mad Men an almost unbearable tension, a Chekhovian edge,is our knowledge that for America, and for the men so busilyselling the idea of it in the series, the sense of existentialcertainty lasted for so brief a moment. We know it’s about tobe shattered — by the tragedy of the Vietnam war, which isbarrelling round a blind corner like an unstoppable tank; by thelate-1960s counterculture, which will reject the values that ledAmerica into Vietnam; and by the attendant sexual revolutions,which will radically change the way men and women relate to eachother.
The second season picks up the story two years on. It’sValentine’s Day, 1962. Across New York, people are watchingtheir black-and-white televisions as Jacqueline Kennedy gives agraceful tour of the White House, a residence we know she will livein for only a short time longer, before tragedy shatters her life,too. Using Jackie Kennedy as such a motif signals that, as thefirst season focused on the dilemmas and desires of the men atSterling Cooper, the second will spend more time on the emergingpsyches of the women — the wives, secretaries and lovers.
It’s now clear that Betty Draper, Don’s beautifulblonde wife, played by the lovely January Jones, is being groomedas a troubled Hitchcockian heroine in the Kim Novak or Tippi Hedrenmould. In the new-season premiere, she begins tentatively to testjust how powerful and potentially dangerous an instrument herseductive beauty and still unexplored sexuality might be.
“Betty Draper is getting angry,” explains MatthewWeiner, the show’s creator. “She is an incrediblybeautiful woman who married a man she barely knows because he looksgood on paper. She has realised that, when her beauty disappears,she will cease to exist. She’s not enough for her husband andshe doesn’t want to accept it. She’s terrified ofdealing with that problem, because she cannot get divorced, shecannot be single, she cannot start over.” Like so many womenat that time. There are also strong hints that Peggy, the secretarywhom Draper has promoted to copywriter — who was shocked tofind she was pregnant at the end of the first season — willalso feature more insistently, though, tantalisingly, we learnnothing, at first, about the fate of her child.
As thrilling as it was to sit down last week to watch the beginningof the second season of a show that promises true greatness, thereis a big problem with Mad Men: what The Hollywood Reporter’sRichmond calls the show’s “tragically low”ratings. If only someone would watch the thing,” he says. Bythe end of the first season of 13 episodes, Mad Men was averagingjust 910,000 viewers on the cable channel AMC. Less than 1m viewersis hardly a blip on the radar when you consider that top-ratedshows such as American Idol can hit 30m viewers a week, whileHouse, starring Hugh Laurie, the top-rated drama series on Americantelevision these days, regularly pulls in 20m-plus. The firstseason of The Sopranos on HBO attracted an average of 4.3m viewers;its 2002 season premiere pulled 13.4m.
Some critics believe Mad Men’s dismal audience figures aresymptomatic of a terminal decline in the taste of the Americanaudience, which seems addicted to ridiculous reality series such asIt’s Complicated, starring Denise Richards, former Bond girland ex-wife of Charlie Sheen, and the new reality show featuringthe horrifying stage mom Dina Lohan, mother of the actress Lindsay.More to the point, critics wondered how long AMC, a small cablechannel, whose first scripted series this is, could sustain Mad Menif so few people tuned in.
AMC, gratified by the plaudits and prizes for the show’sfirst season, decided to double down and spend heavily promotingthe new episodes — as much as $25m, according to someestimates. It seems to have paid off. Last Sunday’s openerdoubled the show’s audience, pulling 1.9m viewers. While AMCand Mad Men aficionados were buoyed by the ratings, some observersdoubt the show will ever be more than a critical hit. Brian Lowry,of Variety, believes that its “tranquil pace” means it“will likely struggle to significantly expand its commercialappeal, despite critical accolades”.
Unfortunately, Lowry may be right. Mad Men can be glacial. That isin startling contrast to the frantic shrillness, addiction tomeaningless action and violence and insistent descent intosentimentality that are the hallmarks of just about everything elseon American television these days. “There is little in theway of ‘action’,” says Robert Lloyd, televisioncritic for the LA Times. “It is possibly the slowest, mostdeliberative show on television, which is one of the things thatmakes it so lovely and mysterious.” The most exciting thingto happen in the premiere was the arrival of SterlingCooper’s first Xerox machine, a huge beast that nobody couldfigure out where to put.
Despite the acclaim for Mad Men, some interesting dissentingvoices, particularly on the right, are beginning to be heard. AdamSimon, a film and television writer and cultural critic, agreesthat Mad Men is beautifully executed, but says: “It is justtoo condescending. I really can’t bear the it is so certainthat it, and by extension its viewers, are so morally andculturally superior to the characters we’re watching —in fact, to the whole era it depicts.
“You get to revel in the cool atmosphere while feeling smuglysuperior to it. Oh, so sexist, so racist, so anti-semitic. Sodesperately in need of the sexual and cultural revolution waitinground the corner. It feels cheap in that sense, allowing us to patourselves on our backs for merely living on the other side of thegreat awakening.”
Perhaps that’s what Man Men needs to attract more viewers— healthy controversy, not just acclaim.
Mad Men 2 begins in the UK in the new year