The millions of Mad Men
viewers see the world of Sterling Cooper through the lens of the historical
horizon of the 1960s, however, the article What
Makes Mad Men Great by Matt Zoller Seitz is based on the premise that the
show “Mad Men” is not a historically based drama. While many may see Mad Men as a period drama,
Seitz argues that the show is a sociological study of the characters not a
societal study or about how the advertising industry, and the people who drove
it, interacted with that era’s forces of change on either a macro or micro
level. Although set during one of the greatest periods of political and social
upheaval our country has known, Mad Men, he asserts, is not concerned with
these events, but merely augment the show’s emphasis on the characters. Many recent, successful television dramas
have been set in historical juxtaposition to significant historical eras like Mad
Men such as Downton Abbey, Boardwalk Empire, and the Playboy Club, but they all
stand in direct contrast to Mad Men because they let their temporal history
mold the narrative and the characters so that the plot is forced to navigate
around the issues of the age.
Mad Men’s “main draw is
behavior, observed with such exactness that one can imagine the show’s being
transposed to the forties or eighties, with different clothes, slang, and
inebriants, while still delivering the same basic satisfactions” [Seitz]. The show, Seitz maintains, is about the
“mystery of personality” and characters that are “random, inscrutable, and mysterious,” who do things the viewers
will never fully understand, much like people in our own lives. In the show, as in reality, Seitz seems to
believe, life moves on, people act, history continues, and another work day of
accomplishing seemingly nothing begins. Mad Men, to him, is about “human behavior
observed in the moment. It doesn’t explain. It observes. It’s not about the
period, it’s about the question mark.” (Seitz)
The theme of the Seitz
article applies modestly to Mad Men, the show does not allow popular history to
overwhelm its story. However, Mad Men in any other time period than the 1960s,
would simply not be Mad Men. There is no other American era that changed so
comprehensively so quickly. Instead of internalizing Mad Men’s universal
psychological themes such as the character’s basis for self-worth and
satisfaction, viewers simply see this other world of the 1960s, unwilling to
internalize the idea that the characters, and our own, existential problems do not
disappear. The culture of change that permeated life in the 1960s and forms the
background of the drama is what makes the show work in a way no other time
period could.
Caption- Mad Men of the
1980s http://mirror80.com/wpcontent/uploads/2012/03/rad-men-title2.jpg
It is preposterous to assume
that Mad Men, taken out of context, would be intrinsically the same because the
show is just about the characters, as Seitz argues. In Mad Men, our first
impression is the world of the 1960s, and how strikingly different it seems
from our own more modern society, and it is the time period visuals themselves
that allow viewers to be transported into that uniquely different era. We see on
the surface the Neanderthal sexual politics, primitive advertising, people
smoking in the workplace that dominate the workplace and the cult of the
perfect homemaker and the dominance of cold war politics that are vestiges of
the past at which we laugh, because we are told, repeatedly, or for some
they’ve experienced, that society has come so much further than that. It is this
perfect storm of social and political change that, together with its seemingly
authentic characters, gives Mad Men it’s unique position of hindsight that makes
the show so great Mad Men’s status as a costume drama set in the 1960s is what
makes the show special, special enough to have a class about it.
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