'Mad Men' true to sensibility of '60s

By Lisa Bornstein, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published July 25, 2008 at 3 p.m.

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The series "Mad Men" won multiple Golden Globes and now is up for several Emmys. Is it:

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Advertising execs Roger Sterling (John Slattery ), left, and Don Draper (Jon Hamm) drink and do business in Don's office at Sterling Cooper in AMC's series, Mad Men.

Photo by Amc

January Jones plays Betty Draper on Mad Men.

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When the first season of Mad Men concluded, it was November 1960. Don Draper, the dashing creative director of Sterling Cooper ad agency, had confronted the dark secrets of his past, as well as the electoral triumph of JFK (Sterling Cooper represented Nixon).

His wife, Betty, was moments away from a suburban crack-up. Secretary Peggy had worked her way up to copywriter and discovered that she was pregnant only when she went into labor.

Off-screen, the show had a small but rabid following. In the months after it went off the air, via reruns and On Demand, the show became a media darling, the hip thing to love and the winner of Golden Globes for best drama and best actor (Jon Hamm as Draper).

Its accolades came from creator Matthew Weiner's gimlet-eyed vision for his series about a Madison Avenue ad agency in the early 1960s. Weiner's stories, his dialogue glancing off the period's racism and sexism, and the show's gorgeous, precise art direction created a hermetic, absorbing world.

When the series returns Sunday, it's Valentine's Day, 1962, and the idea of the New Frontier is causing discomfort for the employees of Sterling Cooper and their loved ones.

It was one thing for women like Betty Draper (the icy blond, repressively pained January Jones) and office manager Joan Holloway (swivel-hipped, cutting Christina Hendricks) to maintain their glamorous, strapped-in figures in a Mamie Eisenhower world; now that Jackie Kennedy is giving White House tours, how will they measure up?

At Sterling Cooper, Draper may have met his match in the smooth, placid rainmaker Duck Phillips, whose first goal is to bring new blood into the agency. The youth wave has begun, heralded by the nation's youngest president. At 36, Draper is no longer a wunderkind, and he's been charged with bringing in fresh talent. Even Joan may be feeling that her sell-by date is nearing.

"It's a fad," Draper says. "Young people don't know anything. Especially that they're young."

This time, the whiz kid is mistaken.

Like latter-day Edith Wharton, the characters of Mad Men live lives dominated by surfaces. The second-season premiere begins with glimpses of the characters' morning ministrations, from Joan zipping up her own red hourglass to Pete's wife helping him with French cuffs. The very thing they sell - image - is the prison in which they live.

Children are the most effective expression of this, an element of home decor that is best managed by housekeepers. In the season's second episode, Don and Betty's children serve as bartenders at their card party, until Betty catches their son downstairs and snaps at him to go to bed - without so much as standing from her chair.

"I don't care what they do when they're up there," she says. "I just like a few hours of quiet."

(Keep in mind that Betty spends her days now riding horses - the upright English style, of course - while their nearly invisible black housekeeper does the child rearing.)

The season's first episode lags a bit as Weiner (probably anticipating a legion of new viewers) painstakingly catches up on the principal characters' lives. The second episode, co-written by Weiner and Lisa Albert, provides more of the deft commentary and observation that makes Mad Men so smart.

Elisabeth Moss walks a shaky path as Peggy, who reveals new strength and ambition but is still thought of as a quasi-secretary by her fellow copywriters. The biggest insult: when the company's first copy machine, the size of a bathroom, is stuck in her office.

That Relaxicizer she tested last season must have worked wonders, as she also demonstrates a new sexual confidence. After fooling around with a man in the hallway at a party, he pushes her to come home with him.

"I'm in the persuasion business, and frankly, I'm disappointed by your presentation," she says.

There are themes to Mad Men episodes, but they're delicate. No "racism is bad" or "give those girls a chance" episodes. Rather, we get glimpses of inner lives rather than revelations, and the second-class citizens are given only slightly more attention than the men of Sterling Cooper would give them.

Even more than last summer, Hamm provides the show's magnetic force. Handsome and polished as the Arrow Shirt man, he's showing more discomfort with his work and his family. His vision of advertising seems to be left behind in the face of facile puns, while even he sounds bored at his magical distillations of a campaign premise.

The first episode ends, gloriously, with the words of Frank O'Hara's poem Mayakovsky:

Now I am quietly waiting for

the catastrophe of my personality

to seem beautiful again,

and interesting, and modern.

That sense is part of the wonder of Mad Men: an era nearly 50 years removed that seems at once gleamingly modern and fascinatingly ancient.

bornsteinl@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-5101

Mad Men

* When, where: 8 p.m. Sunday, AMC

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