Going Mad Men
Aug 13, 2007
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Anyone watching “Mad Men”? I don’t mean the current presidential campaign, but the new series on AMC centered on the advertising industry circa 1960 (Thursday at 10 p.m. also on demand with TV Encore).
It’s pretty well done. Very good art direction (feels like the era) and a pretty punchy plot (if a little soap opera-ish). Producers take pains to emphasize how different the era was: no political correctness, indifference to safety issues, a gulf between men and women in the work place, lots of style and everyone smokes and drinks—all the time.
I was a only kid at the time, but that last part seems pretty accurate, except that it seems to me that cigars are a little under-represented on the show. My memory was of lots of cigar advertising and shops and a pretty good assortment of guys who smoked cigars or pipes. The one time I have seen someone smoking a cigar on the show, it was set up wrong (coming as a segue from a line about how they can smoke cigarettes as much as they want).
Of course, the ad agency that the show is set around has a cigarette account (they supposedly come up with Lucky Strike’s catch phrase “It’s Toasted” in the first episode, ignoring that the slogan really predates 1960 by more than 40 years), so maybe that explains the cigarette emphasis. But does anyone remember different—that there were way more cigars?
It’s pretty well done. Very good art direction (feels like the era) and a pretty punchy plot (if a little soap opera-ish). Producers take pains to emphasize how different the era was: no political correctness, indifference to safety issues, a gulf between men and women in the work place, lots of style and everyone smokes and drinks—all the time.
I was a only kid at the time, but that last part seems pretty accurate, except that it seems to me that cigars are a little under-represented on the show. My memory was of lots of cigar advertising and shops and a pretty good assortment of guys who smoked cigars or pipes. The one time I have seen someone smoking a cigar on the show, it was set up wrong (coming as a segue from a line about how they can smoke cigarettes as much as they want).
Of course, the ad agency that the show is set around has a cigarette account (they supposedly come up with Lucky Strike’s catch phrase “It’s Toasted” in the first episode, ignoring that the slogan really predates 1960 by more than 40 years), so maybe that explains the cigarette emphasis. But does anyone remember different—that there were way more cigars?
