The Idea Blog

I pulled a paragraph from a fully developed New York Times Magazine story about AMC’s series, Mad Men. It’s key to what makes the show tick:

“Deepening the tension between that fantasy and reality, Weiner has put Sterling Cooper, the fictional ad agency that employs the show’s characters, on the old-school, WASP side of the equation, letting them revel in their racism, sexism and anti-Semitism. It was during that period that the creative revolution in advertising was taking off at agencies like Grey and Doyle Dane Bernbach, where Jews and some women held leadership positions. That Sterling Cooper’s creative director, Don Draper, is played by Jon Hamm, a leading man in the Gregory Peck mold who manages to make his sometimes oblique and often heartless character into a sympathetic figure (and won a Golden Globe for best actor), eases the pain.”

It’s an award-winning show, and it does represent what we thought about advertising and advertising agencies in the last era.

The second season begins in July, the first season is now available on DVD (and from Netflix), and I recommend it.