From the first show I thought I knew Don Draper, had met him somewhere, sometime ago. Maybe he just looked like so many people I had known in impressionable years. During the second show it came to me...the resemblence between Don Draper (1960 @ 34) and Jack Kerouac (1953 @ 31).When I watched the premiere of Mad Men on July 19, 2007, I was mesmerized. I immediately liked the people, in spite of their vices. I liked the setting, even though it as pre-digital and bright colored plastic. I liked the work the ad men do, the struggle to find the clever phrase. I like the story, the character development, the setting, the lines that each say, the looks used instead of lines. It was a program I looked forward to after the first one, would watch more than once via On-Demand, and occasionally, have dreams in the same settings, with similar characters.
The whole time I have watched the 1960 world of Don and Betty, I have known that the world was about to change. After all, it is 1960. The world that had stood still after the USA & Friends had conquered it and developed it and now were enjoying it was about to shift. A little to the left, I think.
Is Peggy the one who will read The Feminine Mystique in the next year and can't wait for the liberation theology of The Female Eunuch? Betty won’t divorce Don; they will continue in their near hits of a solid relationship. Will Peter continue as a junior exec who never quite gets it about the way to do anything. What of Pete's chorus, Paul, Ken and Harry. As fringe characters perhaps we will see the chipping away of their worlds by the coming Sixties before we see it affect the main characters. And Joan and Roger? Each one a yesterday.
The kids worry me only because kids in TV shows are a problem unless they are the primary characters. The show can’t last for six seasons because who wants to see Sally and Robert discover the hippie movement. The show will then slip into American Dreams, a fine show but a different show.
Of course, I am those kids. I was eight in 1962. Those are the grown-ups I saw. That viewpoint may be part of my attraction to the show and not nostalgia. It is the idea that I may be enlightened a little. I might find out something I did not know about a place I lived and people I saw.
You could say that all the conflicts are universal and the setting is not critical, but in Mad Men it is. The setting is in large part the conflict. This could only be here and then. So while I wish Mad Men all the success as the best piece of TV since Rod Serling, I don't want to see it grow old and challenged by some time-corner it has painted itself into and start getting desperate.