From the Cheap Seats

We don’t really do TV round these parts. This here’s Film Buff territory, governed by certain assumptions about the gogglebox. No one’s denying that the telly has facilitated some remarkable work over the years and if you want to rap about (Old Skool) Doctor Who then baby, I’m your man. Yet no-one’s going to convince me that most TV has any claim on my time, especially given the teetering pile of still-unwatched DVDs resting upon my shelves.

Which brings us neatly to Mad Men, newly arrived on DVD after completing its run across a sampling of BBC channels. It arrived on a perfumed carpet of hype, the next big thing writ large. Ever open minded, I sat down, fully expecting to have my horrible elitist prejudices confirmed once again. Remarkably, they weren’t

Whatever expectations were raised by the publicity were exceeded by the show itself. Indeed, It was a show that raised expectations with every new episode and somehow kept exceeding them, surging ever further ahead of its rivals with each new instalment.

A brief recap for newcomers: it’s 1960, and the hottest adman on Madison Avenue is Don Draper, creative genius at Sterling-Cooper. Tall, handsome and cool as fuck, he’s the guy that has it all, right down to the Doris Day-a-like wife waiting for him in the suburbs with an apple pie in the oven. There’s office politics to deal with – thrusting young Pete Campbell has his eye on Don’s office – but come cocktail hour, there’s usually a martini with his name on it.

At the heart of Mad Men is a big idea: the way we package and present modern life is a gross distortion of the real product. The programme suggests that we’re as truthful about our lives – our wants and our needs – as an ad man’s jingle. No one knows this better than Don himself: “What you call love,” he says at one point “was invented by guys like me to sell nylons.” As the show progresses, we learn that he’s really a punk farm kid called Dick Whitman who re-branded himself after a fortuitous accident. Having created his perfect nest, he’s imprisoned his wife in it, seeking to cure her anxieties and problems not with attention or love but by sending her to the shrink.

One of the great joys of the programme is the way it takes us behind the masks that the characters wear. Pete Campbell, for instance, starts off as the office snake – he prepares for his marriage by bedding Peggy, Don’s secretary. But the writers want us to understand him. They show us his frustration: he doesn’t have the talent to fulfil his ambitions. He feels patronised by his wealthy father in law but is dependent on the old man’s connections if he’s to advance at work.

Of course, there’s nothing new about pointing out that despair and disillusionment lurk behind the pastel façade of suburbia: Blue Velvet and American Beauty are just two of the films that have done just that. But I can’t think of anything that has tackled the theme with the maturity or the empathy of Mad Men. There’s no patronising the characters or sneering at the lifestyle they’ve chosen, just a numb awareness of what it’s doing to them. For all Betty Draper’s material comforts, by the end of the season, the only person who really listens to her is an eleven year old boy.

Mad Men is lighter on incident than most TV shows, but the slow build, concentrating on character, culminates in some devastating moments. In the final episode, for instance, there’s a sequence where Don Draper demonstrates Kodak’s new slide projector. You can find it on You Tube: watched in isolation, it’s compelling – maybe even magical. But in context, given all that’s gone before and knowing what Don’s thinking, it becomes utterly heartbreaking.

Most of the press has focused on the recreation of the era and the obvious differences between our own: there’s no smoking ban here, nor equality legislation. Women are eye candy and the closet has got a great big lock on it to stop Gays coming out of it. But while we’ve made many improvements, there’s still a lot we haven’t learned. Although it’s set in the past, Mad Men is urgently contemporary in its critique of materialism: the adds are less slick, the products are clunkier but the pressures and stresses of life are common to the era in which it’s set and the era in which it’s filmed.

The show was created by Matthew Weiner, who wrote (and judging by the credits re-wrote) most of the episodes. He even directed some of it too, so film buffs should feel comfortable that there’s an auteur we can talk about. But while the first season has been superior to almost every American movie of the past five years (at least), it strikes me that the movies might not be the best comparison. Instead, I’m reminded of a novel. Specifically, I’m thinking of how 19^th century authors like Dickens and Wilkie Collins (and, to be fair, many others whose work has not lasted so well) would publish their works in instalments before collecting them together in the form we now know.

What interests me is that DVD box sets might be the equivalent of those collected volumes, gathering together the separate episodes (chapters?) into a unified whole. Certainly there are more shows, like Mad Men, The Wire, The Sopranos or even Lost, that have a continuing, developing narrative rather than the more traditional self-contained episodes that most shows still favour. Potential viewers will surely have a very different relationship with these collected editions, no longer picking out favourite stories but committing to the bigger picture. I can’t help but wonder how this – in combination with the changes in distribution and delivery of movies that we know are coming – will affect cinema itself.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. If you haven’t seen Mad Men, the DVD is unreservedly recommended and, since that DVD seems heavy with extras, it’s a good buy for existing fans too. I won’t pretend that it’s dramatically changed my opinion of Television. But it’s certainly softened it.