mad men

So I finished that series I'd tivo'd.

It was called Mad Men and was shown as part of the BBC's season looking at advertising. I quite liked the season and some of the documentaries in it, but knew I wasn't going to have time to watch the show, so I recorded it on my PVR.

To be honest, I probably shouldn't have bothered.

The season was about advertising, as I say, and one of the big things that came out of it was that during the late 1950's / early 1960s the creatives on Madison avenue in New York basically revolutionised the way advertising was done. They were called "Mad Men" (a phrase they themselves coined) and the show was therefore ostensibly set in that era/place.

However, and this was what disappointed me, actually it isn't. I mean, it is set in an advertising agency and the characters are Mad Men, but really, you could have set the show "last week in Birmingham" or "in 1980's Vancouver". The reason I was watching - the advertising thing - is almost incidental.

What the show is really about is the social changes that happened in the 1960s as the repressed (woman and blacks) were starting on the road to equality in the workplace and society. A big chunk is devoted to the Kennnedy/Nixon election, for example.

Now it does that pretty well, I'd say, but I dunno, it kinda left me cold.

You see, a real big part of the problem was that these people were about the most unsympathetic bunch of characters in a TV show ever.

All the men were incredibly misogynistic and racist, extremely caty, back-biting and jealous of each other... and the women weren't much better. They're all also clearly alcoholics and they smoke heavily, plus they shag each other at the merest drop of a hat.

Now, these things would kinda be all right in some degree of moderation, but they're so excessive in the show (for example, you literally never see the characters without a glass of hard liquor in their hands) it almost becomes parody. Plus it stretches the bounds of credibility - I don't care who you are, you could not consume the volumes of liquor these guys do and still function in your daily life.

I dunno, maybe as I say it's because the bit I was looking for - the advertising world and how that works - was so incidental the other aspects just ended up annoying me. I guess if I'd been less pre-expecting what the show was I would have liked it more, but in the end I just felt disappointed :(.