Two Cents Worth of Mad Men

Another new regulation just promulgated by Federal Trade Commission regarding bloggers: Everyone's now required to post at least once about Mad Men. Gushing praise isn't mandatory, but if you have pretensions of being an intellectual, anything else is frowned on.

So this is my post. The Spindletop of praise for the series from the chattering classes, especially those commentators about the same age as Don Draper's older children, made me previously suspect that it's overrated. But I got around to renting the first few episodes on DVD recently, and it turned out to be high-quality entertainment. Not the absolute best thing ever on television (that would be this), but well worth watching for any number of reasons, most of which have been discussed in exhaustive and maybe exhausting detail elsewhere, even such minutiae as the typeface used in the series.

The show's high-sheen verisimilitude has been much noted, and for good reason, as has the way it hammers home the point that people behaved differently back then, at least about certain visible vices, a number of now-discredited social mores, and various questions of personal safety. Occasionally the show exaggerates this to the point of unbelievability. Not for a minute did I believe that Betty Draper (or very many mothers at all, even in 1960) would allow her small daughter to run around covered by a plastic dry cleaning bag.

Still, that's a quibble. I'll be renting more of the series, if only to follow the development of such a remarkable fictional character as Don Draper.