DVD Review: “Mad Men — Season 1″
Rating: 94
HBO passed on “Mad Men,” AMC’s pitch-perfect series about Madison Avenue advertising executives at the dawn of the ‘60s, and that mistake is starting to feel like Decca Records skipping on The Beatles. With intoxicating detail and an unflinching eye for the hard opinions and bad behavior of men with ideas, “Mad Men” shows the creation of our modern media world, and the guys who sold us the American dream.
“Mad Men: Season 1” introduces Sterling Cooper creative director Don Draper (Jon Hamm), a man whose first client was himself. While he has sculpted the perfect life and has a pristine wife (January Jones) and family, he is all about creating images. It’s his business, and Sterling Cooper is dominated by alpha males who spend their days drinking, smoking, chasing women and dreaming up million-dollar ideas, from cigarette ads to image building for Richard Nixon.
But it is 1960, and reality is creeping in, both for Draper and the world around him. The patriarchy is being punctured by Peggy Olson (Elizabeth Moss), Draper’s receptionist who seems to have the selling ideas that will dominate the next decade, and Draper’s real past starts to encroach. At its heart, “Mad Men” is a soap opera, but it covers a time of great social change with an intelligence to match the sheer volume of cloak room groping and personal scandal. Few current television shows offer writing and acting at the level of “Mad Men” — creator Matthew Weiner was a key director and writer for “The Sopranos” — and among the period details and sharp character development, the series delivers valuable insight into how a few well-suited men accumulated wealth, partied like Romans and told us how to buy and live.
Extras: A few strong documentaries on advertising in the ’50s and ’60s, including interviews with some real-life contemporaries of the Sterling Cooper men.
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Between this series and “Breaking Bad”, I now pay close attention to any original content coming from AMC.
I now realize that, had I simply been of age in the early ’60′s in Manhattan, I could’ve just kept all my bad habits rather than cleaning up. In fact, those habits might actually have been resume-worthy.