Starting Mad Men

classicaljunkie and I started watching the first season of Mad Men last night. Bloggers I respect who write often on race and gender politics are rapt at this show, and have taken to writing long posts about it after each new episode. What I'm expecting to be the big dun-dunnnn end-of-season reveal ( pbapreavat Qba'f vqragvgl fjnc va Xbern ) has already been spoiled for me, so now's the time to dig in before all the rest falls away.

Unsurprisingly, we're enjoying it a great deal. We are both surprised at how sympathetic the principal protagonist, Don Draper, is. Early reactions to the show led me to believe that he's a jackass, and that the show chronicles how the changing times slowly undoes him. Thankfully, that seems to be quite an oversimplification. While he is certainly a creature of his era - and would therefore be a howling sexist by modern standards - his adventures in the first episode clearly reveal him to be complex, and flexible.

While he does snap appallingly at a female client who disagrees with his campaign ideas (clients aren't supposed to be ladies, wtf), he soon starts fumbling around for a way to make it up to her. He has to make this up as he goes, and falls down a lot, because the idea of a woman having any power at all - even the simple power of a client over a contracted ad agency - is totally off-script for him. But Draper's willing to adapt quickly, if it's clear that he has to. So, I look forward to traveling through the early 1960s with him.

Really my only complaints so far are the obvious "We're in the past!" gags, like when Draper observes that a thick report he tossed in the trash can permanently destroyed its information, because "it's not there there's some sort of magic machine that makes copies of things". (To which I say: Yes, well, carbon paper? Wev.)

I may end up buying the first season DVD for my dad, for selfish reasons. I bet he'd dig it, but I would really love to hear his reaction to it, because he worked in sales in a big corporation at exactly this time period, and a lot of what this show portrays meshes with his own stories about it.