Review of the Television Show Mad Men

The popular television show Mad Men recently arrived at its conclusion. The purpose of the present sample essay provided by Ultius is to conduct a review of this show. The review will proceed across four main parts. The first part will consist of an overview of the basic premise and plot of the show. The second part will then delve into an analysis of the protagonist of the show, Don Draper. After this, the essay will somewhat idiosyncratically turn to the present writer's opinion on an interesting thing that the show suggests about the nature of eroticism. Finally, the fourth part will consist of a discussion of the anthropological significance of the show, or the ways in which the show is valuable for understanding the nature and significance of the tumultuous decade of the 1960s within American culture. 

Overview of the Show

To start with, then, Mad Men, created by Weiner, is a show that it primarily set in 1960s America within the city of New York, at the business office of an advertising agency. The term "mad" in the title is not in fact short for the word madness. Rather, as Dictionary.com has written: "'Mad men' is a historical term short for 'Madison Avenue' men, coined by the advertising industry itself, in typical self-promotional fashion. Madison Avenue, of course, has been synonymous with the advertising industry since the 1920s" (paragraph 2). Weiner, however, surely meant the title as a pun on this historical fact, insofar as many of the characters within the show often act quite mad, and the advertising industry as such is in itself characterized by a kind of madness. In any event, the show Mad Men essentially traces the stories of the people at the advertising firm, their families, and their personal dramas over the course of about a decade. The advertising agency is a central setting for the show, but it also branches out and delves far beyond that specific context as such.  

While Mad Men is fictional, Weiner's show subtly integrates real events from the 1960s, such as the assassination of Kennedy, into its plot. The effect is that the show gives the viewer a holistic feel of how it must have felt to live during that era in American history. (More will be said on this subject.) The central protagonist of the show, however, is an enigmatic man named Don Draper. It is primarily through Draper that the show expands beyond the Madison Avenue office of the advertising agency and branches out to include several other aspects of American society in the 1960s. In order to understand why this is so, it is necessary to turn now to an analysis of the protagonist himself. 

Analysis of Don Draper

Don Draper is something of a star within his advertising agency, and he is presented to the viewer as something of a genius at what he does. He seems to have an effortless grasp of the basic principles and tactics of marketing that have made clear by real-life brilliant mad men such as Oglivy. However, it is not long before the viewer realizes that Draper is a very troubled man. For one thing, the very first episode concludes with Draper having an affair with some woman, and then returning home to wistfully watch his own children sleeping. An immediate contrast is thus set up between Draper's professional life and his personal life, as well as between his success as a mad man and his success (and lack thereof) as a family man. This contrast is only deepened as the show goes on; and moreover, it is substantially expanded, as this theme introduced by Draper in the first episode goes on to encompass virtually all of the main characters from the advertising agency. Draper himself, though, remains the focal point of this disjunction between the professional and the personal. 

More than that, though, the viewer soon comes to understands that Draper is far more deeply and uniquely troubled than that. Among other things (and without spoiling too much, the viewer soon learns that Don Draper is not actually the original name of the man called by that name. This calls forth almost mythic resonances pertaining to men who have named (or even baptized?) themselves. One perhaps thinks, for example, of Bob Dylan—another major icon, of course, of the 1960s in which Mad Men is set. Dylan was born under a different name; and as he has written in his own memoir: "Bob Dylan looked and sounded better than Bob Allyn. The first time I was asked my name in the Twin Cities, I instinctively and automatically without thinking simply said, 'Bob Dylan'" (79). Draper's own situation was much more intense and serious than that—and again, it would not possible to say more without spoiling key points of the plot. However, suffice to say that in a very real sense, Draper is living a new life on Madison Avenue, and no one actually knows who he is.

The complexity of Draper's character is one of the main driving forces behind Mad Men as a whole, as well as one of the reasons why it expands from being a narrow narrative about an advertising agency to a panorama of 1960s American culture as a whole. For example, there are numerous occasions where Draper tends to wander off and hang out with hippies and other countercultural groups within the contemporary American culture—possibly, one suspects, because Draper never actually belonged, at the psychological level, with the mad men at all; possibly because the internal conflicts of his own nature drive him toward more of a marginal and vagabond lifestyle than anything else. Draper often just disappears from the office, in pursuit of his own personal experiences and visions. His colleagues often put up with it, because they know that this is a genius, although his erratic behaviors do eventually begin to catch up with him at the professional level as well. 

Comment on Eroticism

There is a lot of sex in Mad Men, given that one of the aspects of the protagonist Draper is that he is an irresistible and incorrigible womanizer. As the show progresses, however, Draper's relations within women become emblematic of a more fundamental transformation and evolution that is occurring within his personality structure. Draper has sexual relations with a countless number of women over the course of the show. Eventually, though, it becomes clear to the viewer that the women in Draper's life who are closest to him, at a human level, are actually the ones with whom he has had no sexual relations at all. These include a protegee in his office named Peggy Olsen, as well as a mysterious woman who is interlinked with his past and his very identity in a very complex way. Once the viewer picks up on this theme, it provides insight into what Draper is really about: it would seem that his sexual relations, just like so much else about him, have little to do with who he really is, in a deeper or more spiritual sense of the meaning of human identity. 

One way to explain this phenomenon would be to invoke the concept of what Iyer has called Orphic eroticism (616). The main idea is that as Draper evolves as a man over the course of the show, his own eroticism becomes more and more intertwined with his desire to truly find himself, and more and more indifferent to the thrills of simple sexual relations with a countless number of meaningless women. Again, this is significant not just in and of itself and for it may say about the psychology of eroticism, but also because within the context of the show Mad Men, it is emblematic of Draper's more general evolution as a character (see Berk). At the beginning, the viewer is inclined to see him in more or less hedonistic terms. As the show progresses, however, it becomes clear to the viewer that Draper is searching for something (perhaps in the same way that all of 1960s America was searching for something); and this adds a dimension of depth not only to Draper himself but also to the television show as a whole and to the America within which the show is set. 

Anthropological Significance

Mad Men is not the sort of television show that one should watch for the sake of distracted entertainment. Rather, it is a serious work of art, and also an uncannily accurate portrait of 1960s America. Another way to say the same thing is that the significance of the show is not just aesthetic but also anthropological in nature. Weiner has clearly done his homework, and watching the show is, among other things, an immersive experience of what America must have been like during the time period being portrayed. Moreover, by grasping this portrayal of America through an immersive viewing of the show, the viewer also begins to glean insights about present-day America, insofar as the 1960s were not so long ago and the present day owes a great debt to what happened back then. 

Poniewozik has put the matter very well by calling the show a time machine. To quote him on this matter: "Mad Men is a kind of time machine, but it's a complicated one. It doesn't go in only one direction. You start watching and it takes you to the past—early 60—when you can smoke in any restaurant and doctors are just starting to prescribe the Pill. It moves forward: the Kennedy-Nixon campaign, Camelot, the Moon landing. But it also transports you from there to Don's childhood . . . in the Depression" (1). The main plot of Mad Men can thus be read, to at least some extent, as a historical and anthropological study of 1960s America. However, the real genius of the show probably consists of the way in which it refracts this whole study through the prism of the specific character who is Don Draper. This not only allows the show to expand its scope in both historical and psychological ways, it also enables it to provide an almost phenomenological account of how the 1960s must in fact have subjectively felt.

One warning that should be provided to the potential viewer of Mad Men, however, is that it will be necessary to leave present-day ideological baggage and judgments at the door in order to fully appreciate the show. There is, for example, an obvious gender disparity within the show: the "mad men" in the advertising agency are in fact almost all men, with women being naturally expected to serve as secretaries. There is the single exception of Peggy Olsen—but her exceptionality almost just serves to provide an even more vivid picture of how difficult it must have been at that time for a woman to move ahead with her career. It would be absurd to fault the show Mad Men itself on such grounds, insofar as the show merely provides an accurate picture of what America was actually like in the decade of the 1960s. Several other examples of similar situations are also present in the show, including examples of racism and homophobia. If the viewer finds such a perspective offensive, he must at the very least bear in mind that this is not the perspective of the show Mad Men per se, but rather the actual perspective that was held by the dominant 1960s American society. 

Conclusion

In summary, the present essay has consisted of a review of the television show Mad Men. A main point that has come forward in this essay is that while Mad Men is primarily set in the office of an advertising agency, it is able—surely because of the complexities of its protagonist Don Draper—to expand beyond this specific setting and provide a panoramic vision of all of American society as it changed over the course of the 1960s. On the basis of this review, the strong recommendation can be made that anyone who is considering watching Mad Men should proceed with their plan. However, it must be pointed out that Mad Men is a serious work of art, with deep psychological, historical, and anthropological insights. In short, a viewer who is seeking a light experience may be in for a disappointment.

Works Cited

Berk, Nancy. "A Psychologist's Take on Mad Men Season 7." Parade. 11 Apr. 2014. Web. 3 Jul. 2016. <http://parade.com/279001/nancyberk/a-psychologists-take-on-mad-men-season-7/>. 

Dictionary.com. "Actually, the 'Mad' in the TV Show 'Mad Men' Isn't Short for Madness, So What Does It Mean?" Author, 2 Aug. 2010. Web. 3 Jul. 2016. <http://blog.dictionary.com/mad-men/>.

Dylan, Bob. Chronicles. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005. Print. 

Iyer, Sethu A. Testament: An Invitation to Lucid Romance. Austin: CreateSpace, 2016. Print.

Oglivy, David. Oglivy on Advertising. New York: Vintage, 1985. Print. 

Packer, George. "What's So Good about 'Mad Men'?" New Yorker. 9 Nov. 2009. Web. 3 Jul. 2016. <http://www.newyorker.com/news/george-packer/whats-so-good-about-mad- men>. 

Poniewozik, James. "The Time Machine: How Mad Men Rode the Carousel of the Past into Television History." Time. n.d. Web. 3 Jul. 2016. < http://time.com/mad-men-history/>.

Weiner, Matthew. Mad Men. AMC Studios, 2007. Television show.