
As is often the case with appointment television, I came
late to the game on Mad Men, the AMC
chronicle of Madison Avenue in a martini-swilling age. At this point I’m done
with the first season, and have yet to tackle the second. On Sunday night I
cheated and watched the Season 3 premiere, which struck me as oddly
unimaginative -- certainly less creative than this summer’s ad campaign, a
fitting combination of bombast and finesse. (You may have noticed the bus
banners, or the Banana Republic storefronts, or the retro-cartoonish Facebook
icons of your pals.) But I’ll leave the reviews to the seasoned
pros, and to amateurs with a deeper investment than my own.
One thing has been bugging me all along, though, and I
wonder whether I’m the only one. The opening credits to the
show, iconic enough to have earned their own Simpsons parody, ring
stylish but hollow against the substance of the show. Every time I see them --
and that’s numbingly often, when you’re binging through a full season -- a part
of me imagines how much better they could be.
Yeah, this is obsessive. But we’re talking about a show that
takes period detail to fanatical extremes. From the fashion to the cocktails,
nothing is left unconsidered here. In the world of Don Draper and his
associates, image is everything, and so the show cleverly gives us a gleaming
fabrication, an idealized and profoundly troubled milieu.