Mad Men: Gloss and Understatement on AMC

Bingo here. I've just finished watching episode 3 of the second season of Mad Men, AMC's brilliant take on the advertising industry in the 1960s, and I must say that I'm certifiably hooked. Actually, I have been since the show's first airing last summer. No program has captured my imagination to such a degree since the early days of The Simpsons--in a television environment rife with overwrought superheroes and bloated with bland approximations of reality, MM reasserts the primacy of writers and actors, ideas that made TV a viable entertainment medium in the beginning. Matthew Weiner's scripts crackle with intelligence and the dialogues and situations he creates for his characters refuse to be boiled down to mere sound bytes. Perhaps the most impressive element of MM for me is the way that the show manages to blend high-gloss visual prettiness with a distinctively understated, ironic, slightly skewed understanding of the full range of human emotions.

Case in point: Season 2 episode 2. We see Pete Campbell in his parents' sitting room after his father's passing. Everyone, Pete, his mother, his wife Trudy, his brother, and his sister-in-law, is dressed immaculately, and the room looks as if it has never been visited. While Pete and his brother connive over their father's estate and their inheritance, Pete's mother begins to give away random items in the room to Trudy. The overall tenor of the conversation is stilted and awkward, much as one would expect following the loss of a loved one, but the secretive asides reveal the duplicity marking many of the show's characters. The hydra-headed dialogues, combined with slightly odd behaviors and the polished and pressed look of the characters, create a scene of almost Chekovian complexity. MM's set designers also succeed brilliantly here (and everywhere), with somber, almost sepia-toned lighting effects and props that bristle with so much surrealist weirdness that they could almost be refugees from a Bunuel movie. The viewer can almost hear the starch in Pete's collar, but the conversation is anything but stiff--MM achieves depth as much by what the scripts leave out as what they include, and the crispness of each character's movements create a strange dissonance with the ideas they put forth.

There will be much more to say about this show in the future, but for now, suffice it to say that Mad Men has shown that TV can rise above the lowest common denominator. Now, if we only knew how Joan Holloway manages to stand up straight...