MAD MEN

Now we have another mid-month gap between zip.ca DVDs, so I rented the fifth season of MAD MEN for a week.  It's an unusually intelligent, existential show about a Madison Avenue advertising agency in the early and mid-1960s.  It's funny--watching that show, I can see everything that was wrong with that time:  the casual racism and sexism, the stifling conformism in much of the middle class, the heedless drinking and smoking, the littering!  Yet I still feel the emotional pull of nostalgia for that time.  People today may feel superior to the pre-1968 era, but I sense that we aren't so superior today.

When you think about the show's premise, it can seem almost as bleak as Matthew Weiner's previous series THE SOPRANOS.  Sterling & Cooper reminds me a bit of Never-Neverland, with Don Draper as Peter Pan and Joan as Tinker Bell.  You have a group of original writers, artists and thinkers basically whoring their talents to sell various products and overcome the general public's sales resistance.  Yet that wasn't completely new:  artists like Michelangelo created their great religious imagery basically to "sell" the Roman Catholic Church.

I think my favorite character is the glum, unpredictable senior partner Roger Sterling. (I was surprised to learn that John Slattery is only my age.) In one episode when they tried to work with a Japanese company he caused a big scene and made an issue of the Pacific War that he'd served in.  I got a feeling that World War II was the only time when he really felt alive.