Spitball Army

Several weeks ago, the Sunday New York Times had a special section about the Emmy Awards so,  naturally, I thought that the annual TV awards ceremony was about to be aired.  Wrong.  As I circled around the interweb, trying to find the date and time of the show (which is not as easy as you might think it would be), I determined that the ceremony is to be held in September.  The Times section was merely part of the four-month build-up.

It will be interesting to see how the awards are given out this year, considering the effects of the writers’ strike last year, the resultant drop in original writing, and the overbearing number of reality shows that appeared in the wake.  The lingering effects of the strike keep popping up in unusual ways in the news, as documented here, for example.  I’ll admit to filling up my increasingly limited TV watching time with more reality television than either I or my friends are comfortable with (that is, when the channel isn’t tuned to MSNBC which is, in its own way, a form of reality TV).  But a few new scripted – in the traditional sense – shows have snuck in to my world during this past year, and the standout by a far shot is AMC’s series Mad Men.

It is a rare television program that can pull a viewer into its own universe as well as Mad Men does.  The Sopranos and Six Feet Under, two examples from recent years, did this by holding a prism up to the world, placing the audience within a specific cultural pocket (New Jersey mob families and Southern California undertakers, respectively) and looking outward.  Mad Men‘s cultural point of origin is the world of Madison Avenue advertising circa 1960.  The colorful and layered scripts revel in the slow, rich development of character.  Seen in the context of 2008 America, the show has much to say about advances beyond sexism, racism, careerism, and other -isms, in the ensuing 47 years.  And on many levels, it also shows us that these advances are relative, and we haven’t necessarily evolved much, aside from our  kit bags of electronic gizmos and our hyper-awareness to every minute detail of the lives of others.

Sometimes I watch Mad Men within the context of its time, which happens to be the year that I was born.  In the most ego-centric way, I like to think that this was what the world was like when I began, that culturally we have grown together.  The series mines this idea elegantly by using cultural touchstones to spark the audience’s collective memory, much like Stephen King attempts to do by inserting song lyrics into his novels, or every politician since Ronald Reagan brazenly does in speech after speech by singling out vignettes of everymen to gain empathy for their policies.  The following clip, from the final episode of the show’s first season, may have been Mad Men‘s finest moment so far, and exemplifies its sly blend of drama, sentiment, and marketing:

The second season of Mad Men begins on July 27th, on the American Movie Classic channel.