Coming Late to the Mad Men Party

We do live in amazing times. I realize that is not a particularly profound statement. Most people would probably agree that we live in amazing times. But the time when you really notice it is when it comes to things like television series. You can use something like TiVo an record an entire season without having to worry about videotapes. You can watch entire seasons online on your laptop. You can download an entire series and entire seasons from iTunes onto your iPod, big or small. Plus, you can buy an entire television show's season on DVD.

This is how I came late to the party known as Mad Men. I had been hearing about this show for years and, for various reasons, never watched the darn thing. I don't even know what my excuse was. The show had won awards and everyone it he world, save for myself, had been watching it. Maybe there were other shows on at the same time or there was something about the show being about advertising guys who were chauvinist pigs just seemed to turn me off. Then, I borrowed the season one DVD set from my girlfriend, who is an absolute fan.

It is an amazing thing when you fall in love. Things that you might not have considered, you suddenly consider again. Things you might not have watched, when they are things your significant other loves, you consider watching again. She had raved about Mad Men so much that I decided I finally had to see what the whole buzz was about.

Thanks to the miracle of DVDs I was able to watch all of season one in the span of a week. That is an amazing thing. While people who watched that show on AMC had to watch with commercials and then wait from week to week to see what would happen next, I was able to just click over to the next show. I had no commercials. What I had was total immersion in to the world of Mad Men.

Well, I am proud to say that all of the buzz and all of the awards and praise was right on the money. If you have not seen this show yet, you need to download the seasons or buy the DVDs and check it out. I know there are a few of you out there and I am speaking right to you. This show manages to get everything, and I mean everything, spot on. It's like opening a portal in time and taking a peek back at life in America in 1960, when so much was still old-fashion and so much was on the verge of changing forever.

We see this world through the eyes of men who create ads and sell products for a living. It is a cut-throat world where men are constantly harassing their female colleagues and basically acting as if men really are the superior sex. It is a world where everyone, and I mean everyone, smokes cigarettes. It is just a foregone conclusion that all adult men and women will have a Zippo ligther and a pack of cigarettes on them. Even though the world is starting to discover that cigarettes can kill, it is believed that no one will care. People just love to smoke and they will do so even if it kills them.

This is a world where everyone drinks during the day. Every office of every executive has booze sitting on some table somewhere. When something good happens, the men gather in an office and have a drink. When something bad happens, the man it happened to goes to his office alone and has a drink. Along the way, they are likely to call their secretary "sweetheart" or something that would be equally offensive today.

In the center of this craziness is Don Draper, played by Jon Hamm. He is a man with a very tortured, very secretive past. His past is such a secret that even his wife doesn't know where he came from. He has a perfect wife with perfect blond hair who seems to just want to raise his two kids, smoke her cigarettes, and prepare dinner for him when he gets home. Of course, this is also a world where it seems a given thing that all men with any money or any power have affairs. Literally every executive at the ad firm is sleeping around.

The show manages to get everything right. There is not a piece of furniture that does not look like it came right out of 1960. The writing is outstanding, using phrases, words and sentence structure like you were likely to hear in 1960. In the process they have created fully realized, three dimensional characters that may be woefully flawed but you cannot help but care about. Don Draper may be scum when it comes to his wife, but he honestly seems to care for his family and, most importantly, his children.

Thankfully, I have been able to finally get into the buzz that surrounds this show. The DVD set of season one comes loaded with commentaries and extras. However, none of them are as good as the show itself. When the season ends you cannot help but want to know what comes next. Fortunately, thanks to the miraculous and modern times we live in, I will be able to watch season two before season four ends.