TVSquad

The late, great comedian Bill Hicks had a certain recommendation for ad men. It went a little something like this, "By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing, kill yourself...there's no rationalization for what you do...you are Satan's spawn filling the world with bile and garbage. You are f@cked, and you are f@cking us. Kill yourself. It's the only way to save your f@cking soul. Kill yourself...quit putting a goddamn dollar sign on every f@cking thing on this planet."

Mad Men, set to debut next Thursday, July 19th at 10PM on AMC, takes a look at Satan's spawn circa 1960 in the big, bold Manhattan of Billy Wilder's The Apartment and Doris Day's thinly-veiled single gal sexcapades. The production's period details are remarkable - from the cut of the suits to the shape of what was considered a sexually desirable woman's body. The sheer gloss of the production is probably enough to draw viewers in, but the real pleasure of Mad Men is in the depiction of the era's social mores.

By 1960, the seeds of social unrest that would manifest themselves so fully in the late 60s and early 70s had already been planted. Ginsburg published Howl in 1957 reminding us that he had seen the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness. In 1961 Kennedy took office, and Camelot would be imagined. In 1963 the March of Washington would solidify Dr. Martin Luther King's place in American iconography, and the women's movement would reach another milestone with the publication of The Feminine Mystique.

In academic circles, existentialism was in vogue, and by the end of the decade, the concept of postmodernism would rear its head in publication thanks to our French friends like Jean-Francois Lyotard. Why bring up all this fancy pants theory when talking about Mad Men? Because, after the era depicted on the show, the Truth with a capital "T" would no longer exist. The "truth" would become whatever you could convince the greatest number of people to believe. No one - not artists, not intellectuals - no one knew this better than ad men, and no one had fewer scruples about exploiting the fact that the so-called "truth" about any given product, whether it be an automobile or a politician, really didn't matter so long as someone was buying.

While we don't like to give away much of the episode plot in these "Early Look" pieces, I will say that there are two marvelous scenes in the pilot which deal with the idea of truth and manipulation explicitly. One involves the main character Don Draper, creative director of the Sterling Cooper Advertising Agency, meeting with a trio of Lucky Strike executives following the publication of reports that lend scientific credence to the claim that cigarettes cause, you know, cancer. You can imagine the severely twisted logic at work in the minds of our ad men in that meeting. The second scene involves a meeting between Draper and Rachel Menken, a potential client. His version of "charming" her involves a deeply cynical speech about how concepts like "love" have all been created to sell her things and nothing more. I'll save her reaction for your own viewing pleasure, but needless to say, the ideas being bandied about in Mad Men are rich and the performers and writers are more than up to the task of articulating them.

Matt Weiner, the show's creator and executive producer, has given us an exceedingly glamorous world full of smart-talking, complicated characters, and thankfully, he doesn't let us off the hook morally-speaking. It's an effective push-pull. On the one hand, what a ridiculously sexy world. The clothes, the cocktails, the smoke that hangs in the air ever so cinematically. But, it's a cheap seduction just like an advertisement - a tease for something you may want, but don't really need. Right when we're about to be lulled into a state of complacency over the shiny, shiny surfaces of mid-century Manhattan, Weiner reminds us both of the hypocrisy of those in power in this casually misogynistic and racist era and the fact that we are, to some extent, complicit in the games advertising plays. Advertising flatters us. As one of the characters says, all we really want to know is that whatever we're doing is okay. "You are okay."

If the pilot episode is any indication, the show is best when it tackles these issues in small strokes - combining period detail with a word or gesture. A doctor who keeps a lit cigarette in his mouth as he conducts the new girl in the steno pool's gynecological exam. Male camaraderie turned ugly with a menacingly whispered come-on to a pretty girl.

The show falters when it becomes heavy-handed emotionally or politically. Fortunately, those missteps are few in number and overshadowed by the pleasures of the show, and once we, as an audience, are able to make emotional investments in these characters over the course of a few episodes, Mad Men should become yet another reason to be watching television this summer or any time of year.