On the main page of CULTURE 11, Michael Brendan Dougherty has written an incisive if obvious criticism of the excellent TV show MAD MEN: It’s not a nostalgic or even balanced look at the greatness and misery of the white and prosperous urban American early Sixties. It’s a politically correct, bourgeois bohemian exaggeration of the characteristic vices of that time, with no redeeming virtues. Even THE SOPRANOS showed more affection for its murderous characters. For me, the show is still entertaining and instructive, because the vices are portrayed accurately in terms of detail, even if somewhat misleadingly in terms of frequency. Despite the smug sense of chronological superiority of its writers, the show still suggests that people in those days had more class (in dress, for instance) and probably had a a lot more real fun than we do. The smart lead characters actually seem less conformist, more self-reliant and manly (including the women), and more deep than similar types would today. They’re also somewhat more self-destructive, but that might be better than becoming superstitious fanatics about health and safety, as our bobos have. Imagine a world without jogging and hardly any health clubs, and where people only exercised for fun ! MAD MEN’s lead characters are a lot less like caricatures than most people—fictional and real— on TV these days.
