SUBLIME STUFF: Prime must be chuffed to have snapped Mad Men from the competition.
You could tell from the opening moments of Prime’s new series Mad Men that it was going to take risks.
How many years post 9/11 did it have to be before someone had an opening sequence in which someone falls in slow motion down the side of a skyscraper?
Within minutes we’d also had racism, sexism and homophobia, and, as it turned out, adultery, all filmed through a haze of cigarette smoke.
Mad men, we read as the episode opens, was a term coined in the late 1950s to describe the advertising executives of Madison Avenue. Pause. They coined it.
The stunningly promising first episode - at last, something to look forward to each week - took us straight into what has possibly been the most invidious (and ongoing) ad campaign of all time: the selling of cigarettes.
By the late 50s, Readers Digest (a magazine which, interestingly, has since become synonymous with lowbrow) had begun its campaign to inform the world of the dangers to health that smoking imposed.
At the centre of the drama is ad man Don Draper. You know he’s got a mistress, because as they share a post-coital cigarette she reminds him that she doesn’t do breakfast.
You know he’s worrying about his latest ad campaign for Lucky Strike, because he tells her he is. You know that the Readers Digest campaign has kicked in because they mention it.
You know that she (Midge) feels a lot better about smoking since the pro-smoking lobby has enlisted the support of some smoking doctors, because she tells Draper that. They certainly get in a lot more informative stuff post-coitus than would usually be the case, but hey, who said television has to be real?
It’s the late 50s and you also know that Draper has been a war hero because he reaches into a drawer in his office and looks somewhat longingly at what I assume is a purple heart.
Paul, the least appealing character in episode one - and it’s clear we’re meant to feel like this about him - also refers to Draper’s war record by telling him he’d follow him into combat. What he’s really saying is that he’d climb over Draper’s bleeding body if he could get to the top and Draper knows it.
What a creep Paul is, about to marry a rich man’s daughter, groping women on his stag night, and off to bed with secretary Peggy by the end of the episode.
I loved the way we were taken straight to the heart of the advertising industry, going with Draper into a meeting with the owners of Lucky Strike, his head empty of any idea he can possibly come up with to make cigarettes palatable.
He’s been told by a psychologist from Vienna that Freud believes human beings have a death wish, so why not use that in his campaign?
He dismisses this, instead choosing one word from the process of tobacco growing - toasted - to differentiate that brand of cigarettes from the other five on the market. “But all tobacco’s toasted,” says the cigarette maker.
“No,” says Draper. “All other tobacco is poisonous. Yours is toasted.”
Jon Hamm, who plays Draper, has got the Cary Grant good looks that perfectly suit the era.
Another major character - the prim-looking new secretary Peggy Olsen, clearly foolhardy, otherwise she’d never have ended the episode on her way to bed with Paul - has the disconcertingly short fringe that hairdressers of that era favoured.
She’s interestingly odd looking, and her character is intriguing too. It’s not clear yet where we’re meant to stand when it comes to Peggy. She’ll do anything to get ahead - including going on the pill.
There’s a memorable scene in which the doctor both applauds her for being modern and also reminds her that “easy women don’t find husbands”.
He’s a charmer himself, smoking throughout the consultation, and chuckling as she passes on information that her new colleague - who has recommended the doctor to Peggy - has pretty questionable morals.
Peggy’s also the opportunity for a combined technology-sexism joke - when shown her new electric typewriter she’s told by the woman showing her around not to be overwhelmed by technology - the typewriter “looks complicated but they designed it simple enough for a woman to use it”.
The first episode had to work at establishing the time and place and it teetered on the edge of going too far.
Draper’s boss, delighted when at the eleventh hour Draper gets his idea for Lucky Strike’s new campaign, suggests that Draper should move on to working at selling a presidential candidate - “Young, handsome, a navy hero; shouldn’t be too difficult to convince the American people that Dick Nixon is a winner.”
Only teetered, mind you. This is great television, brimming with quotable lines, exquisitely filmed and with all actors playing their parts with the subtlest hint of mockery - if it were even a fraction more mocking, the viewer would be right to feel that this was simply saying, “Look at how we were back then, when we didn’t know any better.”
It’s much more than this. It seems - at this early stage, anyway - that this drama (written, by the way, by Matthew Weiner, who was both a producer and writer on The Sopranos) is interestingly complex.
It already has much to say about those who are paid a lot of money to make us want many of the things that are wants and not needs, and indeed might kill us.
What makes it more than just a look at rampant cynicism is the character of Draper himself, who we see, in the closing scene, having just admitted that he doesn’t believe in love because it’s just something invented by ad men - experiencing just that emotion as he strokes the heads of his sleeping children - great stuff.
Prime must be very chuffed to have snapped it up.
*Mad Men, Sunday, 8.40pm.
*What did you think of Mad Men? Post your comments below.
