This week­end, Sarah and I tucked into the first sea­son of the AMC series Mad Men.  The con­cept of the show is in essence a look at the lives of Madison Avenue adver­tis­ing exec­u­tives, their office staff, and their fam­i­lies.  Oh, and their mis­tresses.  Infidelity is the fuel that ran Madison Avenue, appar­ently.  The show begins in 1960—one the back­ground plots is the elec­tion of Kennedy vs. Nixon and the focal agency has to work for Nixon (with­out being paid).  In the first episode, the audi­ence wit­nesses enough social injus­tice in the form of sex­ism and racism to erase all ide­al­is­tic notions of the time period.  It almost crosses the line into par­ody ter­ri­tory, and per­haps for some it will.  I found myself rolling my eyes by the end of the first episode.  As the sea­son goes on, they tone this down a lit­tle bit (while crank­ing up the existentialism).

Much of the show’s appeal is the self-righteous indig­na­tion I feel when I see African Americans being treated like 3rd class cit­i­zens, chil­dren being slapped around by the neigh­bors, or women being com­manded by their hus­bands like ser­vants.   I sus­pect self-righteous indig­na­tion for the lib­eral may be in short sup­ply with our side tak­ing over things for a few years.  I rec­om­mend pick­ing up the DVD to every­one look­ing to keep the flames indig­na­tion burn­ing so as to not real­ize that your anger is all that makes you feel alive and fill the hole inside your soul!  It’s work­ing great for me so far.

Beneath the obvi­ous “oh my god, they were SO prim­i­tive and evil” aspect of the show, I sym­pa­thize with the exis­ten­tial dread that much of the cast feels.   No one is happy, despite hav­ing it all and liv­ing the American Dream.  The cen­tral the­sis of this show at least early on is that the American Dream is hol­low and mean­ing­less and has noth­ing to do with our true happiness.

I didn’t really have any inter­est in the show until I saw it par­o­died on Saturday Night Live in some of the bet­ter sketches they’ve done in the past few years.  Despite never hav­ing seen the show, and even through the layer of par­ody, I was intrigued by the premise of the show.  For me, it’s the best thing to come out of Saturday Night Live in years.

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