Mad Men

Zoe and I have watched the first 3 seasons of Mad Men via iTunes, and have been thoroughly smitten by its excellence. We’re quite excited for the season 4 premier at the end of this month. I just read a fantastic (p)review of the series on Salon (“‘Mad Men’: Stillbirth of the American Dream“) by Heather Havrilesky, which I think quite accurately describes how the show embodies so much of the pathology of trying to live the American Dream:

This is the genius of “Mad Men,” its dramatic reenactment of the disconnect between the dream of dashing heroes and their beautiful wives, living in style among adorable, adoring children, and the much messier reality of struggling to play a predetermined role without an organic relationship to your surroundings or to yourself. We’re drawn to “Mad Men” week after week because each and every episode asks us, What’s missing from this pretty picture? … As absurd as it seems to cobble together a dream around a handful of consumer goods, that’s precisely what the advertising industry did so effectively in the ’50s and ’60s, until we couldn’t distinguish our own desires from the desires ascribed to us by professional manipulators, suggesting antidotes for every real or imagined malady, supplying escapist fantasies to circumvent the supposedly unbearable tedium of ordinary life. In show creator Matthew Weiner’s telling, the birth of the advertising age coincides directly with the birth of our discontent as a nation — and what got lost in the hustle was our souls.