Mad Men Revisited

Mad Men Revisited

One of my pleasures in life has always been, and I assume that it will always be my appreciation for reflection.  The art of not only revisiting the past but the ability to analyze, and evaluate how past actions have affected our lives going forward.

Mad Men is a reference to one of my favorite televisions programs.

·       Mad Men is an American television period drama series created and produced by Matthew Weiner. The series premiered on July 19, 2007 on the American cable network AMC and is produced by Lionsgate Television. The seventh and final season will have 14 episodes that will be split into two seven-episode parts, airing in early 2014 and 2015.

·       Mad Men is set in the 1960s, initially at the fictional Sterling Cooper advertising agency on Madison Avenue in New York City, and later at the newly created firm, Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce (later Sterling Cooper & Partners), located nearby in the Time-Life Building, at 1271 Avenue of the Americas. According to the show's pilot, the phrase "mad men" was a slang term coined in the 1950s by advertisers working on Madison Avenue to refer to themselves. The focal point of the series is Don Draper (Jon Hamm), creative director at Sterling Cooper and a founding partner at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, and the people in his life, both in and out of the office. The plot focuses on the business of the agencies as well as the personal lives of the characters, regularly depicting the changing moods and social mores of the United States in the 1960s.

President Kennedy and First Lady at Dallas Airport

The series is developed in chronological order of events as they happened in history, as an example they deal with the Kennedy assassination as it happened, likewise the Nixon Watergate debacle.  The majority of the material on the subject is taken form television clips of actual newscasts of the time.

Many of the commercials they develop in the series are actual commercials that I remember seeing on television back when I was growing up.  The series is well done, unfortunately like all good things these too must come to a conclusion.  There will be 14 more episodes during the coming year (2014), and 2015.  The series will have gone from 2007 to 2015, so if you haven’t had the opportunity to see it, I recommend it.

Viewing this series is like having a dream where you see life as it happened while growing up.  I happen to have the uncanny ability to remember things very similar to the way this series is produced.  I love the accuracy in the way that life in the 1960’s is presented.  The program further represents the progress made in the advertising industry, where content was strictly controlled to where it eventually ran amuck (very little if any controls over content (decency).

This is an opportunity to see how the 1960’s developed from the grownup point of view.  The best is yet to come…