The television show Mad Men won six Emmy Awards this past weekend, including Best Drama Series, making it the first original series on a non-premium cable network to win that award. Much of the fan interest in the series comes from the lavish attention to period detail in the set and costume designs of the show, which takes place in New York in the early 1960s. My traditional theory of nostalgia — basically that 20 years is the standard threshold for nostalgia fads — has been dinged a bit by the fact that pop culture’s craze for recombination already chewed through the 1980s, and so there’s isn’t much about the eartly 1990s to be all that nostalgic about. So the threshold has had to double-down and take us all the way back to 40 years ago to find anything interesting and unfamiliar enough to the young demographic that drives nostalgia. Skinny lapels, squared-off pocket handkerchief and Brylcremed hair for the men, beehive hair, tight sweater sets, and pillbox hats for the women haven’t been seen in public since I were a wee lad, so there you have it.
Not long ago, I came across this piece written by a fellow who was himself a 1960′s-era ad man on Madison Avenue. He says they’ve done a pretty good job with getting the details right, but they’ve slipped up on a few tiny-but-telling details that anyone old enough to have been there would pick out immediately: IBM Selectric typewriters weren’t on the market in 1960, booze at lunch was okay but booze in the office was a no-no, and so on.
I haven’t seen the show yet, even though it is now well into the middle of the second season. Through the Magic of the Internet, I have the entire first season downloaded, waiting for some weekend when I want to veg out to TV. Season Two keeps showing up one episode at a time as it airs, but I won’t even start downloading it until I’ve seen the first lot.
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