New "Mad Men" TV Show Uses the Past to Reveal Racism and Sexism of Today

Matt Weiner describes his new show, Mad Men (Thursdays on AMC), as "science fiction" -- but in the past. What he means is that, just as science fiction often uses a future world to say things about the present you can't say directly (it's both figuratively and literally ahead of its time), his show uses the overtly sexist and racist atmosphere of a 1960 New York advertising office to talk about issues that persist today but that we are too "polite" (to use the words of Alan Taylor, one of the show's directors) to talk about openly.

To say this strategy is brilliant is an understatement. As you watch the show, you feel like you are peeking under someone's bed, into their medicine cabinets and their closets ... and through their dirty laundry, for good measure. You can't believe that he or she wants you to be seeing all this stuff -- but there they are, flouting it loudly and unabashedly in front of your face.

As the viewer, you sense that the people you are observing are larger than life -- their world is a microcosm of America. But you also understand instinctually that it's not America of some hazy past but the America you live in.

This use of an allegorical past is not completely new. Most famously Arthur Miller employed it in The Crucible, in which he used the Salem witch trials to talk about the McCarthy Era. And as I've mentioned before, David Milch has used it in Deadwood to expose the continuing "treachery" of American capitalism.

But for Miller, Milch and others, the trick was showing that the past was just as bad as the present -- giving historical context to a contemporary nightmare. In Mad Men, Weiner is doing somewhat of the opposite -- revealing that the present is just as bad as the past. Unlike the McCarthy Era, we live in a time of innocence, believing we have overcome much of the sexism and racism in which the characters in Mad Men revel.

The advertising world is the perfect setting for Weiner to make the connections between the present and the past. The postmodern world -- in which image is everything and "reality" is tough to see through all the social construction -- is very much the product of American marketers in the latter half of the 20th century.

In a revealing scene during episode 2, advertising executive and reticent war hero Don Draper (played by Joe Hamm) tells Rachel Menken (Maggie Siff) over cocktails: "You’re born alone, and you die alone, and this world just drops a bunch of rules on top of you to make you forget those facts. But I never forget."

Menken asks if he's ever been in love.

"What you call love," says Draper, "was invented by guys like me to sell nylons."

The show has been getting a lot of press for its style rather than its substance. In some ways, that perspective is self-imposed since they thrown themed parties for critics on both sides of the country to promote the show.

But don't let the smoking, martinis, suits, scarves or pomade fool you. Look at the way the characters interact -- within and between gender and races -- and see how, underneath the superficial differences, their internal and external conflicts speak to very contemporary tensions.

The show is not without flaws. Through the first three episodes, the characters themselves are underdeveloped. At times they feel more like cogs in the narrative machine than fully realized, complex human beings. And at least according to Adam Hanft over at Slate, the show is simply perpetuating the stereotype of the advertising business as full of "hard-drinking, womanizing, amoral slime buckets."

But considering the scope of its allegorical ambitions and sheer joy of watching such large canvas come together each week, I can live with these flaws for quite awhile.

In fact, you can divide up the reviewers of the show between those who "get" the allegory and those who don't.