Mad Men: Ben's Take

Maggie was disgusted by the first episode of Mad Men, and I fully agree it will turn your stomach. I thought it was great.

What I think the writers were trying to do is to depict 1960 in such as way as to make it as shockingly alien as possible. To make it seem like a different universe. The sexism in the first episode was indeed over-the-top, but I don't think the show or the writers are sexist -- the viewer is encouraged to be appalled. When it's so bold as to show one secretary telling another, "Men made this typewriter so simple that even a woman can use it!," you gasp.

But you also gasp when the children, playing spaceman, are allowed to run around with plastic bags over their heads. And you gasp when the same children bounce around in the car with no thought given to seat-belt usage.

You gasp over the way the characters talk about race. You gasp when the doctor sparks up a cigarette while examining the patient (you gasp at how everyone, everywhere smokes). You're amazed by how the neighborhood divorcee is treated like an exotic bird (so rare to see someone divorced!) and that the closeted-but-flaming homosexual can keep his secret intact simply by making an occasional lascivious comment about a woman.

You gasp because you feel sure that that's how it probably was back then.

We're accustomed to period pieces doing nothing more than putting costumes on modern-type characters with modern-type values -- it's refreshing when a show goes to such lengths to re-create reality, warts and all. If nothing else, it's a good reminder of how far, how fast, we've come.

And that's all in the first and second episodes. Having established the alienness early, the subsequent episodes are less appalling.