Mad Men

A haze of cigarette smoke clouds the office. The sideboard is stocked with liquor and glasses. This is where the advertising men who inhabit Mad Men spend their days, smoking, drinking, making rude comments about the “girls” who type their copy and arrange the schedules that dissolve into two-martini lunches. This is where they do their work, where they set about manufacturing desire for products and presidents. This shrewd account of American culture sliding into the 1960s, holding by fingernails onto the attitudes of the post-WWII 1950s, is as sharp as the creases in the two button suits, as precise as a narrow-knotted necktie, as wry as the rye on the bar. It also reminds us of the sexism at home in the suburbs, of life as constricting as the corsets and the pearl chokers. Happiness seems elusive no matter the level of affluence or how frantic the party. But we care about these people and their problems. Some of us remember them. Some of us are them. For taking us back and showing us the source of so much of what is still a part of our world, Mad Men receives a Peabody Award.