Everyone, I have found a new TV love and it is called Mad Men. When I saw the ads on AMC I thought it looked intriguing, but I also thought “it’s on AMC, that’s not promising.” But I decided to check it out.

It’s about the gross, entitled lives of ad executives in the 1950s 1960; it’s kind of like Far From Heaven, but less consciously borrowing from Sirk and more about men. It’s this kind of anti-nostalgia thing that I have been thinking about a bit lately; it’s like “You call those the good old days?! We’ll show you good old days!” Women get sexually harassed, everyone’s kind of anti-Semitic (they find a Jewish guy from the mailroom to trot out for a Jewish potential client, to make her feel comfortable), everyone drinks all the time, and the only black people you see are in the service industry. But, you know, it’s also about how tobacco companies want to circumvent the evidence that cigarettes kill people (hey, wait, that still happens) or how doctors are paternalistic and won’t just give women contraception (hey, wait). Anyway, it is also gorgeously shot and styled. I love that, the push-pull: the show is super-caustic about all the crappy things that went on at the time, but it makes the whole thing look so attractive.

Anyway, good TV.