Sad Men

I must once again take issue with the critical judgment of critics I ordinarily admire. In this instance, Will Wilkinson and Micha Gertner disagree! Fortunately, they are both wrong.

Because it is somewhat stylishly done,occasionally well-designed, and produced with overall aplomb, it is easy to ignore that Mad Men is a period-piece soap opera. Its better production values represent higher budgets and the benefits of a hebdomanal, rather than daily, schedule. It is cursed by the same ridiculous plots, unlikely characters, and preposterous acting as any of Grandma's "stories." Its interrogation of gender relations in the sixties bears the same relationship to real dissection as putting firecrackers in frogs bore to high-school biology. Splat! Similar half-assed evocations of a male-dominated, highly-gendered world abound. Mad Men apes Desperate Housewives, but because it dresses in better drag, it seems less the bimbo, more the talented Female Impersonator. Its central "stolen identity" conceit in the character of Don Draper is a sub-amnesia-episode contrivance, straight out of Edge of Night (thanks again, Grandma IOZ!).

Although I have surely mocked and derided him for some sin of liberalism in the past, I must say that Mr. Mannion gets it exactly right when he calls this coat-hanger abortion of a television program "one of the most relentlessly and deliberately humorless shows in the history of television drama."