Television: Boys Behaving Badly

MAD MEN, the critically lauded new series on AMC that not long ago wrapped up its debut season, takes place in the boozy, smoke-filled haze of a fictional top-tier advertising firm in Manhattan circa 1960. It’s a world where advertising is a business, sure, but also a boys’club, where handsome men earn even more handsome salaries and are served by wives at home and a pool of willing secretaries at work. They drink, they smoke, they carouse, they crack wise and openly engage in racism, anti-Semitism, and blatantly sexist talk—and that’s just while they’re on the clock. The show covers the entire catalog of business-class hedonism in pre-sexual-revolution Manhattan, painting the island-or at least the Upper East Side-as a playground for the WASPy and wealthy. As one of the junior executives’ fathers says, “I’m telling you boys, you’ve got it made. Martini lunches. Gorgeous women parading through the office. In my next life, I’m coming back as an ad man.”

Yet if the series is any guide, the ad man’s life is no delight. Despite the constant revelry on display, the show maintains an air of concerned detachment, and nearly every character sports a mood of perpetual anxiety or frustration. Even when the gang of Madison Avenue suits is standing around with drinks in their hands, grinning and barking out epithets and coarse jokes, the frivolity is just a front masking a sea of inner turmoil. They seem to behave as they do merely because it goes with the job and the times: It’s a requirement, not a pastime. When two of the executives share a midday drink in the office, one of them laments that, in decades past, ad men used to drink for pleasure. But now, he dourly muses, “We drink because that’s what men do.”

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About the Author

Peter Suderman

Peter Suderman is an associate editor of Reason.

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MAD MEN, the critically lauded new series on AMC that not long ago wrapped up its debut season, takes place in the boozy, smoke-filled haze of a fictional top-tier advertising firm in Manhattan circa 1960. It’s a world where advertising is a business, sure, but also a boys’club, where handsome men earn even more handsome salaries and are served by wives at home and a pool of willing secretaries at work. They drink, they smoke, they carouse, they crack wise and openly engage in racism, anti-Semitism, and blatantly sexist talk—and that’s just while they’re on the clock. The show covers the entire catalog of business-class hedonism in pre-sexual-revolution Manhattan, painting the island-or at least the Upper East Side-as a playground for the WASPy and wealthy. As one of the junior executives’ fathers says, “I’m telling you boys, you’ve got it made. Martini lunches. Gorgeous women parading through the office. In my next life, I’m coming back as an ad man.”

Yet if the series is any guide, the ad man’s life is no delight. Despite the constant revelry on display, the show maintains an air of concerned detachment, and nearly every character sports a mood of perpetual anxiety or frustration. Even when the gang of Madison Avenue suits is standing around with drinks in their hands, grinning and barking out epithets and coarse jokes, the frivolity is just a front masking a sea of inner turmoil. They seem to behave as they do merely because it goes with the job and the times: It’s a requirement, not a pastime. When two of the executives share a midday drink in the office, one of them laments that, in decades past, ad men used to drink for pleasure. But now, he dourly muses, “We drink because that’s what men do.”