Mad About You...you, sexist, anti-semites

Ain't It Cool News reports:

The Critics Are Mad for AMC's MAD MEN

"It’s an 13-episode AMC hourlong, from writer-producer Matthew Weiner (“The Sopranos”), about sexist, anti-Semite ad men in 1960 Manhattan trying to market, among other things, Lucky Strikes cigarettes. It stars Jon Hamm (“Providence”), Elisabeth Moss (“The West Wing”), Vincent Kartheiser (“Angel”), Christina Hendricks (“Firefly”), January Jones (“We Are Marshall”) and John Slattery (“Ed”)."

And goes on to list a multitude of reviews from newspapers and TV critics around the country.

It's set in a Madison Avenue agency (thus the title "Mad Men") amongst the glamour of hepcats, where "men were men and women were skirts."

It's stuff like this that makes me wonder how much the ad industry has really changed since then. We like to watch old-fashioned movies with men wearing crisp suits and women wearing floppy bows and pencil skirts, and laugh at the Day-Hudson camp fun, but at the end of the day, we have yet to know if everything portrayed as "backwards" then is better today. Why are we so nostalgic for days when doctors recommended two-packs of cigs a day and minorities nodded and tap-danced for us all, while facing racism the second they got off stage?

"But we have laws, and rules, regulations and lawsuits to fight that now! That was forty years ago." Sure, sure, in the public, but what happens inside glass buildings might not always be so surely fought.

In any case, I'm ready to give this show a chance, if only for Jon Hamm.

MAD MEN premieres tonight, Thursday 19th, at 7pm and again at 8pm on AMC, PST.