Mad Men Season Six: Welcome Back!

Vanessa Kensington: Mr. Powers, my job is to acclimatize you to the nineties. You know, a lot's changed since 1967.

Austin Powers: No doubt, love, but as long as people are still having promiscuous sex with many anonymous partners without protection while at the same time experimenting with mind-expanding drugs in a consequence-free environment, I'll be sound as a pound!

--Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery

International man of mystery, that's pretty much me. No one knows much about me, and several trips abroad have cemented my "international" status. I'm no Adam Livingston, of course, but neither have I run through an airport screaming like that the state security police were after me, like Miss Schizophrenia 2013.

Tonight's the long-anticipated return of Mad Men, AMC's celebrated series, set in the 1960s, about an advertising agency and its employees' various neuroses and travails. Questions about the season's direction are burning up the internet. Will Don stray from new wife Megan? Will Roger stop tripping long enough to get his life back together? And do we really have to see the cast decked out in Herb Tarlek-style polyester suits?

As a warmup, be sure to check out 33 Moments from Last Year's Season Finale, as a refresher before the season opener.

Like most things, I came late to the Mad Men party. It takes me awhile to come around on anything popular. A couple of years ago I finally decided the Foo Fighters were great; now they've stopped working together. Ten years from now I'm sure I'll start liking Breaking Bad (having to read how "amazing" something is in nearly every publication and internet site oddly makes me less likely to follow something; its like the old Yogi Berra quote, "no one goes there anymore, its too crowded"). I usually make the right call though. Entourage, for example, will never foul my television set. So a piece extolling Mad Men is about five years late. My bad.

I can't exactly remember why, but I started watching Mad Men around the middle of last season. I had seen the infamous Zou Bisou number that started the season, and it must have grown on me. This business of "how things were," and in some ways still are, intrigued me. So I bought all the back season DVDs and have watched the entire series (blu-ray actually). Netflix is for non-equals; buying the series is far more Baller.

For those few of you who either haven't seen it or don't know what I'm talking about, Mad Men is a wildly popular show that has in past years swept the Emmy Awards, focusing on advertising agency employees and their families, and their attempts to adjust to the 1960s' breakneck social change. In many ways, we find their world abhorrent. Yet, in other ways, the show depicts a simpler lifestyle offering clearer choices and often greater advantages. The primary character, Don Draper, is a hard charging, hard drinking, hard living ad executive who finds that business success and a picture perfect family don't necessarily bring happiness. The other characters engage in the usual office-environment machinations, competing for status through honorable and dishonorable means. The show follows the characters both in business and personal story lines as they play by 1960s rules. The times affect but don't define the characters. We see how the men and women interact at work, how husbands and wives approach marriage and family, and how people cope with the turbulent 1960s. You've met most of these people already; now imagine if they lived within the constraints (and opportunities) of the 1960s.

The show moves consistently forward in time; one season equals roughly one year in show time. We're now in 1968. Which means polyester suits and Priscilla Presley hair and makeup styles soon will blight the landscape. Oh boy. Please do not talk to me about long sideburns or the "dry look." Those poor bastards will have to endure The Mod Squad too. Solid. But they'll get the Amazin' Mets of 1969 to make up for it. And Mister Rogers Neighborhood, which also started in 1968.

I haven't read any of the numerous stories and columns basically doing what I'm doing here, pontificating on Mad Men's message tells us about our own world. But, five years in, I wanted to write about that because its deeply indicative of our current society's struggle to adjust to turbulent and unsettling change at a rapid speed. As happens during turbulent times, Americans, who normally look to the future, (Don Draper once said he lives his life moving forward), will look to the past with a sense of nostalgia and escapism. We have 70s "stagflation" and "malaise" to thank for Happy Days, for example. Aaaaayyyyyy!! Historical dramas like Mad Men or Downton Abbey fulfill that need today.

Some watch to see the breathtaking sets and costumes, which capture the 1960s look with eerie precision. The recreated Howard Johnson's from last season was spot on, for example.

Some no doubt watch just for the surface drama, and compelling characters like Don Draper, the guy you love to hate. No cartoonish J.R. Ewing is he, though, but an incredibly deep and complex character with many "good" and "bad" characteristics that conflict on an every day basis.

Draper "suffers" from many personality traits that our modern world, ever so dripping with sophistication, has deemed unacceptable. His demand of professional excellence in himself and others serve him well in the 1960s, but would make him not a "team player" in today's "accept mediocrity as long as we're all equal and sensitive to one another" world. Issuing instructions unlaced with fawning and praise would offend modern workplace sensibilities. Placing work first would (and does) prevent him from enjoying family and encouraging "normal" growth.

Basically, my dad, like others of his generation, was Don Draper with less swagger. And without the affairs and daily booze and cigarette regimen. He wasn't home much, basically because he was too busy working to keep a roof over our heads and pay for various lessons and other kid crap. But this enabled Mom to stay home, something regarded now as more of an exception than rule. He didn't convene workplace group therapy sessions to decide how to allocate the day's tasks. Nor did he agonize over whether his co-workers were maximizing their professional development. Do your work, or he'd get someone who would. Or as Draper once put it when an employee complained that he never thanked her for anything, he reminded her that she received a salary and "that's what the money is for!" Today, Don Draper would flunk every management course and probably receive counseling on workplace harassment.

No, Mad Men's most compelling function is to compare our modern American society with another real time in American history not unlike our own, also going through rapid change, to ask whether we're really better off now than then. Or whether we were better off then than now. Were Mad Men set in today's time, no one would watch. Don Draper picking up his kids at day care and meeting colleagues for after work coffee? Asking women what THEY think. Bo-ring.

I shall now tell you about 21st Century America, so prepare for the knowledge drop. Rapid, accelerating change, primarily owing to the computer, continues unabated. Was "googling" even a word 10 years ago? Most of us daily hold in our hands a device giving us access to the entirety of human knowledge (and yet we use it to troll ex-girlfriends or flame on other teams' fans). Major change has overtaken nearly all aspects of our lives, such as transportation, shopping, education, entertainment, working and employment, medical care, and investing, to offer only a few examples. Keeping up with all these developments so as not to become obsolete represents a full time calling.

The swinging '60s were not unlike today's times. Though they encompassed even greater change, as society itself was going through an upheaval as the Baby Boomers challenged a wide range of social conventions. One year in reality in the 1960s seemed like three.  The Space Age spawned a technological wave (think transistors, xerox machines, TANG, the pill...), and the economy was booming as American manufacturing jobs had yet to migrate abroad.  The creative arts reflected the change in a mini-Renaissance America. The early to mid-1960s saw groundbreaking theatre (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Hair, How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying), film (To Kill A Mockingbird, Dr. Strangelove, Psycho, Bonnie and Clyde, Cool Hand Luke), music (Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones), art (Peter Max, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Mark Rothko), and literature (Mailer, Capote, Kesey, Vonnegut). Minorities and women began to press for legal and social equality. The younger generation (a/k/a "dirty, ungrateful hippies") drove the change, and anyone over 30 suddenly seemed very old indeed, grasping to remain "current." Sound familiar?  It was as if though the Eisenhower-era shackles had come off and life suddenly became more free. All this change occurred light-speed as "questioning" happened all around. Think of the difference between the Ed Sullivan Show Beatles and the Let It Be Beatles. Those were two different worlds, separated by only six years. Imagine trying to cope with that much change that fast. Or, as Roger Sterling pensively put it in an episode set in early 1966, "When is everything going to go back to normal?"  

So in seeing how the changing "rules" of the 1960s set the parameters by which people lived their lives, we see what kind of alternative reality Americans confronted as little as 50 years ago, and how they coped with such change. In so doing, the show portrays not only "how far we've come," but also explores what we've sacrificed as the price of progress.

Typical of the 1960s, men run the Sterling Cooper ad agency treats and women mostly serve in menial, servile roles. At work and at home, they are pampered, both treated with respect and dismissiveness, held at bay when serious matters arise. Don's (first) wife Betty, a former model, gave up her career to raise children, as did most women of that and previous eras. The show sees her conflict at giving up that life and her joy of raising children while also despairing of a life spent pursuing her own interests. Peggy, however, a former secretary who becomes an important copy writer, provides a contrast. In her, we see the beginnings of "women's liberation" as she takes a job previously occupied by men. And like the "superwoman" stereotype, we see her struggle to reconcile her burgeoning professional career and newfound intellectual respect with her desire for a family and a relationship. Women, huh? Not that this leaves the men untouched. The "times" also demanded that in exchange for economic primacy, society expected men to marry and support a woman and a family. Divorce laws made it difficult and costly to leave a marriage, acknowledging that women enjoyed few economic opportunities and depended on husbands. Hence, we see the agency's women keen to find husbands or men otherwise willing to support them, and men reluctant to divorce wives who no longer interested them. Work became less a calling than an obligation that a man must shoulder to support his family.  

Minorities and "others," such as Jews, received even less notice. They appear on the show in stereotypical positions, such as elevator operators, or rich store owners. Yet as show time progresses, the firm can no longer ignore the civil rights movement and slowly adapts to the evolving '60s and '70s white male cessation of absolute economic preeminence. The firm basically becomes forced to hire its first "negro" due to a prank on another firm that backfired. Though she is a secretary, she, much like "Lt. Uhura" on Star Trek or Diahann Carroll on Julia in television, represents a beachhead that everyone must learn to accept.  

On a range of other subjects, like health (everyone smokes and drinks on the show, 1964 Surgeon General's warning or pregnancy be damned), workplace manners (addressing people as "Mr." or "Mrs." or "Miss" and standing as women enter or leave a room, or wearing a suit and tie every day), and technology (in a bit the writers surely wrote with tongue firmly in cheek, Don sarcastically asks a secretary in 1960 if some magical device exists that can just copy documents), this question of "have things really improved" comes up again and again. On the health front, people don't smoke and drink at work anymore, but we eat crap every day, often at our desks, to which we seem chained all day. Obesity is at epidemic proportions. Walk through the average American office and its a bunch of Casper the Friendly Ghosts shoved into cubicles like veal, pecking away at keyboards. And it doesn't help that we all go home and watch TV or play video games all night. Office customs are radically different as well. Nowadays, offices resemble a kindergarten class where people know bigger words. Or a zoo. Everyone works on top of everyone else. They dress like they're getting ready to paint their game room or just got back from the stables. You can't tell the difference between the CEO and the just-hired file clerk. They address each other as if everyone has the same job. The file clerk addresses the CEO as "hey Dave, 'sup?" Much the same way parents now want to be their children's friends, supervisors want to be their employees' colleagues or buddies. Conversational topics that would have been regarded as fireable offenses then are an everyday thing in 2013. Michael Scott is no aberration. Little wonder that so many companies find it hard to compete. Sterling Cooper never had Hawaiian Shirt Day. And as mentioned earlier, technology has completely transformed the workplace in ways that hardly bear mention. The result, it takes a whole lot less time to do a whole lot more work, and yet, 2013 workers clearly experience more time pressure than their 1960s counterparts. All these labor and time saving devices have made it possible to jam more work into the same number of hours, and have made clients and customers expect that their suppliers will make themselves available all the time, on a moment's notice. Cell phones and texts and internet access have freed us up from the office. But have made us responsible to be on call all the time, and to render instant service. No waiting three days for a letter to arrive, or to check the overnight telexes.  

And just from a simple lifestyle standpoint, the show depicts how differently, and yet in some ways, how similarly, people lived their lives in the 1960s. Dads worked and supported the family. Moms stayed home. Kids were seen and not heard, turned loose during the day to play in the neighborhood, coming home to eat or watch TV at night. Work was hard, but as long as you were capable you knew there was some job available. Divorce was on the rise but still unusual and stigmatizing. Families didn't take extravagent trips, unless you think driving to Disney World is extravagent. But they did stay together. Even so, as the shows has unfolded, the Sterling Cooper men have betrayed more regret at placing work first, and exhibit more concern for their families. You can practically see the birth of today's helicopter parents. Now, of course, expecting that sort of life seems quaint, and in some circles, is politically offensive. Day care, visitation rights, child support, single moms, "never beens," living with Mom and Dad, DINKs...the traditional nuclear family just isn't what it used to be. You're not trapped in a loveless, soul-poisoning marriage anymore, and you needn't bear the entirety of your family's welfare on your own shoulders. When families do stay together, they often obsess over their children and put them at the center of the family. Softball tournaments, soccer leagues, art lessons, and on and on. But you have to worry about your job. And about gut-wrenching life transformations that rarely occurred in the 1960s.  

Every episode puts these contrasts before us, and begs the question "are we really better off"? You be the judge. As for me, its a mixed bag. A friend this morning joked that I probably think of Mad Men as "How It Should Be." With white men firmly in charge. Maybe. But when white men ran things, they had a nasty habit of dying in their 50s. Of never seeing their kids grow into adults. Of chasing their secretaries around the office and lying to their wives about the perfume on their collars. Of bearing absolute and ultimate economic responsibility for families. And of a life spent without the intelligent and enriching company of women and non-whites. Pretty soon, frat life loses its lustre.  

Enjoy the show tonight!