TV review: Man Men BBC4 Sundays 10pm

Mad Men is the latest in the mercurial and relentless production line of big budget US super-dramas. The title, a self-satisfied play on words, sets the tone. The action is set amongst the advertising executives (ad men) inhabiting 1960 New York’s Saville Row of marketing, Madison Avenue (Mad Ave). See what they’ve done? You can almost hear the smugness.

Billed as coming from the makers of the peerless The Sopranos (in fact it’s based on a concept from, and co-written by, one member of the fleet of Sopranos writers), Man Men comes with a big budget, a pedigree writing team, and an interesting idea (set at a time when ‘creative’ advertising was born, sweeping away the old style ‘buy this, it’s really great’ style). The show is slick, stylish, with snappy dialogue, and there’s something ineffably seductive about those simpler, modernist times. The men are smart and masculine (including token closet gay, Italian-American copy-writer Sal and the weasel-ish boor, junior executive Pete Campbell), the women are pretty and feminine (although new fish-out-of-water secretary Peggy seems incongruously plain in a typing pool of pulchritude) and everyone smokes with an air of Cary Grant cool. Even the title sequence is beautifully retro in a Saul Bass revisited with computers fashion.

All things considered then, Mad Men should be great. It’s unfortunate then that with all the careful attention to detail and the backdrop of uncertain times in an assured and dynamic industry, that character and plot should feel so flimsy.

Much of the action revolves around senior executive Don Draper, a man more creative than his boss, more authoritative than his over-excitable staff, and cooler than all of them. The writers have latched on to a lead character, and have done their best to make him brooding, complex and contradictory. He chain smokes his way through meetings (meetings which he regulary saves from the brink of client walk-out); he beds beautiful women before returning to his stereotypically serene suburban life with his beautiful wife and children; but most of all he broods. He stares moodily out of office windows, train windows, car windscreens, and crowded bars. What a lonely, misunderstood man he is. He is a decorated war veteran, he has saved the lives of men, and now he’s making a fortune selling constipation medication to the frustrated American. Plus he is the product of a secret, difficult upbringing (he’s a man; he doesn’t talk about it). In short, Draper is a two-dimensional attempt at a three-dimensional character.

Mad Men frequently relies on two out-moded attitudes prevalent throughout America and big business in the late 1950s (what people think of as the sixties did not start in 1960, as evidenced here): sexism and anti-Semitism. Draper and his idolising colleagues display impressive, often shocking reserves of both of these –isms. Whilst Draper has a complex relationship with women (yes, he sleeps with them like most people treat themselves to that extra chocolate biscuit, but he really loves his wife), his anti-Semitism is casual and brutal. Both he and his boss make at least one comment an episode regarding their mistrust of Jews, which is perhaps both a realistic portrayal and a rather heavy-handed way of pointing out that soon these disliked chosen people will soon be running Mad Ave. An example of this is seen in episode three (shown on Sunday 16 March). There is much fuss about an ad for the new VW Beatle. The marketing world reacts with surprise and heavily-disguised envy at this innovative, minimalistic advertising. The campaign was designed and executed by Jewish creatives at a Jewish agency and our Mad Men dismiss it as naive Jewish nonsense (on top of advertising a German product 15 years after the war). Historically, that car ad would change advertising and its relationship with the people consuming it permanently, forcing agencies to be wittier, smarter, and better informed. Perhaps this is just the plot building up.

Alongside Draper is a cast of fairly shallow support. There are flirtatious secretaries that know how to manipulate the men running the show (though their ambitions end with the hope of marrying one of them); there are school-boyish junior creatives motivated only by success, ego and sex; there’s Draper’s wife Betty showing signs of both suspicion of her husband and of extreme neurosis (she has indulged in a new and shameful phenomena – psychotherapy); and there’s an assortment of clients and wives who, for the most part, just serve to prove that Don Draper is cooler and more complicated than everyone else.

Which is all fairly negative. So, on the positive side, Mad Men is only three episodes in and there is much which might be built on. Most US dramas have immediacy; an opening moment of extreme drama which Mad Men lacks, but is that such a disadvantage? It’s just possible that those two dimensional characters will blossom into interesting studies of humanity, ambition, greed, and frustration (much like The Sopranos). There has been talk of Draper working on the forthcoming Nixon presidential campaign, which could produce something genuinely exciting. Historically, feminism and civil-rights can't be far away, which may add to the tension. The acting isn’t bad; the actors convince the audience that this is 1960 where men are real men and women know their place. The dialogue is strong and genuine, as are many of the set-piece scenes, plus there’s hardly any of the irritating, ironic nods to the knowing, modern audience which are so often a temptation to writers.

In summary, Mad Men may lack the addictive qualities evident in its forebears (from 24 to The Wire; The Sopranos to Lost) but it might just reward the persistent viewer over time. Until then, try not to throw something whenever Draper develops that thousand-yard stare and don’t try to match these guys cigarette for cigarette. And if you do, make it’s that smooth, smooth smoke that REAL men choose and your doctor recommends.