Longtime reader The New York Times Review of Books writes us,
[...] the problem with Mad Men is that it suffers from a hypocrisy of its own. As the camera glides over Joan’s gigantic bust and hourglass hips, as it languorously follows the swirls of cigarette smoke toward the ceiling, as the clinking of ice in the glass of someone’s midday Canadian Club is lovingly enhanced, you can’t help thinking that the creators of this show are indulging in a kind of dramatic having your cake and eating it, too: even as it invites us to be shocked by what it’s showing us (a scene people love to talk about is one in which a hugely pregnant Betty lights up a cigarette in a car), it keeps eroticizing what it’s showing us, too. For a drama (or book, or whatever) to invite an audience to feel superior to a less enlightened era even as it teases the regressive urges behind the behaviors associated with that era strikes me as the worst possible offense that can be committed in a creative work set in the past: it’s simultaneously contemptuous and pandering. Here, it cripples the show’s ability to tell us anything of real substance about the world it depicts.I took the liberty of bolding morally superior language.
Never mind the "world it depicts" nonsense. The Lucy Show depicts the sixties. Mad Men depicts the naughts playing the sixties. I mean:
Whatever, though. Post ruined -- thanks, NYTRoB. (Gross.)
Yes, this is that kind of blog. No, I didn't see it coming. At least I didn't do Lady Gaga.
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