The main reason I haven’t been interested in watching Mad Men is that I was pretty certain it would be impossible for the entertainment industry to produce a tv show set in the late ’50s-early ’60s without including a lot of self-congratulatory stuff about how much more enlightened we are than those pigs. I find it hard to endure that stuff, for all sorts of reasons, but most of all because, as a portrait of a time and a culture, it’s substantially false. So no matter how good the show may be in other ways—and many people say it’s quite good—I figured I would end up gritting my teeth through a lot of it.
Here’s confirmation, from the very intelligent and judicious Benjamin Schwarz of The Atlantic:
This striving for verisimilitude serves another purpose: Weiner seems to hope that getting the vintage mitten clasps and IBM Selectrics right will help viewers believe that outrageously un-PC attitudes and behavior were as common as the series shows them to be. Mad Men is hailed for what The Times calls its “unflinching portrayal of Eisenhower/Kennedy–era sexism, racism, anti-Semitism,” and this unrelenting focus on the unenlightened aspects of the past is clearly central for Weiner and his writers. Most of the supplemental historical material in the DVD sets focuses on racial and gender issues and progressive politics, including a lengthy paean to the SDS’s gaseous Port Huron Statement. The takeaway is clear, as The Times approvingly quotes an academic who indulges in a rather Whiggish interpretation of history: “The show explains why the ’60s had to happen.”
But even if the portrayal were as “dead-on” as The Times assures us it is, that portrayal is hardly neutral. In describing a scene in which sexist badinage is exchanged at an account meeting, McLean correctly points out that “the series is critical of this limited view and is not afraid to spell [its criticism] out.” That stance—which amounts to a defiant indictment of sexism and racism, sins about which a rough moral consensus would now seem to have formed—militates against viewers’ inhabiting the alien world the show has so carefully constructed, because it’s constantly pressing them to condemn that world.
And that stance is responsible for the rare (and therefore especially grating) heavy-handed and patronizing touches in an otherwise nuanced drama. Must the only regular black characters be a noble and cool elevator operator, a noble and understanding housekeeper, and a perceptive and politicized supermarket clerk? Must said elevator operator, who goes unnoticed by the less sensitive characters, sagely say when discussing Marilyn Monroe’s death, “Some people just hide in plain sight”? Get it—he’s talking about himself. He’s invisible. Even worse, that stance evokes and encourages the condescension of posterity; just as insecure college students feel they must join the knowing hisses of the callow campus audience when a character in an old movie makes an un-PC comment, so Mad Men directs its audience to indulge in a most unlovely—because wholly unearned—smugness. As artistically mistaken as this stance is, it nonetheless helps account for the show’s success. We all like to congratulate ourselves, and as a group, Mad Men’s audience is probably particularly prone to the temptation.
A most unlovely—because wholly unearned—smugness. I knew it. And Schwartz is a fan of the show. You can read the whole piece here.
This desperate need to spit on the recent past of our culture is pathological, more properly the study of psychologists than critics—which doesn’t mean we need to fall into the equal-and-opposite reaction of idealizing it, of course.
Light On Dark Water 
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