The Way We Weren't
MAD MEN: “SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES”
AMC
THE NATIONAL POST
With Swingtown and Mad Men, TV drama goes back to the future
Welcome to the 1970s, when people swung, though not musically. They did other things too, of course, but on the evidence of tonight's first episode, Swingtown isn't interested. It's a curiously limited portrait of a decade or even - since it makes a big deal of being set in the U. S. bicentennial year of 1976, with July 4 fireworks exploding all over the screen - a single year in that decade.
Don't you think, our heroine Susan Miller asks her friend Janet, that "there's an energy shift we're missing out on?" Just the kind of question that must have rolled effortlessly off people's tongues every day of the decade. Well, nobody could accuse Swingtown of not laying its themes on the table, right from the off. Susan and her husband Bruce are about to move, in a sociologically upward fashion, from one Chicago neighbourhood - where Janet's the neighbour - to another. Observing them as they move in are their new neighbours, Tom and Trina Decker, who are licking their lips. Tom and Trina have an open marriage, and they can't wait to invite Bruce and Susan into it. In fact, it's the first thing that crosses their minds - which, like that of the show, are of the one-track variety.
The episode actually starts with Tom and Trina, not as a subtle way of easing us towards meeting the Millers themselves but in order to generate as much steam as possible as quickly as possible. Tom is an airline pilot, and there he is in his cockpit, advising his passengers of their imminent touchdown in Chicago (where, says the weatherman, "it's hot and wet") and with a stain on his shirt. No, it's not what you think: A rookie flight attendant has spilled some coffee on him, and she's abjectly apologetic: what will his wife say? "My wife," purrs Tom, "will love you," and so it proves. And we haven't even had the credits yet.
Susan and Bruce have the usual TV complement of troubled and troublesome kids, whom Susan (Molly Parker, in a charming variant of the awakening role she played in Deadwood) advances as an excuse for having missed out on "all that Woodstock stuff".
She says this while accepting Trina's offer of a Quaalude: her first, though, blushes over, she takes it with as little fuss as if it were a chocolate drop - probably less. She and Bruce are attending the Deckers' Independence Day party, at which their hosts have every intention of loosening them up. It works, too: The two couples end up in a happy four-way haze.
Not everybody has their potential. Janet, who is something of an emotional limpet and quite happy with her constricted life, thank you very much (I quote her pretty much directly), has tagged along to the party, and gets a nasty shock when she blunders into the basement. Janet is the kind who trails her old friends to their new home bearing her own prize-winning apple pie, while Tom and Trina favour ambling across the lawn with a house-warming bottle of Dom Perignon. (Make that house cooling, if Tom is half the man we're meant to take him for.) Returning home after her glimpse of orgy, Janet takes to furiously scrubbing her stove - at dead of night, mark you - because, she tells her husband with the symbolism dripping off her like beads of sweat, "we live in a pigsty." Janet is being set up, with extraordinary cheapness, as a straw-woman, a caricatured figure of repression; presumably she will either stay that way for the season or suffer some kind of erotic comeuppance. That apart, I can't see that the show has anywhere to go. Either Susan and Bruce will settle happily into their new liberated lifestyle, which will be nice for them but not very dramatic, or they will get messed up with love and jealousy and logistical problems, which would be soapy and predictable. It looks like we're in for Sex and the Suburbs or Not- So-Desperate Housewives. As for making us nostalgic for the '70s: first they'd have to convince us that the era they're depicting was a) attractive and b) real.
Which is what Mad Men, premiering Sunday on CTV, does for the 1950s, a period that it makes seem very far away and very close. We smile and wince at the casual-but-calculated sexism (in which both genders collude) while recognizing the underlying attitudes; they have not, after all, gone that far under. Mad Men is far more erotic than Swingtown shows any signs of being, because the bodies are attached to minds that have other things on them. It's a unique show: It has the trappings of a workplace sitcom (not that different from The Office, at first glance), but it spurns the situations and its comedy, though abundant, is acrid. That's especially the case in the first episode, "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," which brings the advertising firm of Sterling Cooper and its creative director Don Draper (the excellent Jon Hamm), the firm's (and the show's) star performer, up against the problem of pitching Lucky Strikes to a society that's beginning to know about lung cancer. No question that the admen and the Lucky Strikers put their mouths where their money is; they all smoke like chimneys, though that seems an ugly simile for a show that makes office smoking look elegant and office boozing enviable. Especially funny is the company's desperate attempt to find just one Jew on their payroll, so that a department-store magnate and possible client will feel at home. (They finally locate him in the mailroom.) Blacks, of course, are in strictly service positions, and even an Italian feels incurably self-conscious.
The patina is exactly right, like one of the edgier movies of the period, Sweet Smell of Success or The Apartment. It certainly looks better than the '70s, and of course sounds better. Mad Men is set in 1960, but its (and its characters') musical tastes hark back five years earlier: to “Band of Gold” or “On the Street Where You Live” (the Vic Damone version). We're on the cusp; these men in suits and women in skirts seem untouched by rock 'n' roll and would be flabbergasted - the men, anyway - at any rumour of a counter-culture. They're in for shocks. Peggy (Elisabeth Moss, with the look and flair of a young Brenda Blethyn), gets ahead of the curve by going on the pill, to her doctor's lascivious disapproval; she's demure and shocked by advances, but still succumbs to the ambitious office jerk, days before his marriage; she could be naive or smart or both. Meanwhile - or more accurately, next week - Don arranges for his nervous wife to see a psychiatrist; and then phones him to find out the details - and the shrink has no qualms about telling him. It's a boys' club all right, even apart from the scenes at the Playboy, but one in which all the members are headed for ulcers. It's about gloss and self-destruction, as opposed to Swingtown, which is just about gloss. I was this show's captive from the opening title-card, which told us that Mad Men was a phrase coined to describe Madison Avenue advertising executives and then added "they coined it."