unhappiness -- remain an
abiding mystery to me, which is why I watch "Mad Men." My father,
though a salesman, was Don; my mother, though from Flatbush, was Betty. It's
often said that the show is popular because it allows viewers to take a position
of retrospective superiority over its characters -- that when it shows a
pregnant wife smoking and drinking, it allows us the comfort of thinking we know
better. What I like about the show is that it allows no comfort at all, not even the
comfort of coherence. "Mad Men" is perilously bad when it attempts to explain
its characters' imperfections. It does much better when it wraps their
imperfections in perfect clothes and leaves their every mystery intact. It
doesn't simply indulge in tomb-raiding; it takes tomb-raiding as its subject,
handing us the artifacts of the generation even now passing from our lives, and
daring us to make sense of them. And so each week I watch in the hope of
understanding more about Fran and Lou, only to earn the pleasure of
understanding less about Betty and Don, though, if memory serves, I smoked a lot
of pot with Sally in college.
Bing: More about 'Mad Men' | More on the cast
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"Mad Men" airs Sundays at 10 p.m. ET/PT on AMC.
(AMC)
