without the beatles

I don’t watch a whole lot of TV other than baseball, but the sheer perfection of the Mad Men concept hooked me in right away. The show strikes particularly close to the bone since both my parents worked on Madison Avenue during the 60s. I like to tell friends that my dad was a mad man. And even though I’m a child of the 70s and 80s, the values of the Mad Men period, like those of the 60s more generally, persisted long afterwards and cast a long shadow over my most formative years. ...So much has already been written about the show that there’s really not much left to say except to offer my opinion that the season just ending this past Sunday night was the weakest so far. The reason I say this is that Mad Men has become less a show about the 60s, where the period itself is the star of the show, and more a character-driven soap opera that happens to be set in the 60s. Much of the social context now seems almost beside the point. This may be what most viewers want, and it may be the case that what I’m looking for is more or less a documentary about how advertising came of age in the 60s. I just hope it doesn't mean that the show has jumped the shark. ...It’s not that I won’t watch Mad Men next year or that I object on principle to the soapy direction it’s taken. There have been a number of soaps – or what TV Guide used to call ‘serials’ – that I’ve enjoyed over the years, like General Hospital, The Edge of Night, All My Children, Dallas, Falcon’s Crest, Dynasty... But none of these shows tackled the admittedly daunting task of reconstructing and projecting the zeitgeist of a historical period through the points of view of their characters. It’s most certainly not an easy thing to do, but Mad Men executed it so well over the first few seasons, and I guess I got spoiled. ...Part of the problem may be that this season focused a lot on women’s issues, which are less interesting to me than, say, music, drugs, and the commodification of cool. Some of the women’s stuff was fascinating, like they way they've dealt with pre-Roe v. Wade abortions through the character of Joan, while other stuff, like the various depictions of women's struggles in the workplace, were only mildly interesting to me. ...As the season progressed into 1965, I just kept waiting for the Beatles to show up, which they did, but only through a few scattered references. Rock ‘n roll more generally is almost entirely absent from the Mad Men scene, which is hard to believe since ad men would presumably have had their finger on the pulse of what was arguably the most important cultural force of the times. Where are the people at the firm who are hip to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, the Beach Boys...? Maybe my periodization is off here. Maybe ad men didn’t figure out what a potent market force rock 'n roll could be until well after it became a mass cultural force. But I rather doubt it. I think advertising played a key role in making rock so forceful. The Beatles had already made two movies by mid 1965, played the first of their two shows at Shea Stadium (which was alluded to on the show, but only in what felt like an afterthought), and played The Ed Sullivan Show twice. ...So from this point of view, I was quite disappointed. I'll have to ask my parents how they experienced things. Perhaps my expectations were misplaced. I'm remembering just now that my mother, who was a copywriter in the mold of Peggy, gets a great deal of pleasure in telling people that the 60s just passed her by, that she didn't even notice they were happening. She was too busy building her career to notice any social or cultural upheaval. But I think she's an anomaly in this regard, and I also think that her notion that the era passed her by is bunk insofar as she was a career oriented women and a divorcee who married a second time. She may not have noticed the 60s, but the changes were happening to her in a pretty forceful way. ...I know my father noticed things just by remembering his record collection, which featured plenty of mid-60s classics, like the Rolling Stones' Aftermath, Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited, and plenty of Beatles LPs, including Rubber Soul, and the one I liked best as a little kid...

Part of the problem here is that I'm so obsessed with everything Beatles, and I expect everybody else to be the same way. When I think of what it would have been like to be 13 years old in 1965, I imagine myself breathing, eating and dreaming Beatles. But maybe that's just tunnel vision on my part. On the other hand, perhaps this season of Mad Men was just a bridge that sets the stage for what will be an explosive fifth season. I hope so, but we won't know for nine months.