Before Mad Men

I've seen a lot of mention around blogdom lately of Mad Men, a tv series about a 1950s era Madison Ave advertising agency, and which deals with questions of morals, ethics, secular and religious belief systems, and the messiness of human interaction. I haven't seen the show myself, not having cable tv (sniff, sniff), but it reminded me of a past tv series that also dealt with the same themes of ethically challenged characters working for an ad agency - Thirtysomething. I know, I know - most people feel justified in despising that series :) but bear with me a bit while I explain why it's at least as good in its own way as Mad Men.

Mad Men has the ad agency - so did Thirtysomething. When the show started, Michael Steadman and friend Elliot Weston had just begun their own small ad agency. It failed shortly thereafter and they both joined the ranks of a huge agency, DAA, with a very disturbing boss, Miles Drentell. It was an interesting glimpse into how ad agencies work and there were plenty of ethical dilemmas, from the making of manipulative ads to the betrayals of an insider takeover (see the video below).

Mad Men has an interesting tension between the religious and the secular - there's even a Jesuit character :) - but Thirtysomething was no slouch here either. The main character, Michael, was lapsed Jewish, his friend Elliot lapsed Catholic, and the series allowed them to grow and change in their relationship to their religious doubts and beliefs over the years.

Mad Men has some women characters who are allowed to be real people struggling with the 50s template of and their own unexamined attitudes about what it means to be female. Thirtysomething has been criticized for showing women characters as half-heartedly liberated, as closet stay-at-home moms. I think actually it shows the real tension women feel between wanting to be full people, to have a family and a vocation, and one of the characters I found especially interesting was Michael's cousin Melissa, who slowly and painfully forges a photography career for herself.

I think one of the worst crimes Thirtysomething perpetrates is showing us how embarrassingly seriously some of us took ourselves in the 80s and 90s. It's much easier to look way way back to the 50s with Mad Men, to a time when we may not even have existed, and to enjoy the weirdness and the wonder of an era untouched by our questionable participation :)

Here's a vid from YouTube that shows Michael and his dreaded boss at work at the ad agency, DAA ....



I've seen at Netflix that Thirtysomething has just come out on DVD - maybe give it a chance, if you haven't already consigned it to the tv outer darkness.