How accurate is Mad Men with regard to the early '60s?

[FedoraFan112390]

I'm curious--
In terms of the fashion, and overall atmosphere/feel, how accurate is the show Mad Men in its early seasons to what the early 60s (60-64) were actually like?

 

[Stanley Doble]

I only managed to watch about 10 minutes of one episode before turning it off in disgust. It seemed to be a mashup of cliches stuck together in a witless style, a bad caricature by someone without taste or art.

Not at all accurate. You could try watching some TV shows from that period. Try Peter Gunn or Jack Paar's Tonight Show. They aren't exactly documentaries either, but will give you a better feel for the period.

Or maybe some old Frank Sinatra movies.

 

[Doctor Strange]

Ten minutes is hardly enough to have any true sense of the show.

It is for the most part quite accurate, though the storytelling is modern and there are occasional instances where the character motivations or details are a bit off. And of course, these people are way better looking and spectacularly perfectly dressed than was average! But I am exactly Sally Draper's age and I remember the early sixties. My parents were commercial photographers in southern Westchester, so I actually knew Manhattan ad execs and bohemian commercial artists in that timeframe. From my POV, it is very well done.

But Stanley is right that you'll get an even more accurate sense of the period from the TV shows and films of the time, not to mention books and magazines.

 

[LizzieMaine]

That said, thought, it's important to point out that there were only a tiny, tiny minority of Americans who lived lives even close to those depicted in that program. It's a pastiche of a small subset of the urban upper middle-class. The lives of the average Americans in the early sixties, the lives of Joe Dinnerpail and Sally Punchclock, were nothing like those shown.

If you want to know how ordinary people lived and what their world looked like, sit down for a few hours with a pile of Sears catalogs from the late thirties to the early sixties. Reality was an accumulation of stuff from the previous three or four decades.

 

[tonyb]

It's a point we've made many times before, but the very presence of this thread is evidence enough that it bears repeating: As Lizzie says, it's a highly idealized version of that place and time. The sets, the clothing, etc., stylish as they are, are hardly representative of the ways most people lived 50 years ago.

It's FICTION. It's a make-believe depiction of a thin slice of mid-20th century society as seen through early 21st century eyes. It's a "modern" drama set 50 years ago, and is much more reflective of today's sensibilities than those of the 1960s.

I watch the show, though. Lots of eye candy there. And the storytelling works for me. The characters feel real enough -- none wholly virtuous, or evil.

None of this is to dispute what Dr. Strange has to offer, though. Some people did indeed live and work in those kinds of spaces and wore those kinds of clothes and led those sorts of lives. But not the people I knew then.

 

[LizzieMaine]

One movie I often recommend for a good look at the *real* early sixties is "It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World." It was shot mostly on location around parts of Southern California, and includes a broad cross-section of character types. The characters themselves are all broad caricatures, but the costuming is reasonably representative of the period -- you've got upper-middle-class twits, middle-class dentists, and working-class truck drivers and goofs. Even the vehicles are well-represented versions of what you might see on the streets -- Milton Berle in his shiny new Imperial, Mickey Rooney and Buddy Hackett in their Volkswagen, and all the way down to Phil Silvers in his rickety '46 Ford. See it on the big screen and you'll pick up a lot of interesting details that wouldn't find their way into any modern reconstruction of the period.

 

[HudsonHawk]

From what I've read, the fashions were fairly accurate to what Manhanttan executives would have been wearing in the 1960s. And yes, people smoked and drank in their offices (they did that up until the mid-90s). But that's about it. Even top level ad men of the time have said the personalities and actions of said characters are entirely fiction.

 

[Stanley Doble]

I still say it wasn't the least bit accurate. People just didn't think and act that way in the sixties or any other time. Except in the imagination of someone who unthinkingly accepts every negative stereotype ever sold by someone with an agenda.

Let's just say it is as accurate as Rush Limbaugh's portrayal of the typical liberal. Or Chris Mathews portrayal of the Tea Party.

 

[tonyb]

One movie I often recommend for a good look at the *real* early sixties is "It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World." It was shot mostly on location around parts of Southern California, and includes a broad cross-section of character types. The characters themselves are all broad caricatures, but the costuming is reasonably representative of the period -- you've got upper-middle-class twits, middle-class dentists, and working-class truck drivers and goofs. Even the vehicles are well-represented versions of what you might see on the streets -- Milton Berle in his shiny new Imperial, Mickey Rooney and Buddy Hackett in their Volkswagen, and all the way down to Phil Silvers in his rickety '46 Ford. See it on the big screen and you'll pick up a lot of interesting details that wouldn't find their way into any modern reconstruction of the period.

It's a guilty pleasure of mine, too. Couldn't tell you how many times I've seen it, or bits of it. A dozen, at least. I recall the Mad Magazine parody of it, titled (you guessed it) "It's a World, World, World, World Mad."

I've found myself of late tuning in TCM, not to watch the old movies start to finish, but rather to take a glance at in the midst of all the other things I have to do around here. I've found that I'm pretty good at guessing when a film was produced after taking in maybe a minute or two of it. The clothing and the interiors and the street scenes offer plenty of clues, of course, but so does the dialogue. Speech changes, too -- not just the lexicon, but manner and tone as well.

 

[Edward]

One thing I consciously registered as a bit heay-handed was everyone smoking like maniacs.... mind you, watching any restaurant or pub scene in a UK sitcom or drama made in the 60s and really right up to the late 70s, and it's much the same. As I recall, in that timeframe, in the UK at least about 50% of men and 30% of women smoked.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Peak smoking in the US was in 1965, when 54 percent of the population smoked.

 

[F. J.]

Bewitch: The Original Mad Men

I've never seen Mad Men, but his thread reminds me of a commercial for Bewitched I saw a while back.

[video=youtube;oU765SErkw4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oU765SErkw4[/video]

Bewitched, a situation comedy about an advertising executive who is married to a witch, aired from 1964 to 1972 with the 1964 and '65 seasons being shot in black and white. The earlier seasons were certainly better than the later ones, especially after they replaced Dick York in '69.

I think the show was better with the original Gladys Kravitz and with Aunt Clara, played by Alice Pearce and Marion Lorne, respectively. Alice Pearce died of ovarian cancer in 1966, and Marion Lorne passed in 1968 at the age of eighty-four. The show just wasn't the same without them, especially since the new Gladys Kravitz, played by Sandra Gould, was just irritating and conniving, while the old one was just your typical nosy neighbour and was a fairly sympathetic character.

I know, this thread is supposed to be about Mad Men, but even though I haven't seen the show, I think I prefer the firm of McMann & Tate to Sterling Cooper.

 

[Fading Fast]

I haven't seen it since it was on in first run, but I remember thinking that "The Wonder Years" captured a lot of aspects of growing up in the late '60s (when I was growing up) pretty accurately.

Also, living near NYC (I grew up in NJ), I remember some of the wealthier families' Dad from the better neighborhoods taking a train into the city each day (seemed exotic, successful, exciting that they did that) and they were dressed in suits and ties similar to Mad Men (but that's a kid's impression - I have no memory of very specific details).

In the first season, when Don commuted more and lived in his big house, some of the decor (scaled down to the small neighborhood houses I grew up in) hit home - knotty pine was common as in Don's kitchen or maybe wreck room, I don't remember.

But my world was pretty much "The Wonder Years."

 

[LizzieMaine]

My home town, c. 1960. When you got away from the big city, the rest of America was quite a bit less dazzling.

Our apartment was the upper window at far left, by the 1930s car.

 

[31 Model A]

My home town, c. 1960. When you got away from the big city, the rest of America was quite a bit less dazzling.

Our apartment was the upper window at far left, by the 1930s car.

Far more advanced than my hometown, you had a traffic light and a cop.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Far more advanced than my hometown, you had a traffic light and a cop.

Yeah, but it only ever flashed yellow.

 

[Edward]

I haven't seen it since it was on in first run, but I remember thinking that "The Wonder Years" captured a lot of aspects of growing up in the late '60s (when I was growing up) pretty accurately.

Also, living near NYC (I grew up in NJ), I remember some of the wealthier families' Dad from the better neighborhoods taking a train into the city each day (seemed exotic, successful, exciting that they did that) and they were dressed in suits and ties similar to Mad Men (but that's a kid's impression - I have no memory of very specific details).

In the first season, when Don commuted more and lived in his big house, some of the decor (scaled down to the small neighborhood houses I grew up in) hit home - knotty pine was common as in Don's kitchen or maybe wreck room, I don't remember.

But my world was pretty much "The Wonder Years."

The Wonder Years did a lot of coming of age stuff that was really universal, not specific to that particular culture, which is I think part of why I warmed to it. Never seemed to go overly sentimental either, which I appreciated.

 

[tonyb]

I'd like to think that Mad Men captures something of the 1960s zeitgeist, and I suppose in some small ways it does. But I'm more inclined to think of it as a reverse period piece. It's the years 2008 through '15 in 1960s drag. But I still like it. It's fun.

 

[Fading Fast]

I'd like to think that Mad Men captures something of the 1960s zeitgeist, and I suppose in some small ways it does. But I'm more inclined to think of it as a reverse period piece. It's the years 2008 through '15 in 1960s drag. But I still like it. It's fun.

Very well said.

 

[MikeKardec]

In my limited opinion, Mad Men started out as a sort of a send up of an era, an ironic (sometimes wonderfully ironic) revisionist entertainment that used elements of the reality of the time to contrast with the story of an ad man who was living multiple lies. Content and theme complimented one and other beautifully, it was art, not documentary.

It's most wonderful moments were things like the daughter playing with her brother with a dry cleaning bag over her head and the mother yelling: "Sally Draper, come back here!" And then: "If you've left my dresses on the floor of the closet you're going to be in a lot of trouble!" Or something like that. It poked a good deal of fun at the era, some of it pretty subtle, and that is usually not done by being utterly realistic.

As the show continued to be a success I believe several things happened. The pressure of creating top notch scripts overcame the need to be a continuous ironic commentary. The characters and their stories became more and more important and elements were added that they needed to resolve, again crowding out the before mentioned commentary and the initial magic of the show and the reason that it was given the style it has. Lastly, I suspect that the writers just didn't have the sensitivity or the political will to send up the culture of the late 1960s in the same way they had sent up the early 1960s. I kept hoping ... personally I think the mindless conformity of so many who saw themselves as "counter culture" was hysterical, easily as funny as Don Draper dumping the trash off of the blanket he'd just used for a picnic with his family and then throwing his used beer can into the State Park foliage.

All that said, I grew up under the desks at Bantam Book's Madison Avenue and Fifth Avenue offices in that very era. The show looks and feels very much like my memory ... but I was a kid, very much like the oldest of the Mad Men writing staff.

I don't mind the direction the show has gone in. Every successful TV show lives in a state of tension between it's ideals at the beginning and the requirement to keep it going once casts, crews, and studios begin to rely on it for their livelihoods and audiences for their ongoing entertainment. Most shows devolve into soap opera in order to survive and because the stories become so complicated that all the writers have time to do is service the concepts they have previously set up.