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

[Doctor Strange]

Coincidentally, the New York Times just published this set of candid pictures from a 1966 Xmas party at a Madison Avenue firm. It wouldn't look out of place around season 5:

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/12/23/once-upon-a-midnight-blurry

 

[Michaelshane]

I remember the 1960s very well.I have watched every single Mad Men episode.I can smell the people and rooms,buildings,cars.It looks and feels just like I remember.Everyone smoked,everywhere they went.Cigarette butts smashed on the floors of public buildings.Train stations,hospitals,post office,city hall,police stations,all smelled like cigars.Everyone who came to visit was offered a drink,and to say no was not an option.Our house had two or three ash trays in every room,a fully stocked bar in the den.I knew someone like every person in the Mad Men cast,and most of them were my relatives.

 

[MikeKardec]

It was also nice to see the era connected to the Depression through Don Drapers past. So often in film and fiction, the two time periods seem like different worlds. Last summer I had a long conversation with a writer for the New York Times, a very intelligent woman who happens also to be highly opinionated about just about everything. She was very critical of the show and, while I can't recall them well enough to go into them here, her criticisms would have been difficult to refute ... I didn't try, I just listened for anything I thought was worth learning.

Much of her opinion, however, was along the lines of what we have heard here: It's not the complete 1960s experience. Having had time to think about it, I'd argue that's not the point. It started as a satirical distillation of an industry set in a time and using a character that reinforced the theme. It was successful enough to morph into a sophisticated soap opera in order to keep going. I wonder if it hasn't taken on the cultural baggage that Vietnam films did in the 1980s, each one was expected to somehow encompass and explain the entirety of the American experience in Vietnam ... something the entire culture couldn't get it's head around and thus was a ridiculously high goal for any mere movie. In fact the only film maker who seems to have really tried was Coppola, producing his Guernica-like Apocalypse Now, which may have raised the bar so high that people really DID expect each new film to go as far if not further.

I don't really think Mad Men is any Apocalypse Now but if it does set off more and more discussions about a era that has a controversial relationship with many living generations it wouldn't be a bad thing at all! If, somehow, it is supposed to be a look at the complete '60s experience, I just wish it would be as amusingly critical of counter culture as it was of the "establishment."

 

[HadleyH]

I think the set design is accurate!

All in all is a very satisfying series.....in fact, one of the best series out there IMO.

 

[Spitfire]

I am not that old, but I started working in advertising - as Art Director - in the early seventies. And I must say, that the offices, the clothing and most of all - the way they work - is pretty accurate. Although we worked a lot harder than these guys.

 

[stevew443]

I gave Mad Men a really good chance to hook me. I watched the first 4 seasons and tried to get interested in the characters. I think the series is beautifully filmed, and the scripts seem to be first rate, but I just could not care about any of the characters. To me, it seemed as if Man Men was trying to capture the success of the Sopranos but failed to capture the warmth and humor of the New Jersey Mafia I actually cared about what Tony Soprano was going to do. As for Don Draper... well, I just don't care what he might do next.

I was born in 1952, so I did live through the period that Mad Men represents, and I see much that is accurate, but I also grew up in a very small town in WV, so much of the series shows things that I would never have experienced.

 

[Fading Fast]

I gave Mad Men a really good chance to hook me. I watched the first 4 seasons and tried to get interested in the characters. I think the series is beautifully filmed, and the scripts seem to be first rate, but I just could not care about any of the characters. To me, it seemed as if Man Men was trying to capture the success of the Sopranos but failed to capture the warmth and humor of the New Jersey Mafia I actually cared about what Tony Soprano was going to do. As for Don Draper... well, I just don't care what he might do next.

I was born in 1952, so I did live through the period that Mad Men represents, and I see much that is accurate, but I also grew up in a very small town in WV, so much of the series shows things that I would never have experienced.

You hit on my one complaint with a show I otherwise enjoy and respect: almost every character is unlikable and many are outright angry, mean, selfish and / or spoiled almost all the time. Betsy and Pete are two horrible human beings that I would - in real life - avoid at all costs.

While we all know there are a lot of people like that in the world, there are also decent people who, while flawed, do decent things, have a general positive approach to life and try to conduct themselves in a good manner. The show would have more warmth and humor as you said - more real humanity - if it had more characters with, well, good character. Don, oddly enough, shows flashes of decency, but he is too dark and can be too despicable to really root for. However, when it is Don versus most of the other characters on that show, I do root for him as he is the least bad choice.

 

[MikeKardec]

You hit on my one complaint with a show I otherwise enjoy and respect: almost every character is unlikable and many are outright angry, mean, selfish and / or spoiled almost all the time. Betsy and Pete are two horrible human beings that I would - in real life - avoid at all costs.

When a show, novel, movie is all Ozzie and Harriet it's too boring and needs some dark side to liven it up, but when you have characters who are dark, troubled, angry they eventually need to band together to do something right in their lives ... if it's done right there is nothing more powerful as when dark characters make a move to clean up their lives or the world or whatever. I always feel that characters must eventually inhabit their power ... the power they have been learning throughout the story. A nice moment in another AMC series, Halt and Catch Fire is when the three fairly dysfunctional characters who are almost enemies band together at the last minute to go to Las Vegas and sell the computer design they have all compromised their lives over.

But you really can't wait 7 years for your characters to ride into battle.

My favorite bits of Mad Men have been those touches of symbolism (god I hate using that word but nothing else occurs to me) like when Megan has just decided to go back to acting and Don has just lost the business partner/wife of a lifetime and the elevator doors open but the car is not there ... just an empty shaft. But I'd hesitate to pretend the Mad Men characters are as dark as those on say, Sons of Anarchy. That's some deeply bad warped screwed up S@#&! A door into hell.

 

[Benzadmiral]

I've watched quite a bit of the show in its earlier seasons. The period, to me (who recalls it dimly from pre-teen days), is the last good time in America, and I've often planned crime stories set in the pre-1963 world.

They've frequently gone to great lengths to get their details right. In one episode, set in early 1965, Don's daughter (?) is watching a "Man from U.N.C.L.E." episode, and is enamored of David McCallum as the Russian agent Illya. The producers went to the trouble of finding, and showing on the daughter's TV, scenes from a black-and-white episode of the show that would indeed have been airing in the late winter/early spring of '65. Nice touch.