It’s easy to call AMC’s Mad Men a period piece, even though a large amount of the widely lauded show rests on the fact that it took place in the 60’s. But the meat of the story of a booming NYC ad agency that represented clients like big tobacco companies and Dick Nixon, exists in the superficially pristine yet devilishly subversive environment that the characters operate in. It’s an environment that is as timeless as it is confined. Everyone smokes, even in the face of the lid being blown off the cancer causing capabilities of a cigarette. Every woman is a piece of meat for the executives, even though marriage and families are held at a premium. Even the centerpiece of the show, Don Draper, represents both the best in terms of the knight in shining armor when sticking up for his secretary in the face of the wolves of his office, and the worst of scum when he goes to pick up his daughter’s birthday cake and simply refuses to come back until late in the night. There’s this intense aloofness that exists, it’s effortless in the way it’s desperate, it pulls you in both directions until you can’t decide whether to laugh or to shake your head. It’s constantly SELLING you on something, twisting your perspective enough until you start to wonder if maybe it isn’t RIGHT, or maybe you aren’t WRONG.

I’m always amazed when a show can take a total abstraction and make it a vital part of the show. You layer that kind of an approach on top of quality writing, and you have something special. The level of misogynistic behavior in Mad Men is horrifying, and yet strangely sympathetic. As they peel back the layers of the men, we begin to see the hallmarks of the easiest psychological weaknesses that cause them to act as they do. Yet, at the same time, the misogyny is what drives the women to act both ruthlessly, exploiting their feminism for gain, and also to act desperately in their attempts to hold down a man and fit into the vision that 1960’s society carved out for them. It’s a smart play on the All in the Family rule, where instead of LAUGHING at the pigs, we feel for them. Instead of wanting to defend the women, we shake our heads a bit. We’re armed with the knowledge of how the story on a broad scale plays out, and we find ourselves maybe finding sympathy where ten or twenty years ago we would’ve found anger or disgust.

That’s not to say that any of it is excusable. I’ve written about misogyny on this blog before (because I LOVE it), and if you ask me, one need only to look at this recent presidential campaign to see how far away we are from having any mind of equality in terms of gender relations in this country and in this era. But Mad Men continues that grand tradition of television in challenging us, and making us rethink how we might see the good guys and the bad guys, and what it means to be a “man” in the most colloquial sense of the word. Sometimes it’s the difference between merely acting the part, or selling the part. Because everyone’s buying something, whether they know it or not.