TV Review: MAD MEN

As usual my husband and I are late to the party when it comes to watching hit shows on TV. We always assume that if something is wildly popular with the masses it must suck. Sometimes we are wrong, as we learned with The Sopranos and LOST. But Mad Men, airing from 2007 to 2014 and winning 16 Primetime Emmy Awards along the way, is surely the worst of the worst.

Classic Don Draper activity: smoking while drinking.

We lasted until Season 2, Episode 7, in which Don Draper, the married creative director of an ad agency set in the 1960s, has another one of his tawdry and tiresome sex scenes, this time with the wife of a client he has been screwing with some regularity for months, and which we, the audience, are forced to watch, telling ourselves that this is not porn but a highly-acclaimed and 100% approved national TV series. Still, as he grinds away on top of her and then slaps her, ties her wrists to the bedposts with his belt and some scarf that was handy and ultimately leaves her that way, we beg to differ.

Don Draper (not his real name) is the Hero. We are supposed to love him, swoon over him, and tune in week after week to see him cheat on his wife with yet another woman, ignore his two kids, chain smoke Lucky Strikes and drink what seems like a fifth of whiskey each day at work, forget how much he drinks after work. He is clearly an alcoholic, sex-addicted liar who lacks any emotion, has stolen another man's identity and is idolized by everyone who meets him, except his wife who feels alone, depressed and trapped in a loveless marriage.

Lauded by critics for its authenticity in depicting a certain era, in the last episode we watched Don and his wife and two kids take a picnic lunch in the country, mostly to drive in Don's brand new Cadillac. After lunch on the grass in an idyllic setting they pack up to go home, leaving behind all their dirty paper plates, used cups, empty bags of potato chips and soda bottles on the grass, then hop into their flashy Coupe DeVille and speed off with nary a care in the world while the camera lingers on the mess, in case we hadn't noticed. 

I'm wondering, who did that, ever? Nobody, that's who. Or at least nobody who drives a Caddie and makes a decent living and dresses in fine suits. Maybe low-life creeps who live in trailer parks threw trash out the window of their beater jalopies, but not affluent middle-classers like the Drapers. Hey, I was alive at that time and while I was just a teenager, I know what I saw and my parents and their friends, all of whom could have walked onto the set of Mad Men and fit right in, drinks and all, never littered as much as a tissue and would have had a cow if they caught me doing so! 

The constant smoking, the heavy drinking, the vapid women with their pointy breasts and obsequious behavior and willingness to have sex with any man who looks at them twice is the stuff of daytime soap operas, not fine, thought-provoking drama. At least on Grey's Anatomy, another prime-time sexy soap where everyone ends up sleeping with everyone else, usually in the hospital supply closet, you learn a little bit about medicine so it's not a total waste of time. For example, did you know that a certain percentage of people die in surgery each year for no apparent reason? That little tidbit kept me from having surgery on my arthritic knee and instead I was cured with acupuncture. So far the only thing I've learned from watching Mad Men is that most Americans have their minds in the gutter, and that hasn't helped me at all.