Revolutionary television from before, well, the revolution

Mad Men mania has taken over the media. Here in Toronto the face of Mr. Don Draper is plastered on the cover of the alt-weekly rag     EYE. Vanity Fair also has an essay on the show and a photo spread of the set. The Toronto Star, the L.A. Times, the Huffington Post, New York magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and the Globe & Mail all have respective news stories, episode reviews, blog posts, columns, and feature length articles.

The ink spilling out of everyone’s pens seems to sound the same. As the show burst onto the screens of middle-America Sunday night with record ratings, everyone wanted to see, obviously, what would come next. The writers of the AMC blockbuster have long had a challenge looming in the distance: the second half of the sixties.

As Joshua Ostroff writes in EYE about the set of Mad Men, “What it doesn’t feel like is the 1960s…in 1963 America was still stuck in the 1950s.” And though the show’s popularity rests squarely on its decidedly 1950s un-politically correct, pre-feminism, pro-capitalist outlook on a world that still allows smoking indoors; in the years the show is approaching, the times are a’ changing.

All the talk about the small screen’s cinematic end to this golden age of 1950s-style advertising reminded me the of a retrospective on 1960s advertising I wrote last summer, titled, “The Revolution Will Not Be Advertised.”

What I had learned from 1960s issues of     Marketing was consistent with what turned up on the editorial pages over the weekend as culture reporters prepared for the first of this TV season’s major debuts. “In the 1960s, advertisers remained blissfully ignorant of the societal upheaval around them,” the tagline read.

“The 1960s were all about revolution. Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones spread counterculture throughout a new, unconventional generation: the baby boomers. The anti-establishment movement, however, meant trouble for marketers. They had to reach young freethinkers without alienating older, more conservative consumers.”

The imagery in advertising still carried the utopian postwar imagery of the 1950s, I wrote. And thus, the writers, art directors, set designers and, of course, stylists of Mad Men have the same challenge the marketers of the ‘60s had. They have to move past everything they know, and everything that has made them a success.

The charm of Mad Men undoubtedly lies in nostalgia, and any changes the show makes are going to receive outcry from viewers longing for the simpler times of earlier seasons. But change is coming, and they can either worry or prepare. And if the producers have reason to worry, Mr. Draper should be even more concerned.

As my former editor Rob Gerlsbeck wrote in Marketing two issues later, “In the 1970s, advertising was under the microscope, and legislation threatened to kill it outright.”

Things aren’t looking so swell for Draper, but he’ll no doubt deal just fine—he always does. Still, stay tuned. This could get ugly.

Ugly, and entertaining.