Boys behaving badly.(TELEVISION)(Mad Men)(Television program review)

MAD MEN, the critically lauded new series on AMC that not long ago wrapped up its debut season, takes place in the boozy, smoke-filled haze of a fictional top-tier advertising firm in Manhattan circa 1960. It's a world where advertising is a business, sure, but also a boys' club, where handsome men earn even more handsome salaries and are served by wives at home and a pool of willing secretaries at work. They drink, they smoke, they carouse, they crack wise and openly engage in racism, anti-Semitism, and blatantly sexist talk--and that's just while they're on the clock. The show covers the entire catalog of business-class hedonism in pre-sexual-revolution Manhattan, painting the island--or at least the Upper East Side--as a playground for the WASPy and wealthy. As one of the junior executives' fathers says, "I'm telling you boys, you've got it made. Martini lunches. Gorgeous women parading through the office. In my next life, I'm coming back as an ad man."

Yet if the series is any guide, the ad man's life is no delight. Despite the constant revelry on display, the show maintains an air of concerned detachment, and nearly every character sports a mood of perpetual anxiety or frustration. Even when the gang of Madison Avenue suits is standing around with drinks in their hands, grinning and barking out epithets and coarse jokes, the frivolity is just a front masking a sea of inner turmoil. They seem to behave as they do merely because it goes with the job and the times: It's a requirement, not a pastime. When two of the executives share a midday drink in the office, one of them laments that, in decades past, ad men used to drink for pleasure. But now, he dourly muses, "We drink because that's what men do."

And that's the problem, not just for the characters, but for the series as well. It's so busy shaking its head at its protagonists' politically incorrect indulgences that it forgets that, whatever else you might think of their actions and indiscretions, those foibles afforded a certain amount of fleshly satisfaction. Instead of a hot-blooded show about the wild lives of New York's advertising bad boys, we get a museum piece--beautifully produced, no doubt, but in thrall to certain modern sensibilities--on the unenlightened ways of a previous generation. So what ought to be a vicarious thrill is, instead, little more than a high-gloss history lesson. To put it another way: On Mad Men, everyone is always smoking, but no one ever enjoys it.

That's a shame, because the series ought to be a crowd-pleaser. The show's creator, Matthew Weiner, is, like so many TV producers these days, a veteran of The Sopranos. And it's easy to pick out similarities between the two shows. Both revolve around confident men with families in the suburbs and powerful, alluring jobs that afford them easy access to money, influence, and women. And both make liberal use of dramatic irony, relying on the thoroughly modern mores of their audiences to cast judgment on the follies of their characters.

But Mad Men plays like an inversion of Weiner's old show, trading ferocious expression for button-down repression. Unlike the ill-tempered, disreputable louts who made up the cast of The Sopranos, Mad Men is populated by eminently respectable East Coast upper-crusters. But, strangely enough, the brutes on The Sopranos were, especially in early seasons, more sympathetic--and noticeably more fun to watch. One of that show's great triumphs was finding ways to get its audience to relate to its criminal characters, despite their murderous ways, and allowing viewers to enjoy the ...