"Mad Men": It's brilliant by design

Last summer a lot of us who watch TV for a living went bonkers for a new series on AMC called "Mad Men." Set in New York in 1960, it followed the career and personal life of Don Draper, an advertising executive at the top of his game, an impeccably groomed Fifties man with a pretty wife named Betty, two loving children and inner demons that push up his blood pressure and drive him to drink.

Draper (played by Jon Hamm, right) works at a Madison Avenue agency with other walking heart attacks and goes home to the suburbs of Connecticut, where Betty and her fellow desperate housewives pass the time.

Two days before "Mad Men" was nominated for 16 Emmys, including best drama, the show's creator, a onetime sitcom writer named Matthew Weiner, gave TV critics a personal tour of Draper's home and office on a studio lot in downtown Los Angeles.

For all the accolades showered on "Mad Men," fewer than a million people watched it last season. Weiner spent six years shopping his script before a network with no track record in hourlong dramas rolled the dice. If there's one thing he knows how to do, it's sell his show. Not that he has to try too hard with this particular group. As Chubby Checker sings in the season opener, we're ready to twist again like we did last summer.

"These are all New York colors," Weiner is saying. We're standing in the offices of Sterling Cooper, the WASPy ad firm that is Draper's workplace. It's been lovingly assembled with period furniture and accessories. We've been on lots of sets, but the level of attention to detail on "Mad Men" is something else. Weiner explains that in researching the show, "we just tried to get everything right. And by right I don't mean the way it was in the movies or in pictures in magazines."

He points to a desk phone with bulky wires that extend down to the floor. "You will never see a telephone in a movie with these wires. They'd cut the wires and take them off." It was important to study industrial films and amateur photos for clues about the East Coast palette. "You can't use the movies for research," he explains, "because even if they shot for weeks on location in New York City ... everything inside is completely from California."

Just then January Jones, who plays Betty, materializes in a yellow and blue printed party dress that flares out. We ooh and aah. Her shoes are made of clear Lucite. She's been outfitted for this occasion by "Mad Men's" costume designer Janie Bryant. Whole articles have been written on Bryant and set decorator Amy Wells. The mid-century playground Weiner and his crew fashioned has become the envy of tastemakers everywhere. Designer Michael Kors is using Bryant's designs for "Mad Men" as an inspiration for his Fall 2008 collection.

Bryan Batt, who plays an adman on the show, in real life runs a design store in New Orleans and was recently featured in House Beautiful. "They have to check my bag when I leave the set," says Batt. "There are so many things here I would kill for."

For season two, the show has fast-forwarded to 1962, which has been celebrated in films like "American Graffiti," "Hairspray" and "Animal House" as one of the most idyllic years in American history. It was a year of station wagons and Drexel Heritage furniture and girdles and ashtrays and wall paneling. Americans were buying more new things than ever, yet the styles lacked imagination compared with European products. Manufacturers entrusted design not to designers, but to engineers, who would take an existing product, change the color and add a raft of questionable new features. Writing in the New York Times that year, the chairman of Tiffany & Co. lamented that consumer products in the U.S. projected "strength and vigor" but lacked "esthetics" or "what is commonly called taste."

It is into this age that Don Draper, as creative director of Sterling Cooper, arrives, chin forward, tastes firmly locked in the 1950s. He is a master at the black art of consumer persuasion. Selling things comes easy to Don, because it lets him draw on his own reserves of desire and loneliness. Advertising is forward-looking and usually amnesiac. Don, we learned in season one, fought in Korea and took on the identity of a fallen comrade in order to make a clean break with his past. He and Betty don't communicate their secrets very well, if at all, and the long stretches of silence and mundane chatter on the show cleverly draw attention to the destructive forces lurking just beneath the surface.

Weiner walks us over to a soundstage where the Draper home is set up. The washer-dryer unit and gas cooktop in the kitchen are a familiar dull gold color. The GE icebox is sturdy and unexceptional. The most elegantly designed appliance in the room — a chrome-and-black toaster — is hidden under a dorky slipcover.

"Part of my attraction to the period is the design," says Weiner. "There was a big, big design boom in the 50s which was commercially motivated. If you came up with a new color for a stove you could reduce the time that you replaced the stove from eleven years to seven years."

The living room, which got a makeover between seasons, is both deliciously retro and one that a family could live in now, provided they moved the two huge movie cameras out of the way. The throw pillows on the cream-colored sectional are burnt orange (which matches the drapery) and turquoise (the wallpaper). There's a formality to every set on "Mad Men" that lends an air of quiet desperation to everything that happens inside their walls.

"You come into a set like this and you really get a feeling who lives here," says Weiner. "That's what I love about it. They're changing it all the time. And yet, like the show, there's a lot of stuff that doesn't change at all."

One reason we all like "Mad Men" is that it rejects the cliche of recreating the past through popular culture and consumer goods. The decor is a means to an end — a rather stylish end, if you think about it — which is to recreate the past through the psyches of archetypal people who lived it.

This tension between the confining past and the liberating future to come is never more evident than when you meet one of the "Mad Men" performers out of costume. Take Christina Hendricks, who plays the queen bee of Sterling Cooper, its no-nonsense office manager Joan Holloway. Squeezed into '50s undergarments and zipped into her trademark red dress (which is a lighter shade than the oversaturated version you see on screen), which matches her flaming hair (itself pushed up three inches for good measure), she becomes a statuesque siren, a shapely object of affection from two genders.

In person, wearing a loose-fitting purple silk print dress and rhinestone sandals, the best qualities of Joan stand out just as prominently in Hendricks: intelligent eyes, creamy skin, that hair — and obvious smarts that her other features might distract an observer from. But you're also immediately struck by how petite she is compared with Joan. I fully expected her to be looking down at me, not up. Hendricks, who laughs when I mention this, is keenly aware that Bryant did not design her wardrobe with flattering her figure in mind.

But in its overt and (in hindsight) forced manipulations of the body, "Mad Men" is simply providing a fleshy example of the less obvious contortions people go through all their lives, and how that was never more true than in the Rorschach test that was the Sixties.

"Really, it's not about the products," Weiner says. "It's about how YOU change. Everyone can remember someone who, senior year of high school, just froze. And that is as interesting as the person who the first time they heard about the civil rights movement, got on a bus and went to Mississippi. How many people lied about going to Woodstock? That's the story about history. We only get the juicy parts. It's really so much more complicated."

Comments

[B.J. Reed]

Just watched "The Apartment" circa 1960 with Jack Lemmon And Shirley Maclain - Sure felt like New York in 1960 including the adding machines, typewriter covers and vinyl furniture! Even the plotlines of smoking, drinking and womenizing were alive and well in Billy Wilder's masterpiece - This is what makes Mad Men so much fun to watch.

[Brock Whaley]

I agree that the set design and the devotion to historical accuracy make
Mad Men such a pleasure to watch. However, in the second season opener,
As the characters watched Jackie Kennedy’s tour of the White House, on top of one of the television sets shown on the program, was an indoor UHF TV antenna. This was a gold antenna sitting on top of a console. It is known as a double batwing UHF antenna. In reality, there would be no need for such an antenna. It would be useless, or offer very poor reception of the New York VHF stations that broadcast the tour; Channels’ 2, 4, and 7. In addition, the only UHF television station operating in the New York market on February 14, 1962 was WUHF on channel 31, making very limited test broadcasts of a non-commercial nature. I doubt that any character would have gone to the extra expense of owning a television capable of receiving UHF at such a time, when the addition of a UHF tuner made a set more expensive. This UHF station had a very sporadic schedule, and seven New York City channels were available for viewing on regular VHF only set.
A very minor flaw, I know, to an otherwise exceptionally well crafted program.
Brock Whaley
Honolulu

[Glenn Hauser]

Enjoy the show too. But were there remotes back then, with a B&W TV? Couldn`t get a good look at it; maybe it was on a cable rather than wireless.

[Brock Whaley]

No, no cable on the remote control. And the TV set in question only "clicked" over to one channel position (thanks foley) and then back to Collingwood and Jackie. Based on NYC channel spacing, they must have switched between WNBC-TV channel 4, and WNEW-TV channel 5, and back to 4. All nets simulcast the tour (2,4, and 7). Metromedia (5) did not.

[nino sutcliffe]

Love the show. Love the attention to detail in costumes but January Jones would never have worn those stretch riding pants. They weren't available until years later. I know,I bought one of the first pair.Just look at any photo of Jackie Kennedy riding in the 60s.