An Alternative View of Mad Men

I highly recommend TipsiM's topic, "Clearinghouse of loose ends and unanswered questions".

Buried in this topic, is a post by Lorna Moir regarding The New York Review of Books article
entitled "The Mad Men Account" by Daniel Mendelsohn:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/feb/24/mad-men-account/?page=1

This is an extremely well written article with an alternative view of Mad Men. Mendelsohn's view is that Mad Men is a "soap opera decked out in high-end clothes". He states that Men Men is "essentially, the stuff of soap opera: abortions, secret pregnancies, extramarital affairs, office romances, and of course dire family secrets; what is supposed to give it its higher cultural resonance is the historical element. When people talk about the show, they talk (if they're not talking about the clothes and furniture) about the special perspective its historical setting creates--the graphic picture that it is able to paint of the attitudes of an earlier time, attitudes likely to make us uncomfortable or outraged today. An unwanted pregnancy, after all, had different implications in 1960 than it does in 2011."

Mendelsohn states that "the greatest part of the audience for Mad Men is made up not, as you might have imagined at one point, by people of the generation it depicts--people who were in their twenties and thirties and forties in the 1960s, and are now in their sixties and seventies and eighties--but by viewers in their forties and early fifties today, which is to say of an age with those characters' children. The point of identification is, in the end, not Don but Sally, not Betty but Glen: the watching, hopeful, and so often disillusioned children who would grow up to be this program's audience, watching their younger selves watch their parents screw up".