This week marks the release of the Season Two DVD set of “Mad Men,” the brilliant AMC cable drama about a fictitious Madison Avenue advertising agency in the early 1960s.
The cringe-worthy news: It’s accompanied by a major marketing campaign involving Banana Republic, Clorox, Vanity Fair and Variety.
Such hype — including “Mad Men”-inspired men’s suits and ads for bleach extolling its value in removing lipstick from collars and “getting ad guys out of hot water for generations” — seems entirely fitting for a series about marketing and promotion. But it also could make the series seem shallow.
That would be almost tragic, for in its first two seasons “Mad Men” has provided a valuable and utterly entertaining historical/cultural lesson. With the end of “The Sopranos” and “The Wire,” it may be the best television series on the air today.
In spite of the marketing maelstrom, here’s a look at “Mad Men — Season Two.” The four-disc box set ($49.98, not rated) includes a premiere of the third season, scheduled to begin Aug. 16.
The second season begins in 1962. As head of the Sterling Cooper ad agency’s creative department, main character Don Draper (Jon Hamm) faces the usual challenges of winning over new clients, retaining old ones and dealing with internal struggles over the agency’s control. Draper’s got new problems with his marriage to Betty (January Jones), caused in part by his philandering.
Other key characters are dealing with major changes in their personal and professional lives. For one, Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss) moves away from her conservative Catholic roots after being promoted from secretary to the agency’s first woman junior copywriter. With both Peggy and Don, we learn crucial information about their mysterious pasts.
The skillful “Mad Men” dialectic plays out between home life and office life, between integrity and duplicity in both, and between the ad people’s adroit marketing communication skills and their woeful lack of communication with loved ones.
“Mad Men” remains beautifully attuned to the social, political and cultural currents of its time. Episodes contain references to events ranging from the Cuban missile crisis and the space race to “The Defenders” TV series taking on the previously taboo issue of abortion.
To explain these events, the DVD set contains a series of “time capsules,” often featuring actual people involved in them.
If there’s one subject central to “Mad Men,” it is the changing role of women in American society. From Betty Draper’s frustrated suburban housewife to Olson’s naive but smart up-and-comer to Joan Holloway’s (Christina Hendricks) wily, frustrated office manager, these are women who’d been trapped by society’s expectations about their “proper roles.” In 1962, they’d begun to question those standards.
These issues are explored with intelligence and depth in a two-part DVD documentary, “Birth of an Independent Woman.” It intersperses “Mad Men” scenes with social criticism.
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