Mad Men has returned, Sundays, SoHo, as confoundingly bittersweet and cynical as ever. Now in its sixth season, it still feels as though it could simply run on forever, as a metaphor for purgatory.
The characters, based around a 1960s advertising agency, have seductive superficial period gloss and (to a modern sensibility) quaintness of attitude. But somehow, in a variety of ways, they are each doomed – not least the tormented but high-functioning hero, Don Draper, who has embarked on yet another affair, this time with the wife of a doctor neighbour. “If I looked and talked like you,” says the unsuspecting doc to Draper, “I wouldn’t have had to go to medical school.”
Don himself does not quite know why, when he has the luscious Megan as his new wife, he is still picking at the frayed ends of his privileged life. His secret psychic crisis continues to play out, with his handsomely deadpan success at work sandbagged by the central lie of his existence: that he stole the identity of a dead Korean war vet and is really the son of an abused young woman and had a cruelly insecure childhood.
Sounds drab when you put it like that. But Mad Men’s brilliance is the melding of eternally recognisable human failings and existential grimness with the mandatory glossy, up-beat ethos of the prosperous American 60s.
The stories and the dialogue are wry and absolutely pitiless. There is the appalling, shocking conversation between Don’s ex-wife Betty and her politician husband about the newly orphaned and homeless young woman they’ve magnanimously agreed to take in for Christmas.
Jealous of her youth and talent, Betty speculates her husband might like to have his way with the waif. Later, Betty, contrite and haunted by the girl’s plight, fails to find her in a squalid squat. Nothing changes, except that everyone is a bit sadder and more resigned. And Betty dyes her hair.
Roger shrugs off the death of his mother, but weeps wretchedly at the death of his shoeshine guy.
Sometimes nothing much seems to have happened from one scene to the next, the inexorability of each character’s day underscored by curiously dim lighting, like that used in the daytime soaps. But this is a soap of sorts – only no cliffhangers. Vietnam, sexism, smoking, beatniks, back-combed up-dos, fondue, cutsy visions of mom-and-dad family life in ad campaigns – Mad Men is quite the antidote to those deathlessly bright, happy 60s sitcoms.
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