Why has 'Mad Men' garnered so much popular and critical acclaim? In the US, a large part of the success could be attributed to the period it is set in and the meleiu it explores. Mad Men is set among advertising people in America in the sixties.The sixties were both the apogee and the nadir of the post-war American experience. The agony and ecstasy of being American, so to speak. As the post-war economic boom washed into the homes of every American, advertising and it's denizens on Madison Avenue came to represent the increasing servility of the avant garde to the popular.
A set of clever but unscrupulous people inveigled and then distorted anything out of the ordinary to serve the cause of the mundane and the ordinary. To showcase the sizzle to sell the steak. The fascination of today's American public with the lives of the men and women who populated Madison Avenue in its heydays is perhaps a fascination of tracing the beginnings of the consumer culture that is perhaps the central leitmotif of modern American society.
But then what about Mad Men's worldwide popularity? I believe Mad Men will be considered a landmark in television in decades from now because it will be the foremost representative of the era when the TV series became an art form to be ranked almond literature, music, dance, the theater and cinema. Mad Men is perhaps the first mainstream big-budget television series that gets into the he heads of its characters and, dare I say, it's viewers to create a stream-of-consciousness experience that goes deeper and beyond the specifics of the narrative. In doing so Mad Men transcends the limitation of the primitive stimulus-response-stimulus structure of the usual TV drama (as so painfully evident in Indian TV series) and gets into realm of the full-bodied flavor of high quality literature, theater or cinema. Mad Men is not alone. Breaking Bad, a TV series set in New Mexico about a upstanding chemistry teacher's transformation into a ruthless criminal mastermind is mesmerizing and deeply affecting. I am sure there are quite a few more out there that I am yet to savor..
One final thing. I have worked in large advertising agencies, have been the founding promoter ofa small one and over the past few years have been an adviser for a couple of mid-size others. How does the meleiu in Indian advertising compare to the one depicted in Mad Men? Well the human frailties and egos on display there are very much evident here. However the drama inherent in the process of creating and selling advertising here is only a pale imitation of that shown in Mad Men. That is partly due to the fact that in a TV series the mundane is hidden. And partly because the Indian economy is where it is. Still largely imitative, still largely stuck in the basics. I am sure as we, as a nation, find our own economic voice and realize our own potential for innovation so will Indian advertising discover its very own voice, it's very own creative heat and drama. And perhaps one day it's very own 'Mad Men'
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