The Consumer Products Safety Commission has determined that cigarette smoking is hazardous to your health. \u00a0But that doesn\u2019t stop the folks at Sterling Cooper Advertising from smoking like fiends. \u00a0Or from drinking too much.\u00a0 Or from treating the girls in the steno pool like crap. \u00a0Or from stealing important documents out of each others’ trash.<\/p>\n
Yes, it all seems vaguely familiar.\u00a0 OK, we admit it, more than vaguely familiar. \u00a0Last night\u2019s premier episode of \u201cMad Men\u201d on AMC, which depicts Madison Avenue circa 1960, proves what we feared was true:\u00a0 the advertising world has changed very little in the past 40 years. \u00a0For example, there\u2019s Don Draper, ultra-slick creative director, pulling new campaigns out of his butt at the last minute, while hiding a dark secret. \u00a0He\u2019s challenged by Pete, the 26-year-old suck-up, and his entourage of frat-boy executives. \u00a0The next big pitch is for a Jewish client, which is a problem for agency principal Roger Sterling because he\u2019s never hired anyone but WASPs. \u00a0And everyone is scoping out the new girl Peggy, who\u2019s hiding sexy ankles under a not-so-flattering dress.<\/p>\n
Created by those hacks that gave us \u201cThe Sopranos,\u201d Mad Men is all the rage. \u00a0\u201cPossibly the best show you\u2019ll see this summer\u201d says Time. \u00a0Newsweek raves it is \u201c. . . sumptuously filmed, you could turn down the volume and just watch the suits . . .\u201d\u00a0 And Rupert Murdoch\u2019s Wall Street Journal says it\u2019s “One of the best-written, all-around sparkling works to come along in many a season.”<\/p>\n
The show is also blurring the line between the content of a show about advertising and the advertising content that supports it. \u00a0The commercial breaks are sponsored factoids about ads, such as \u201cthe first TV ad for prescription drugs ran in 1997\u201d, followed immediately by a spot for fibromyalgia medicine.<\/p>\n
Next week\u2019s show promises a look into Dick Nixon\u2019s presidential campaign (yep, another product that has been proven hazardous to your health). Mad Men runs on Thursday nights at 10 and you can get caught up at www.amctv.com.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Consumer Products Safety Commission has determined that cigarette smoking is hazardous to your health. \u00a0But that doesn\u2019t stop the folks at Sterling Cooper Advertising from smoking like fiends. \u00a0Or from drinking too much.\u00a0 Or from treating the girls in the steno pool like crap. \u00a0Or from stealing important documents…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[32,43,773,775,1145],"class_list":["post-465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2","tag-advertising","tag-amc","tag-mad-men","tag-madison-avenue","tag-sopranos"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}