Mad Men: Season One

Introduction

From Matthew Weiner, one of the creators of The Sopranos, comes Mad Men which follows Don Draper (Jon Hamm), a high-flying executive at a Manhattan advertising firm in 1960.

Don is happily married to Betty (January Jones) and happily unfaithful with numerous women. The series begins with Peggy (Elisabeth Moss), fresh out of secretarial school, starting work as Don's new secretary at Sterling Cooper and learning the ropes.

Amongst the people who work there are the ambitious young upstart Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser) and Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks), another secretary who takes Peggy under her wing. The office is a hotbed of machismo, sexism and racism, all perfectly acceptable in 1960, where people were anti-communist, anti-Semitic and there was no such thing as a sexual harassment suit.

Video

A superb transfer, with excellent period costumes and props - if this is a NTSC to PAL transfer, I couldn't tell, as the picture was flawless.

Audio

A clear Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack with a lovely score.

Extra Features

Disc 1 contains a 19 minute featurette called Advertising the American Dream in which academics and 'Advertising Legends' talk about the birth of advertising, following the Second World War and the new found affluence of the middle class.

Disc 2 has a brief piece on David Carbonara, where he talks about scoring the show.

There are commentaries on episodes 1 (by Matthew Weiner), 5 (by Jon Hamm, Elisabeth Moss and Aaron Staton) and 10 (by Tim Hunter and David Carbonara). The first is a well delivered and informative track by the show's creator, though it's a little more specific to the episode that I'd have liked - one more geared to the show in general would have been better. The second, Jon Hamm and Aaron Slaton are clearly recorded separately from Elisabeth Moss, but they speak well about the episode, touching briefly on the show as a whole. The commentary on episode 10 is very dry, with Tim Hunter, who directed it, obviously reading from a script and going into technical details; the contribution from David Carbonara, recorded separately, is a little more interesting but that's not saying much.

Conclusion

Like many TV shows, I had never heard of this, so had no idea what to expect. The cover art mentions The Sopranos, due to the involvement of Matthew Weiner, but Mad Men is a very different type of show - an extremely engrossing, slow burning, character-driven drama.

Whether the deliberations are about how to sell Lucky Strike cigarettes, advertising a dodgy weight loss product, or marketing Nixon for President, the challenges seem as relevant now as they were then.

The attention to period detail is phenomenal and, amongst a superb cast, Jon Hamm is excellent - it's easy to see why he won a Golden Globe. I thought this was a great series and I'll definitely tune in to watch season 2 when it screens here in 2009. Stand-out television.