There's an interesting piece about Mad Men by the author James Meek in this week's London Review of Books. Worth reading if you're interested in the show.

Here are a couple of brief extracts from the long piece.

"Sterling Cooper, the fictional advertising agency around which Mad Men is built, is a caricature of the commercial TV system that produced the series: a pool of creative people in bitter thrall to the accountants and deal-makers they rely on for money. Although we learn in parenthesis that the agency gets most of its income from commission on the ads it places, for dramatic purposes the agency is divided into two departments: Creative, which comes up with campaign slogans, artwork and copy for ads, and Accounts, which persuades, charms, fawns, bribes and pimps its way to getting and keeping corporate clients. Mad Men is a show about writers dependent on advertising, written by writers dependent on advertising, the difference being that the fictional writers of Creative write the ads on which they depend."

"By making Leopold Bloom an ad man, Joyce anticipated the modern world, where a common dream is to brand ourselves, project an attractive corporate image through social media, then stumble on the one meme or clip that will stop the world in its tracks and get us bought:

What were habitually his final meditations?

Of some one sole unique advertisement to cause passers to stop in wonder, a poster novelty, with all extraneous accretions excluded, reduced to its simplest and most efficient terms not exceeding the span of casual vision and congruous with the velocity of modern life.

Yet the weight of big corporation commercial propaganda that occupies so much space, time and thought has a malignity. The cumulative effect of current British advertising is that in order to be happy, beautiful and prosperous, you should borrow money, drink, gamble, buy a new car and eat processed food.

The protagonists of Mad Men seldom address advertising as advertising. In Don’s first effort to articulate what it’s all about, he declares:

Advertising is based on one thing, and you know what that one thing is? Happiness. Happiness is the smell of a new car. It’s freedom from fear. It’s a billboard on the side of the road that screams with reassurance that whatever you’re doing is OK.

This doesn’t make sense. Advertising that convinces you your life is fine isn’t going to make you buy something new; the aim of advertising is to promote dissatisfaction, a sense of specific want, not reassurance. As it turns out, however, Don is merely deluded. The happiness he speaks of is his code for the state of the ideal American family life he believes himself to have created, and believes himself able to sustain, even as he gives himself the freedom to step outside it at will. His early crisis with his wife comes because she is both a consumer of his brand, the Perfect Draper Family, and an essential part of it."

Well, when not busy promoting dissatisfaction, I'm looking forward to the final season of Mad Men, though I have little hope of a happy ending for Don.

More on Mad Men from Welcome2Optimism here.

And I can strongly recommend James Meek's The People's Act of Love.