 "Reality bites")
A lifetime ago as a card-carrying member of the American academic life in the mid- and late 1960s, I used to turn my nose up snootily at the very mention of television, the idiot box about to be elevated as the message itself by Marshal McLuhan. The entertainment it offered was banal: tawdry soap operas (Peyton Place), hokum westerns (Bonanza), poorly executed, even if addictive, space drama (Star Trek) and a host of courtroom, medical and espionage shows that bore little resemblance to reality. For news and sports, I found the tube to be no match for the venerable The New York Times, except on occasions such as Walter Cronkite’s coverage of the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968 (Norman Mailer’s brilliant reportage Miami and the Siege of Chicago was still some months away).
In a fitting irony, those very times are mesmerisingly recreated with remarkable verity in Mad Men, arguably among the very best television serials of all times. It will begin its seventh and final season next week in the United States and India. The intervening half a century has made me an avid follower of 24x7 news, live sports events and gripping teledramas.
Mad Men is the saga of America’s coming of age as the world’s leading power, industrial, economic, political, military and social as well. This sojourn is recorded through the prism of the rise and rise of Don Draper, an impoverished, little educated, impostor of a Korean war veteran (he assumes the identity of his slain officer), who finds his metier as a ‘creative’ in the newly expanding world of advertising on Madison Avenue in New York City. It takes us from the placid-as-can-be Eisenhower era to the tumultuous late 1960s, when America was again engulfed in a foreign war, even as it was in the throes of the greatest social transformation it ever experienced.
Along the way, we see Jewish professionals and entrepreneurs being grudgingly accepted, doors to exclusive male domains being pried ajar by determined women, Blacks making their presence known and the discrete charm of middle class suburbia increasingly coming undone by adultery, alcohol and other intoxicants. Even as the privileged continue to prosper, assassinations, race riots, anti-war protests all begin to challenge old political beliefs and the WASP way of life. And California beckons the jaded East with a cornucopia of opportunities.
That is not all that is good in Mad Men. It also throws up many nuggets of insights for students of marketing and management. Otherwise boring themes of designing surveys, endless struggles for right tag lines, strategies for making winning pitches, and transition from the ‘cold’ print medium to the ‘hot’ electronic one engage our attention not just for their plot value, but also their terrific authenticity.
Mad Men derives its strength from two main sources: riveting writing, mostly by Matthew Weiner (who is also the producer) and pitch-perfect acting by an ensemble cast led by Jon Hamm, (who seems to have stepped out of the same Central Casting department responsible for Rock Hudson and Dean Martin) as Draper.
Weiner cut his writing teeth on that granddaddy of all new American television, The Sopranos, the hugely successful epic of the Mafiosi in the New York-New Jersey area aired by the cable network HBO between 2000 and 2007. Cable freed writers and creators of the new generation shows from the shackles of network television regarding situations, language and visualisation. Crime, sex, substance abuse, expletives, partial nudity, were no longer taboo. Newer and more engrossing themes created huge audience interest — for example, the recently concluded Breaking Bad dealt with the life of a cancer-stricken school teacher who made and sold drugs. It met with tremendous critical and popular acclaim. Television has followed the trend set nearly three decades earlier by films (The Godfather came in 1972) and done so with great aplomb.
The garden-variety television became suddenly far more realistic and engrossing in the 2000s. Police dramas and procedurals (The Shield, CSI), hospital shows (Gray’s Anatomy, and the marvellously stimulating House, MD, based on Sherlock Holmes), legal case studies (Boston Legal, Law and Order), were all stand-out hits and ran for many seasons. Comedy shows such as 30 Rock and Two-and-a-Half Men broke the old moulds too. Conventional soap operas continued to be offered, but they were no longer the staple of entertainment television.
The result is obvious: television is no longer the boob tube. Having become intelligent, it attracts new audiences and gives films a run for the money. David Carr of The New York Times spoke for many when he observed, “The vast wasteland of television has been replaced by an excess of excellence that is fundamentally altering my media diet” (March 9, 2014) and proceeded to list a host of shows that captivate him.
Two shows from that galaxy are of particular interest to us at present, enveloped as we are by real-life political theatre. The West Wing presents the eight years in office of an exceptionally erudite liberal and idealistic Democratic President Josiah Bartlett (a Nobel Laureate in economics, no less). The series, which ran from 1999 to 2006, eerily foretold events of a decade later. Bartlett, like Barack Obama, faced a hostile Congress, budget difficulties, a partial shutdown of the administration (all unheard of in the George W Bush presidency when the show was aired), and a weary White House increasingly remote and dysfunctional in the second term. It culminates with the election of a little known Latino Congressman, Matt Santos, as Bartlett’s successor, anticipating the phenomenal and rapid rise of Obama.
House of Cards, which just ended its second season, is the polar opposite of The West Wing. This adaptation of a British serial of the same name has Francis Underwood, a completely unscrupulous Majority Whip (the third ranking member of the majority party in the House of Representative) rising to become the unelected president (much like Gerald Ford) in less than two years. No depth is too low for him and no crime, including murder, too heinous. Oscar-winner Kevin Spacey, the lead, is enjoying a new career on the small screen. He remarked at the awards ceremony last month that it was good to get away from Washington. The second season of House of Cards had begun a fortnight earlier.
The West Wing is winding its way to conclusion on our satellite channels. House of Cards has just finished. The two shows have a common and unlikely connection. Aaron Sorkin created The West Wing and was its presiding deity for the first four seasons. David Fincher helped develop House of Cards and directed its early episodes. They had collaborated on The Social Network, the absorbing story of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook.
Our prim guardians of public morality, who blip every cuss word in the imported shows and spread haze when a female appears in her underthings, will never allow this kind of new reality in our television. What rich drama could await us if Arun Singh were to emerge from his self-imposed exile and create shows on the Bofors tale of the Kargil War! We must wax nostalgic on Buniyaad, Kakkaji Kahin or Udaan, all at least a generation old, as our specimens of reality TV!
In a fitting irony, those very times are mesmerisingly recreated with remarkable verity in Mad Men, arguably among the very best television serials of all times. It will begin its seventh and final season next week in the United States and India. The intervening half a century has made me an avid follower of 24x7 news, live sports events and gripping teledramas.
Mad Men is the saga of America’s coming of age as the world’s leading power, industrial, economic, political, military and social as well. This sojourn is recorded through the prism of the rise and rise of Don Draper, an impoverished, little educated, impostor of a Korean war veteran (he assumes the identity of his slain officer), who finds his metier as a ‘creative’ in the newly expanding world of advertising on Madison Avenue in New York City. It takes us from the placid-as-can-be Eisenhower era to the tumultuous late 1960s, when America was again engulfed in a foreign war, even as it was in the throes of the greatest social transformation it ever experienced.
Along the way, we see Jewish professionals and entrepreneurs being grudgingly accepted, doors to exclusive male domains being pried ajar by determined women, Blacks making their presence known and the discrete charm of middle class suburbia increasingly coming undone by adultery, alcohol and other intoxicants. Even as the privileged continue to prosper, assassinations, race riots, anti-war protests all begin to challenge old political beliefs and the WASP way of life. And California beckons the jaded East with a cornucopia of opportunities.
That is not all that is good in Mad Men. It also throws up many nuggets of insights for students of marketing and management. Otherwise boring themes of designing surveys, endless struggles for right tag lines, strategies for making winning pitches, and transition from the ‘cold’ print medium to the ‘hot’ electronic one engage our attention not just for their plot value, but also their terrific authenticity.
Mad Men derives its strength from two main sources: riveting writing, mostly by Matthew Weiner (who is also the producer) and pitch-perfect acting by an ensemble cast led by Jon Hamm, (who seems to have stepped out of the same Central Casting department responsible for Rock Hudson and Dean Martin) as Draper.
Weiner cut his writing teeth on that granddaddy of all new American television, The Sopranos, the hugely successful epic of the Mafiosi in the New York-New Jersey area aired by the cable network HBO between 2000 and 2007. Cable freed writers and creators of the new generation shows from the shackles of network television regarding situations, language and visualisation. Crime, sex, substance abuse, expletives, partial nudity, were no longer taboo. Newer and more engrossing themes created huge audience interest — for example, the recently concluded Breaking Bad dealt with the life of a cancer-stricken school teacher who made and sold drugs. It met with tremendous critical and popular acclaim. Television has followed the trend set nearly three decades earlier by films (The Godfather came in 1972) and done so with great aplomb.
The garden-variety television became suddenly far more realistic and engrossing in the 2000s. Police dramas and procedurals (The Shield, CSI), hospital shows (Gray’s Anatomy, and the marvellously stimulating House, MD, based on Sherlock Holmes), legal case studies (Boston Legal, Law and Order), were all stand-out hits and ran for many seasons. Comedy shows such as 30 Rock and Two-and-a-Half Men broke the old moulds too. Conventional soap operas continued to be offered, but they were no longer the staple of entertainment television.
The result is obvious: television is no longer the boob tube. Having become intelligent, it attracts new audiences and gives films a run for the money. David Carr of The New York Times spoke for many when he observed, “The vast wasteland of television has been replaced by an excess of excellence that is fundamentally altering my media diet” (March 9, 2014) and proceeded to list a host of shows that captivate him.
Two shows from that galaxy are of particular interest to us at present, enveloped as we are by real-life political theatre. The West Wing presents the eight years in office of an exceptionally erudite liberal and idealistic Democratic President Josiah Bartlett (a Nobel Laureate in economics, no less). The series, which ran from 1999 to 2006, eerily foretold events of a decade later. Bartlett, like Barack Obama, faced a hostile Congress, budget difficulties, a partial shutdown of the administration (all unheard of in the George W Bush presidency when the show was aired), and a weary White House increasingly remote and dysfunctional in the second term. It culminates with the election of a little known Latino Congressman, Matt Santos, as Bartlett’s successor, anticipating the phenomenal and rapid rise of Obama.
House of Cards, which just ended its second season, is the polar opposite of The West Wing. This adaptation of a British serial of the same name has Francis Underwood, a completely unscrupulous Majority Whip (the third ranking member of the majority party in the House of Representative) rising to become the unelected president (much like Gerald Ford) in less than two years. No depth is too low for him and no crime, including murder, too heinous. Oscar-winner Kevin Spacey, the lead, is enjoying a new career on the small screen. He remarked at the awards ceremony last month that it was good to get away from Washington. The second season of House of Cards had begun a fortnight earlier.
The West Wing is winding its way to conclusion on our satellite channels. House of Cards has just finished. The two shows have a common and unlikely connection. Aaron Sorkin created The West Wing and was its presiding deity for the first four seasons. David Fincher helped develop House of Cards and directed its early episodes. They had collaborated on The Social Network, the absorbing story of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook.
Our prim guardians of public morality, who blip every cuss word in the imported shows and spread haze when a female appears in her underthings, will never allow this kind of new reality in our television. What rich drama could await us if Arun Singh were to emerge from his self-imposed exile and create shows on the Bofors tale of the Kargil War! We must wax nostalgic on Buniyaad, Kakkaji Kahin or Udaan, all at least a generation old, as our specimens of reality TV!