MS4 - Text, Industry & Audience: Mad Men

The Great Hiatus is over, Mad Men returns. On Sky Atlantic though, and that will be a shame for many as BBC4 felt like the right place for it – a place for a Freeview/Guardianista/Mad Men kind of person. So to get involved with Don and co means contributing £20 a month to Sky.

Race is a subject that MM has previously only skirted round the edges of. Now we've got to 1966 and the civil-rights movement is making more and more noise right outside the open window, out of which the vile young bucks of a rival agency, Y&R, are chucking water bombs. SCDP by accident end up appearing moderately progressive, and this double episode ends up with a bundle of CVs from African-American candidates in the in-tray. A black character to come, perhaps?

Change – that's what's really going on, and being demanded – not just by the civil-rights activists but by women. There's change in the detail, too – the clothes are getting brighter, the skirts shorter, the apartments cooler, the parties and the music better, the family unit less tight. There's a strong sense of the new v the old. Mad Men feels as if it's finally getting into the 60s proper – or the 60s that most people now think of as the 60s. While the old guard are still wearing suits and knocking back tumblers of whisky, outside on the balcony the younger ones are smoking reefers before going home with each other.

To be honest it is not the most thrilling of series openers, until the party anyway. It's slow, even. Don's still doing what Don does, though now to new young wife Megan; Pete's being a prat, as ever; Roger's got nothing to do at all; Joan, lonely and paranoid at home; at work Peggy still struggles against a raging tide of misogyny.

If it wasn't for what was going on outside the window then, Mad Men would simply be a soap opera set in an ad agency, and would be in danger of getting stale, however fine the writing. What it is so good at, though, is putting these characters into the context of a time and a place.

Don's surprise 40th is one of those special Mad Men moments. It's all there in that room, in Don and Megan's beautiful new deluxe apartment – the smoke, the prejudice, the old, the new, 1966, change. And then Megan takes the microphone, joins the band, sings a saucy French song to her new husband.

It causes a fair amount of embarrassment and jealousy. And, in Don, a helluva lot of undisguisable horror. But the moment belongs to Jessica Paré, who plays Megan. The star of this show, she is what a lot of the fans will be taking about. 

Edited from: guardian.co.uk:  28/3/12