MS4 - Text, Industry & Audience: Mad Men

After a very long hiatus, Mad Men is returning on Sky Atlantic on Tuesday 27th March with a double episode. It would be a good idea to watch the new season and keep a track upon how the press and media responds to the show in preparation for the MS4 exam.

The show has had a massive impact on the US cultural landscape by tracking the lives of characters through the social upheavals of the 1960s.

With its meticulous reconstruction of the decade, it has won a fanatical audience and transformed the fortunes of the AMC cable network. The programme is known for its lavish sense of 1960s style in its acting, scripts and every detail of the characters' costumes and attitudes. "The 1960s have always resonated in America. We think that it was such a cool place to be. So we look at them through the show with this nostalgia, but also a knowing eye," said Professor Jennifer Dunn, a pop culture expert at Dominican University in Illinois.

That resonance has manifested itself in countless ways. The show has crept into US malls, where fashionable clothes and shoes with a distinctively 1960s look are all the rage. In New York, in the build-up to the season's beginning, the Roosevelt Hotel – whose 1960s incarnation featured in the show – is offering a "Mad Men in the City" experience for guests to pretend that they have slipped back in time by five decades. The real-life building that houses Mad Men's fictional Manhattan corporate headquarters is hosting parties where guests dress up in period clothes. Even the venerable Newsweek magazine is producing a Mad Men-styled issue, complete with retro-looking adverts. There are viewing parties galore in New York, including those at the Carnegie Club, which is one of the few bars left in Manhattan where you can legally smoke: something that would no doubt appeal to the hard-living Draper.

The show has also spawned a mini-publishing boom. There are two Mad Men cookbooks, which feature retro recipes such as Waldorf salad and oysters Rockefeller. There is a guide to imbibing called How to Drink Like a Mad Man, a reprint of a genuine 1962 humorous tome called The 24-Hour Drink Book: A Guide to Executive Survival. But it is not just all testosterone-fuelled excess. The show is famous for its depiction of the struggle women had to get noticed as equals in the 1960s.

The show's success has also led others to copy its formula of complex plots, deep characterisation and obsessive recreation of the past. They include Boardwalk Empire, which has recreated the Atlantic City of the 1920s; Pan Am, which went back to the 1960s to look at flight attendants; and The Playboy Club, which featured a 1960s gentlemen's club.

Edited from: guardian.co.uk 18/3/12