Mad Men will begin season 4 this Sunday, July 25 and it promises to give us better than ever viewing, according to AMC. The AMC Mad Men show is set in the 1960's among the high powered (mostly men) executives in a New York advertising agency. The show gives us a realistic window into the lives of the exec's and their families during this decade.
See the Mad Men preview video and thoughts from the cast about Season 4: Here
Mad Men brings us to a time that was just on the cusp of women breaking out of the housewife role. Although it has not happened at Don Draper's home, his wife is going through some type of identity crisis of being a women in this role inside this decade. The unraveling of Betty Draper is starting to look like a mental illness, but she may just find what she is looking for this season.
The depiction of home life during this era is realistic as one can get without traveling back in time in some type of machine. "Kids should be seen and not heard" is what the household motto becomes as the husband walks through the door after a long day at work. Dinner on the table at the same time every night with the family all in their predestine chairs was a sacred rule seldom broken.
Mad Men barely has a scene without a cigarette lit and in someones hand. The cocktails flow from the office cabinets and continue on to happy hour at a local bar. The first cocktail of the day is prepared by the wife as she awaits her husbands return from work, but little does she know he has at least four on board any given night walking through the front door.
Secretaries were not hired for skill, or at least the skills needed to organize and maintain an office. They are very often sexual playmates of one of the executives at the business they work in. Women dressed for doing the laundry and it was not unusual for the housewife to vacuum in pumps or even high heels.
Women are portrayed as helpless individuals, except for a few strong ones who break through the mold. It is the day and age where it was a struggle of a magnitude unknown today for a woman to be successful in a mans world.
Connecticut was home to many of the real life ad executives that worked in the city in the 60's and it still is today. The bedroom communities ran up and down the area where 95 is now. The train was the mode of transportation to and from NYC. The black suits with hats on their head and brief case in hand would line the platforms of the stations from New Haven to Greenwich waiting for their morning train. In the evening the train doors would open and carbon copies of the male population were seen pouring onto the platforms of the bedroom communities of Connecticut. This nightly return trip brought the men home to their wives waiting with the only car the family owned to pick up the man of the house.
References: AMC
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