My favourite TV show: Mad Men

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2014/apr/10/my-favourite-tv-show-mad-men

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When I rise from the sofa after an episode of Mad Men, I sigh at how lucky we are to be living today. Not because today we no longer have to deal with Sterling Cooper levels of antisemitism, sexism and racism, or because today we know about the effects of alcohol and cigarettes on our fast-dying bodies, but because we are living in a time of such fantastic TV. God it's good.

Watching Mad Men is an active state. You are required to listen, and see things, and not look down at your phone even once. Much as I love the feeling of bathing in a few well-timed episodes of Friends, I do look forward to engaging with the telly, once a week at least. Mad Men episode blogs compete for references to just-spotted novels, and half-suggested political and cultural events that add texture to the characters' seductions. Fans dissect the props online, the costumes, the soundtrack, the weather. Everything means something on the internet after Mad Men, every inch of skirt; every coffee cup is a signifier, a warning or memory. The script is magnificent in that you barely notice it. There was an exciting moment last season when bloggers wrote essays explaining how they'd come to the realisation, reading between the scenes, that Megan had been murdered. She hadn't, but where a show like True Detective lights its dialogue like neon cinema signs (you can picture the writer pausing the tape after every line to turn proudly to the audience for a thumbs up) in Mad Men it just feels like ... talking. And then, at the same time, alongside all that wisdom and infinite detail, there are stories. Real stories.

Hidden identities, deathly power struggles, infidelity: loads of it. Stories that are beautiful illustrations of how advertising works to sell us fantasies about ourselves. Characters that evolve and surprise you, and then you look back and see how the things, all the things, that happened to them made them this new person who looks just the same but sadder round the eyes. Joan and Peggy, two sides of the same dented coin, a walking page of #EverydaySexism, clambering their way across that landscape of dicks and haircuts in their own, time-shaped, corseted ways. Betty, the melancholy housewife defined by her beauty, left behind by a world that is changing. Sally, coming to terms with the grotesque glamour of being a grownup. Roger, a suave combination of wit, power and death. Pete, the most ambitious man in the world. Megan, passive, wiggling, saint. And Don. The best-dressed sociopath on telly. Anaesthetised pin-up. Alcoholic dad with attachment disorder and flashes of creative genius. Liar. Sexy liar. When you Google his name there are equal numbers of essays on the twisted psychology of his character and how to utilise his inspirational sales quotes in the workplace. Which is something.

There's been plenty written on the meaning of Mad Men. Too much, maybe. But it's the way it makes you feel, rather than the things it teaches you, that deserves a bit of time, I think. The way you are both seduced and disgusted by the gorgeous excess of this filtered 1960s, the saturated colours and the way people drink. The way you develop complex relationships with the characters, to the point where they drip into your dreams like exes. The way you feel nourished after an episode, and a bit scared, because what if people find out about Don, and what if they don't? And is there any hope for Joan? Or Sally? Or "women in the workplace", and violent sex, and war, and who you are? And then, of course, the credits roll and there you are in your pyjamas 50 years later, and everything's OK because it's just TV.