TVCriticism.com

Another Summer of Quality

Forget about Fall Premiere Week. Summer has become television's finest season, thanks to the superb offerings on basic cable. While the broadcast networks, slaves they are to the young demos, continue to slavishly pander to what they believe (perhaps incorrectly) are the tawdry, immature tastes of the 18-49 demographic, basic cable is programming with respect for the intelligence of viewers young and old.

Mad Men leads the pack, of course, but it's not along. Two established dramas have reclaimed the initial promise of their early episode with strong runs during the Summer of 2008.

The Closer has matured nicely, with its prickly lead character growing less angry and a better manager of her team. And episode called "Dial P for Provenza" gave G.W. Bailey the chance to shine as he once did on St. Elsewhere. Jennifer Coolidge was hilarious in a guest role. It's great to find a drama that doesn't take itself too seriously.

Speaking of lightening up, Law & Order: Criminal Intent has also come out of a long depressing funk and gone back to police procedural basics. Detective Goren presumably has been unburdened of his dark side for future episodes. Chris Noth turned in a fine season of episodes, winding up his third tour of duty in the franchise. A top writer on the show has moved on, but let's hope his successors follow the pattern of this strong season.

Monk continues to be television's only light mystery, and genre much loved by the audience. Sometimes it's just a little too goofy, but a positive change in the supporting cast have given the program legs, and it's mystery clues are better than ever.

Raising the Bar, a new legal drama from Steven Bochco joins the TNT lineup in September, proving that television's top showrunners are finding basic cable its ideal working environment.

It wasn't a totally lost summer for the broadcasters. NBC did a commendable job covering the Olympics. But with two weeks of political conventions leading them into the Fall, don't be surprised if the network shares continue to erode as they have for the better part of the last quarter century.

In Praise of Mad Men

What I appreciate most about Mad Men is its maturity. It is civilized, intelligent, and more interested in the human condition than in exploiting facile high stakes plot points.

I love that the series refuses to pander to the presumptions of today's advertising business about the audience, even as it explores the golden age of that industry. More than any show in history it draws you gracefully into its sponsorship, and that unique ad environment is often put to good use.

Mad Men respects the emotional maturity of its audience. It doesn't pound us with a relentless musical score. It doesn't rush us along, so we wait through a long focus group for one insight at the end which will launch a career. It is ruminative, yet it celebrates imaginative energy. Sexuality is everywhere, but it's gentle and understated, reflecting the shame and inhibition which our culture has since lost, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.

The scene pitching the Kodak account in the Season One finale "The Wheel" has been heralded as one of the finest in the history of television. Small wonder Matthew Weiner was nominated twice in the writing category, once for the pilot, and again for the season finale.

Mad Men is true to the period, and it's thick with contrasts between that time and these, but never as object lessons. Dangers from cigarettes and alcohol to cellophane bags appear in the foreground, then disappear without driving home an immediate lesson like some overwrought David Kelley polemic. One minute you think the ad game is being mercilessly skewered, then the hero casually one-ups a group of critical bohemians.

It's a show you have to talk about when it's over. Did young women sometimes not know they were pregnant? Did a character anticipate those combined effects of booze, oysters and a "broken" elevator, and was that a just punishment for what preceded?

Much about the show has been justly praised: its authenticity, the lovely opening title sequence, the perfect casting. One of the small things I enjoy is that the characters read interesting, provocative authors like Marshall McLuhan and Ayn Rand, and occoasionally talk about what they've read. Sometimes they just talk like people who read. On what other program would a secretary be reprimanded with the line "your decolletage is distracting"?

Here's hoping this rich, engaging program inspires other attempts to transcend the conventions of today's low aimed prime time serials. And here's hoping that Emmy recognition will draw in a wider audience to this show. Frasier proved that aiming high to a sophisticated audience doesn't necessarily mean that audience will be small.

Perhaps Mad Men will prove that a very smart show set in the past can reach beyond viewers like those of us old enough to remember the early 1960's, and treasure our memories.

Emmy nominated Mad Men is on AMC Sunday Nights

AMC's Mad Men, TVCriticism.com's choice as the most creatively successful program of 2007, has received 16 Emmy nominations including two writing nominations for series creator Matthew Weiner. In case you missed Season One, a DVD has been released.

Season Two can now be seen Sunday nights on AMC. It seems television's smartest, mature adult programs all run during the summer: Mad Men, USA Network's Monk, TNT's The Closer, and PBS' mysteries on Masterpiece, including an all too short but extraordinary new series of Foyle's War.

Mary McNamara in Multichannel News wrote "The Mad Men season (one) finale contains one of the most memorable scenes in the history of television. Don Draper (Jon Hamm), the maestro of the Sterling Cooper agency, pitches Kodak on an ad campaign, using photos of his own beautiful wife and children as models."

The new issue of City Journal contains a wonderful op-ed "Story Time" by novelist and screenwriter Andrew Klavan. Winding up this wonderful piece about a visit to an inner city school, Klavan argues that conservatives have ceded too much by allowing liberals to become the storytellers of our country.

Klavan argues that conservatives need their own publishers and media companies to counter the liberal cultural monopoly. This reminds me of the old argument which left wing radicals debated back in the 1960's: do we form our own counter-institutions, or infiltrate and eventually take over the establishment? As it turns out, they did both.

So far, on the cultural (as opposed to the political or religious) front, conservatives are doing pretty close to neither these days.

Digital TV Converters (if you don't have cable or satellite)

DTV.gov and DTVAnswers.com are places to go for information about the February 17, 2009 transition to digital television in the United States. Better yet, just keep reading here ...

If you have an analog off-air television set which is not hooked up to a cable, satellite or telco video subscription, be aware that it's antenna-based chanel tuner will be useless after that date. The federal government is providing $40 discount cards for the purchase of small converter boxes which will allow old television sets to continue working.

For information about the "TV Converter Box Coupon Program", go directly to www.dtv2009.gov. Once you've got the discount card (and its all important number) in hand, you can either go to a retail store or an online shop like the one we used, FreeDTVshop.com to order your box.

KeepMyTV.com is another useful website with a video explaining all of this.

Which converter box do you want? Well, you can navigate through AVS Forum (see link at right) and learn all about your options. Since over 80% of the country has cable, satellite, etc., you'll mostly need these converter boxes for extra TV's, e.g. in seasonal vacation homes or for older relatives who resist the idea of paying a monthly TV bill.

In our case the concerned party required a simple remote control with large buttons. That requirement pointed us directly to the RCA DTA 800. It wound up costing $28.94 including shipping after using the discount coupon.

Physical installation is simple. The new broadcast television signals are already up, so the thing works now. You'll still need an antenna, of course, not the old rabbit ears but rather a rooftop UHF antenna or an amplified indoor type, depending on your location. Your antenna will be receiving digital images -- an all-or-nothing proposition. No weak signals will be seen, no hazy or snowy images. Distant signals with transmitters in a different direction from most other local stations will probably not come in at all. So if you're in West L.A., don't expect to get PBS channel 24 from Riverside. You'll still need cable or satellite for fringe area broadcasters.

The converter box requires a bit of setup, so that the volume and on/off controls on the remote will work with your particular old TV set. You'll also have to choose between smaller images with black "letterboxing" at the top and bottom of the screen and full screen images which cut off the sides of the newer widescreen transmissions.

The converter won't display high definition images on your old TV. It's purpose is to convert new digital signals to old analog ones which your old TV understands. The unexpected bonus will be extra channels. In some major markets, local network-owned stations are running extra all-news and all-weather channels. Even without the vastly superior image quality of a digital display, viewers can enjoy some additional choices from the broadcast menu.

Your Attention Please, Ladies and Gentlemen ...

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Over the last few years GSN has done something wonderful for everyone with a DVR system like TiVo. During the middle of the night the network aired, in sequence, black and white episodes of the classic CBS panel show What's My Line? Star blogger James Lileks praised the series in an article, as did the Wall Street Journal in Robert J. Hughes' piece entitled "Oh, the civility!" This is no insignificant cult.

Those of us who followed loyally saw history move forward one week per night, from the early 1950's through 1967. It was a time of cultural transformation in America. World War II references, exaggerated formalism, and gender stereotyping gave way to Camelot fashions, references to twisting the night away, and more subtle redefinitions of urban sophistication. This was a time when a publisher, a columnist, a stage actress and a news broadcaster, all well into middle age, were the epitome of the urban "in crowd."

In early 2008 GSN began the rerun process anew.(Yes, the press noticed.) So every weeknight at Midnight (Pacific time) history will move forward by one week, with the help of the TiVo and GSN. Some manners and mores of 1954 don't look so bad seen from 55 years later. Judge for yourself.

August 2007 column

Outstanding New Drama of 2007: Mad Men

Mad Men, a drama series set in a 1960 New York advertising agency, airs Thursdays at 10PM on AMC.

Mad Men looks to be the third great television drama of this decade, following 24 and Deadwood. It is to AMC what Sex and the City was to HBO, The Closer to TNT, Monk to USA, and The Shield to FX: a breakthrough.

The period verisimilitude is astonishing. And I'm not just saying this because my Dad's name was Don, he worked in the New York advertising business in 1960, and he smoked Lucky's. Matthew Weiner's writing is observant, the hair and costumes true to the period, the characterizations are unaffected by the conventions of a later time, and the fine actors never slip into twenty-first century intonation.

I could go on about the clever choice of clients for the ad agency; the fascinating personal and professional challenges of the characters, especially the lead Don Draper; the perfect tonal mix of humor and drama; the resonant echo of half century old gender roles; and the richly detailed study of a professional class on the make, fueled by alcohol and nicotine. But what I most want to mention first are the commercials, and how they're framed.

Some genius at AMC realized that this program was the perfect platform for advertisers. Even before watching I determined to forego the DVR for once, and check out the pods between the action. After confidently preserving the best placements for their own promos, AMC introduces each unit with a graphic bumper. It looks like the show might be coming back on, but instead we learn a bit of advertising history related to the sponsor supplying the next :30 spot. They do this not once, but for every national advertisement.

The period detail is what gives Mad Men its cinematic allure, but the characters make it great television. Jon Hamm is outstanding as Don Draper, the creative director and alpha male of the agency. Don drinks, smokes, cheats on his perfectly lovely suburban wife Betty (January Jones), abandons his brother, hides his past, and serves as our tour guide to a world "where the truth lies." Still, or maybe because of these human failings, he mesmerizes us.

The fine cast also includes Elizabeth Moss as Peggy Olson as Draper's loyal secretary, a woman whose talent for a well chosen phrase and populist sensibility do not go unnoticed, even within a maze of gender stereotypes.

John Slattery plays Roger Sterling, Draper's boss, with understated acumen. The mix of power games, sexual tension, and creative magic which drive the agency business survive to this day, and Sterling is at its nexus, shrewd, saavy, and baldly pragmatic. In her own center of power is Roger's lover, Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks), the queen bee of the secretarial pool, and the arbiter of office conduct for all "the girls".

While earnest Peggy and cynical Joan get more scenes, Maggie Siff gets the most transformational role as Rachel Menken, a woman in power, of all things. Rachel is a client, the owner of a department store headed in an upscale direction if she can only overcome sexism, anti-Semitism, and that greatest of obstacles, the temptation to fall in love with a married man.

On video --

They say that television and comedy in television is changing," said Frasier Emmy winner David Hyde Pierce in 2004. "And I just want to say when it changes back, call me."

Season 1 Season 2 Season 3 Season 4 Season 5 Season 6 Season 7 Season 8 Final (11)

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�2008 Jim Kearney

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