Made Men

Today I will be conspicuously silent when it comes to office chatter. Because today, everybody is talking about last night's big finale of Mad Men.

It seems like every one of my colleagues is a devotee of the show.

I am not.

In fact, I haven't watched it at all and have no opinion as to the demise or the rise of Don Draper.

I should correct myself, I watched the very first episode. But only because I had to. I was hired to work on promos for the launch of the show, which I was sure wouldn't make it past the first season. In my line of work, I've seen so many pilot episodes of shows that never went anywhere.


Top Plumber -- who will be America's supreme poopie cleaner-upper.

Ventriloquist Island -- 10 puppet masters land on the isle, only one will remain.

Breakfast Nation -- we'll sit down with real Americans, who have real problems, who like real pop tarts.


In any case, I never jumped on the Mad Men train. I have a buddy who worked on the show as an advertising consultant, so I'm not going to trash it, but it seemed all about the clothing, the personal angst and the comical up and down romances.

I have a wife and two daughters, I don't need any more of that.

Besides, I like my shows about advertising the way I like my sushi: raw and adventurous, with the potential for violent hurling.

To me at least, Mad Men had little to do with the realities of the ad world, which as the title of this piece as well as previous posts indicates, has become more and more like the Mafia. A ruthless money-making enterprise designed to line the pockets of greedy white men.

If I'm going to watch a show about the industry I've seen commoditized, digitized and declawed to the point where shitty work is celebrated and jargon-slinging posers are worshipped as prophets, I'll turn to one of the premium pay per view networks like Showtime.

Where the language is unrestricted.
Where death, suffering and the meaningless of life are explored.
And where true insight comes bursting from the television in delightful, and oh-so-true, fits of rage.

Here, for example, is a snippet from last week's Happy-ish, and Rob Reiner discussing an upcoming shoot with the Keebler Elves, the cookie baking Keebler Elves. This sums up the current state of our business in a way 1200+ posts on this blog never could: