LOIS MISSES ON MAD MEN

Before George Lois went to work at Esquire and became a giant of the magazine industry, he was a giant of the advertising industry. Thus it makes sense that for its August issue, Playboy would turn to Lois for some comments on Mad Men, which begins its fourth season on Sunday. Now, this does not mark Lois’s first opinions on the series; he’s spoken about it before, and he doesn’t like it. He thinks it shortchanges ethnics, the Jews and Italians (and Greeks, like Lois) who were transforming the industry with audacious and creative campaigns. He is also sore that the show shortchanges art directors (of which he is among the most brilliant) in favor of copywriters. “Mad Men has given the world the perception that the scatology of the Sterling Cooper workplace was industry wide. In theor advertising, the show’s creators have the balls to proclaim that “Mad Men explores the Golden Age of advertising,” but surely they know that they are shoveling shit. Their show is nothing more than soap opera set in a glamorous office where stylish fools hump their appreciative, coiffured secretaries, suck up their martinis, and smoke themselves to death as they produce dumb, lifeless advertising. . . .The more I think and wrote about Mad Men, the more I take the show as a personal insult. So fuck you, Mad Men, you phony gray-flannel-suit, amle chauvinist, no-talent, WASP, white-shirted, racist, anti-Semitic Republican SOBs.”

Well, far be it from me to take issue with one of my heroes. And with a genius. And with a guy man who on the scene while I was literally in short pants. Still, I think Lois is taking the show entirely too personally. For one thing, all those years that he was involved in making ads that ran on Bonanza, did he think, “Yes, this is it, this is exactly what cowboy life was really like.” When his ads ran on that earlier show that involved an advertising agency, Bewitched, did he say, “Boy, you have to admire the documentary qualities of this show about a suburban witch.”  The truth is, Mad Men is brilliant not because it is about advertising, or even about the sixties. It’s about us–about people who are so sure of everything who are in the process of discovering that everything they’re sure of is falling apart. That in a nutshell was the experience of the sixties, and it has been the hugely uncomfortable experience of the last two years. I’m sorry, Mr. Lois, you’re looking at the show through the wrong side of the lens. How Mad Men handles the facts is irrelevant; its vision is brilliant.