As writer and executive producer on the last three seasons of The Sopranos, Matthew Weiner has the blood of Bobby Bacala and Christopher Moltisanti on his hands. His new series, the critically worshipped, Golden Globe-winning Mad Men, is another close study of a secret fraternity where egos clash, tempers flare and bloody vendettas are launched. Mad Men takes place in the Madison Avenue of 1960, when advertising was seen as a sexy, aspirational profession rather than one that needs to be prefaced by an apologetic explanation.
Don Draper, the series' lead character (played by the previously little-known but soon to be big-known Jon Hamm), embodies every attribute that once made advertising guys the envy of the nine-to-five world. He's suave, he's prosperous, he looks good in a suit, he has a bottomless repository of cynical quips, he glides through life in a haze of cigarette smoke, fuelled by martinis and the ministrations of a chic, discrete boho mistress who soothes away the pain of the day before he swans back to the suburbs and his perfect model-pretty wife and high-spirited, unblemished kids.
But Don Draper is an unknowable empty shell, hiding a secret past and utterly detached from his equally at-sea model-pretty wife. And, just as Don has made himself a sexy success by presenting a glossy, smoky facade, so his Manhattan-based agency Sterling Cooper, which made its millions by playing on America's insecurities about all the things they don't have and didn't know they needed, is a barely-hidden house of pain. Women are seen but rarely heard beyond the squeals of pleasure accompanying the regular, friendly slaps on the butt. The mousey girl who shows an aptitude with copy and makes the rare transition from the secretarial pool to the copywriter's desk is regarded with pity and suspicion by all the other females in the office. The only visible black faces are the cleaners who leave in the morning moments before the staff roll in. When a Jewish client comes in for a meeting, a frantic search culls the agency's lone Jew from the mailroom. Sterling Cooper's sole gay employee works overtime presenting himself as a ladies' man and comes close to unravelling when a male client makes a pass at him. The agency boss Roger Sterling (John Slattery, the only nominally recognisable cast member) can't control his raging appetites even after he's felled by a series of heart attacks. And, on the eve of the Kennedy- Nixon election, the pulse-takers of the agency are, almost to a man, convinced of a Nixon victory and confused by the prospect that times may be changing.
For all the secrets and the affairs and the personality clashes and even the physical confrontations, Mad Men unspools at an almost hallucinatory pace. Characters listen and consider what others have said. There are long leisurely moments devoted to people thinking about what has just happened to them. By TV standards - by life standards - Mad Men requires a considerable amount of attention. "Someone was joking with me," says Matthew Weiner. "They said 'you know what your show is? It's the phone's ringing and someone walks into the room but they don't answer it.' I can honestly say that the directorial style and the pace of the show is determined by how I like things. There's so much subterfuge, so much lying and dishonesty when people are together socially, that a lot of what you're seeing when it gets slow is the honesty. Some people have described it as dreamlike but there's always a story being told. I hope that when people watch it they're not doing their chequebooks and talking on the phone because they're going to miss something."
Despite the treatment meted out to anyone who isn't white, male and the right kind of rich - Sterling Cooper's ambitious, privileged twenty-something is an almost universal object of contempt - Weiner is an ardent admirer of the era whose foibles he chronicles: "1960 was just such a fruitful, interesting time in the United States. There was so much intellectual activity going on. There's amazing musical things, amazing books were coming out. Because of the prosperity of the time, people were starting to pay attention to materialism. And also, it really was the apex of New York City. It was the centre of production, publishing, fashion, playwriting, television. It was the biggest port, and then the pill came out in 1960, which was one of the greatest challenges to ever happen to humanity. And at the bottom of all that, advertising was on the verge of a revolution." But when we think of that time in America, our first impressions are the white picket fence and the happy family. "There's such a dichotomy in the culture between the way it's been presented to the world versus the way people were actually living. A lot of the cliched depictions of the 50s - and I picked 1960 as the height of the 50s' [popular US sitcom] Leave It To Beaver and the ideal family with the dad in the hat driving the car - people were laughing at these things back then. We have a perception of the way it was and it's not even close to the way it was."
While fictional advertising men and women are as plentiful now as they were in the days when Rock Hudson and Tony Randall strode the corridors of cinematic agencies, the current incarnation of the copywriter is permanently repenting for the shallowness of their career choice.
Don Draper may be a shadowy figure, unable to fully open himself up to anyone in his life, but he's at his best when he's unashamedly selling, whether it be a product, his agency or his version of himself. "I've always thought that the reason advertising has this appeal is that there's great stock given in jobs that are creative but also make money," says Weiner. "I find that salesmanship is an American religion. It's not about conscience. His conscience should be focused on his life. Business is not about conscience - business is about selling products, which is what he's best at. If you set it now, he would have to be apologising, he would have to be feeling sick about what he does."
As the man behind the suffocation of Christopher Moltisanti and the execution of Bacala in a model train shop, Weiner does not discount the role played by The Sopranos in the ultimate evolution of his subsequent show. "The Mad Men pilot script was how I got my job on The Sopranos. When I got there the show was already a billion dollar success. David (Chase)'s attitude was basically 'serve the story, make sure you're saying something, make everything a little movie'. You start to really think about the audience and surprising them and not giving them what they're expecting. I was there for three seasons, I'd already seen it as a fan for four. It made me raise my game, it made me pay more attention and it made me trust myself."
Mad Men, Sun, 10pm, BBC4
