"Mad Men:" The post-"Sopranos" Zeitgeist show?

About a week into TV Press Tour, and the largest consensus vote for the show critics like the most is "Mad Men," from AMC (American Movie Classics). This is doubly impressive given that cable networks that specialize in one subject usually humiliate themselves when they branch out to different types of programming - does anyone remember Lifetime's first original series? Animal Planet's first original movie? - and AMC has but one prior original series, "Hustle," which was good, but that was a co-production with the BBC, which has been at this business for a while and therefore should know what it's doing. "Mad Men" is all AMC's doing. And it's great.

"Mad Men" - premiering Thursday - is set in the world of Madison-Avenue advertising in the year 1960, where men were men (as long as they were WASPs) and Scotch was their drink and women were their playthings who understood their place in the world and cigarettes were inhaled almost as often as oxygen. Part of its genius is that it may be the most politically incorrect show now on TV - and simply because it honestly portrays American society a mere half-century ago.

"Mad Men" comes from Matthew Weiner, a staff writer on "The Sopranos;" in fact, it was his original "Mad Men" spec script, written seven years ago, that won him the "Sopranos" gig. He confirms the story that David Chase told him that even if he were ever to fire him off his show, he would still try to help him get "Mad Men" made. (Weiner tried to cajole Chase into directing the pilot, unsuccessfully; instead, "Sopranos" director Alan Taylor took the helm.)

Oddly, HBO, though it obviously had Weiner's "Mad Men" script, never even broached the topic of airing the series. That's a particularly damning fact, particularly given how HBO has foundered a bit in recent years: Shows like "Rome," "Big Love" and the upcoming "Tell Me You Love Me" have had their merits (or not), but coverage of them has invariably focused on their salacious aspects - ancient Roman decadence, polygamy and NC-17-level sexual frankness - rather than on their actual quality. With "Mad Men," most that has been written about it focuses on its quality and its ideas.

Which made some of Sunday's "Mad Men" press conference kind of frustrating at times. Questions during press conferences can be kind of stupid, but in general, critics in attendance step up to the level of play of their adversary. They'll largely ask fairly intelligent questions at PBS press conferences, and invariably ask dumb ones at press conferences for Fox reality shows - more or less, what the shows involved deserve.

But it seemed to me that the questions for "Mad Men" were missing the point. There were questions about all the smoking on the show and questions for the actresses about what they thought about the show's sexism. But if a show has big ideas, you're doing them a disservice if you ask them about small ideas: Allow them to elevate the level of discourse, even if most of entertainment journalism can't be bothered to elevate itself beyond the vacant insights of Victoria Beckham these days. Honest: There're worse things than inviting people to think.

So we got highfalutin: "To expand on those past couple of questions, this may be one of the most
politically incorrect shows on television right now
simply because it just shows the mores of
the country less than a half century ago. So, in that
way, it's kind of about how our society has evolved. And
so, anyone out there who wants to tackle this: We know
what gains have been made, but what has been lost? And
are men more enlightened or are they just more wussy
these days?"

From there, Weiner generously moderated a mini-panel discussion amongst his cast on the overarching sociological themes the show, by nuanced extrapolation, explores (none of these themes are directly addressed, as the show is too busy being vibrant and funny and subversive - you just have to pay a little attention to see what it's really getting at). The panel talked for four transcript pages before another question was posed, and afterwards, Weiner actually thanked me for my question. (And, yes, of course we'll delve into those issues, when the print story on the show breaks. So be patient, already. Do you really expect a blog entry to reveal to you the mysteries of the universe?)

Sunday night, AMC hosted the evening's press-tour party, at the Friars Club in Beverly Hills (which apparently has yet to pay its air-conditioning bill, but otherwise served as a great kitsch place to celebrate old-school attitude), featuring a performance by Jeff Goldblum's jazz combo (marking perhaps the first time in Press Tour history that the performer at a TCA party was more famous than the stars on the show the party was feting).