It Was A Mad, Mad, Mad Mad World

I thoroughly enjoy Time.com’s top ten lists. However, this past year, they published a list that made me pretty upset. It was a list entitled ‘The Top 10 Things We Miss About the “Mad Men” Era.’ Before I dissect the list, I’d like to share a little anecdote. My boyfriend’s friend works in marketing and mentioned how everyone in his office loves the show, “Mad Men” because it really captures the glory days of advertising. My boyfriend told his friend that if that’s what his friends were getting out of the show, then he was watching a completely different program. When I heard this story, I told my boyfriend that those people were completely missing the point of this show and shouldn’t be allowed to watch it (I can be a bit extreme, sometimes).




Anyway, part of what I love about “Mad Men” is that it captures the 1960s really well (Creator Matt Weiner is known to be almost compulsive when it comes to portraying the details of the era). The decade was rife with tension and the show really knows how to exploit that in order to squeeze the most possible drama from the situations it places its characters in. The sixties was a decade in constant flux and it definitely changed things for the better. The fact that anyone would write a list glorifying some of the more questionable aspects of that decade is beyond me:



10. Enjoyable Air Travel: The list makes it a point to mention that stewardesses in the 60s were very attractive because hiring practices were “different” back then. Right, let’s bring back a time when people failed to be hired simply because they couldn’t make your pants happy. I’m sure every current flight attendant longs for the days when they were ogled by air travelers. Let’s all remember that many of them looked like this:

and not this:

6. Real Cocktails: While I enjoy my drink as much as the next guy, I don’t think that this is something we need to lament. If someone really wants a stiff drink, they can order one. So what if drinks have become fruitier? That doesn’t make them any less delicious! And their low alcohol content simply allows you to consume more without becoming totally shitfaced. Let’s remember that the majority of people in the 60s were probably undiagnosed alcoholics.



5. Drinks at Work: Again, why is this list encouraging alcoholism? You need only to watch the season one episode, “Red in the Face,” to see why drinking at work is a bad idea and hardly a necessity.

2. Casserole: I don’t like casserole, nor would I want to eat one every night.



1. Struggles and Causes: This one really gets me. Why on earth would anyone miss “struggles and causes,” particularly, the ones that afflicted America during the 1960s? And it’s not like people in this day and age lack causes to fight for!



Now, I understand that most of this list is a bit tongue-in-cheek and that the writers point out a lot of the problems with these items. But it still incensed me to no end to read about people longing for a time that wasn’t all that glamorous as is evidenced by the show, “Mad Men.”