Mad Men: Season One DVD: Review By Brian Gallagher

I'm typically late to the party when it comes to most TV shows. For me, for most shows, it's generally a lot easier just to knock a whole season out on DVD in a day or two, rather than watch every week. Even the shows that I do watch every week (See: Heroes), by the time the next season starts up you've pretty much forgotten everything over the summer and have to re-watch everything on DVD before the next season starts, so, hell, why not just eliminate the middleman of regular TV watching? When I heard the astounding buzz swirling around Mad Men in the summer of 2007, I knew it was something I'd have to check out eventually, and god damn am I glad I did because this is some of the most brilliant television I've ever seen.

What makes this even greater is the fact that this show really isn't an easy sell, or it isn't a very tangible sale anyway. If someone asks you what Mad Men is about, all you can really say is it's about the culture of the 1960s and advertising dudes dubbed Mad Men, since they work on Madison Avenue. There really isn't much of a hook, like there aren't any characters with super powers or people killing other people or genre elements to the show at all. No, it's just a good old-fashioned drama without all the bells and whistles (save all the period props and costumes). It's kind of a dangerous show from a publicity perspective, because there's really not a whole lot to sell the show on, besides maybe parading out a ton of critic's quotes proclaiming how amazing it is. It's really just something that has to be seen, which is a pretty ballsy move in a TV climate like today, but sometimes the ballsy moves are the ones that pay off the most, and this astounding series more than proves that maxim.

What's really intriguing about Matthew Weiner's series is that it's really not about advertising that much at all. It's kind of like Sports Night, a show set in the world of sports television but is really focused on the colorful characters that inhabit this world. While Mad Men is set in the Madison Avenue world of advertising, at the firm Sterling Cooper, and their top dog Donald Draper (Jon Hamm), but the show is really about these incredible characters and the intriguing cusp year of 1960, a year where everything was changing before people's eyes, although sometimes people forced themselves not to see that. The wardrobes and character's mentalities are still very much 1950s, especially with the way that men treat women and a woman's station in life. In the second episode we're introduced to a character that is a divorcee that moves into the Draper's neighborhood, and just the fact that she's divorced in this era casts a disparaging light on her before anyone really gets to know her. There are some quite fascinating women in the series, from Elizabeth Moss's Peggy Olsen, Draper's timid new secretary who actually starts to advance into the creative departments, January Jones' Betty Draper, Don's beautiful wife who is having just as many identity crisis issues as her husband Don is and the lovely Christine Hendricks' Joan Holloway, the head of the secretarial pool who is also fooling around with one of the firm's partners, Roger Sterling (John Slattery). We get some wonderful male characters as well, with Bryan Batt's Salvatore Romano, the head of the art department who is having identity issues also... of a sexual nature, Vincent Kartheiser's Pete Campbell, an extremely ambitious ad man who is desperate for Draper's approval, Michael Gladis' Paul Kinsey, who also wants to write plays, Aaron Stott's Ken Cosgrove, an aspiring author as well and Rich Sommer's Harry Crane, a seemingly by-the-books man. Still, the entire series revolves around Jon Hamm's tremendous performance as Mad Man extraordinaire Don Draper, the creative director of the firm, a man who has everything but can't seem to find a way to be happy with all that he has. He fools around with mistresses on the side whenever he can, despite having a gorgeous wife and loving kids at home that he doesn't see as much as he probably should. Draper is probably one of the best-developed characters in TV history, with such a rich and mysterious backstory that unfolds throughout the season and, on top of that, Draper seems to transcend a lot of the "norms" of the time. Sure, Draper is a bad husband, with all the boozing and cheating and all, but he seems to be a few steps ahead of the game. He gives (gasp) a woman, his secretary Peggy, a shot at writing copy for a lipstick company, but he seems to slip back into the "normal" behavior with anything concerning his wife, since he's extremely protective of her. He actually blames Betty when Sterling makes some advances on her, and, if nothing else, Don Draper is a character that surely keeps the viewers on their toes at all times. ALL times. I really can't say there was a performance I didn't like this entire season, but Jon Hamm's Don Draper, with all of its complexities, is a tour de force performances leaps and bounds ahead of the normal TV curve.

What's also leaps and bounds ahead of the TV curve are the writing on the show from creator/executive producer Matthew Weiner and his writing staff. It's a show that is so effective it seems so amazingly simple to write, but that's far from the truth. With a rather large ensemble cast of characters here, each of which are given ample opportunity to show their chops, no matter how small the role, they subtly throw in these little nods and winks to the culture of 1960, both in how it is still like the idyllic 1950s and how it is progressing into what would come to be known as the 60s as a whole. We get some very intriguing stuff about the Nixon/Kennedy election, which plays a major part in the series, as Sterling Cooper is doing work for the Nixon campaign, and it's quite amazing how these men who can shape and form the purchasing minds of the country still think that Kennedy can have no shot at winning the election. To be quite honest, I could write for hours and hours about the complexities of this series, how it does such an amazing job of having so many balls in the air at the same time and still blow us away with incredible storytelling, but the more I write, the more you have to read, which means less time that you can be spending watching this phenomenal show right this f*&$ing second.

Mad Men is a simply groundbreaking achievement in television. It's a show that reminds us, in this day and age of CGI and gimmicky TV, that story truly is king, and this could be one of the best TV dramas of all time.

The features are spread out on the first three discs of this four-disc set and we start off with Scoring Mad Men, which deals with the rich musical numbers prepared for the show. We hear from the show's composer David Carbonara who talks about his style in composing for the series. He talks about how he has separate themes for certain characters and we get a pretty cool part where they talk about Betty's car crash in Episode Two and we even see the sheet music on top of the scene. Some of this stuff is kind of cool, but it's kind of boring just hearing a dude talk about music. It's about six and a half minutes long and it's worth watching...once.

Appropriately enough, the next feature is a Mad Men Music Sampler, where you can listen to 13 songs from the official soundtrack. I've never really seen this done on a DVD set before, and it's pretty cool, actually. We get songs from the likes of Vic Damone, Ella Fitzgerald, The Andrews Sisters, Bobby Vinton, Rosemary Clooney and composer David Carbonara in this nice, unique little feature.

Mad Men Season 2 Preview is next, but it's just pretty much the same thing as the "preview we are forced to watch at the beginning of the disc. It isn't actually a preview at all, as it's just a bunch of clips from Season 1 and we don't get any new footage from Season 2. Weird.

Next up is Advertising the American Dream, and this featurette talks about the trade of advertising in the 50s and 60s. We hear from a lot of actual advertising executives and also some professors talking about that proverbial American dream and advertising. It's a pretty interesting featurette with some interesting insights on this trade and our society as a whole as well. They also talk about advertising in this 60s era and how it changed the face of the trade, and how women started to come into their own, so to speak, during this era as well. This featurette runs a little too long here at almost 19 minutes, but it's also worth a watch as well.

Pictures of Elegance is next and it's a series of three photo galleries, one for Costume Design by Jane Bryant, another with Hair Design by Gloria Casny and Production Design by Dan Bishop and we get commentaries by each artist as well. It's pretty innovative, actually, since most photo galleries are, you know, just photo galleries that you can scroll through, and this one is set up a lot differently and the commentary adds a lot more as well.

The last thing we get here is Establishing Mad Men. We hear from creator Matthew Weiner and other producers and crew members along with cast members like Jon Hamm, Elizabeth Moss, Christina Hendricks, John Slattery, who actually wanted to play Draper but was too old. It's pretty interesting that Weiner brought a lot of people he worked with on The Sopranos and how Weiner envisioned these characters and how they were cast. We hear from essentially every major actor in the series and we hear some interesting stories about how they first came on board. We also hear from a lot of the show's writers, but, like other features here, this runs too long. We hear how all the writers knew Weiner from so-and-so years ago and how they went on about the research, but it is pretty cool that we hear from a writer whose actual mother shot at her neighbor's pigeons, which made it into the series in a hilarious end to Episode 9. This feature is broken up into three parts, with each part at about 20 minutes apiece. The second part goes more into the production side, and how they found locations for the Sterling Cooper offices, and the work that went into making that come to life. We hear from the actors about how they can actually get lost in this world since it's so authentic, and we take a look at the costume design as well. The third part starts off into the costumes again, talking about specific characters and how their wardrobe is matched to their characters. They also discuss hair and makeup for each character and this really is quite a comprehensive piece on how this show runs at every level. These all run for an hour, with all three parts, and it's a wonderful look inside this fantastic drama.

The episodes are presented in the 16x9 widescreen format.

The sound is handled through the Dolby Digital 5.1 format.

Sadly, I didn't get the slick Zippo packaging with this season, but it's pretty cool nonetheless. The season comes in a standard fold-out thing, but with a clear sleeve that has the de facto Mad Men logo of the silhouetted dude chillin' in a chair with a cigarette, with a title card below it. The foldouts contain descriptions of each episode and numerous photos throughout the season as well. The back gives you a brief season synopsis, more photos, a brief special features listing along with the tech specs. Nicely done.

Mad Men, simply put, just has to be some of the best television I've ever seen. It's an incredibly thought-provoking series that takes us back to an interesting time period in America, with some of the best writing and knockout performances I've seen on TV in ages. Truly phenomenal!