The Men of Summer
No ‘House’? No ‘Lost’? No sweat. This is basic-cable season, and AMC’s ‘Mad Men’ is its must-see TV.
by Devin Gordon for Newsweek
Is it weird that television’s best new drama of the summer is on a channel called American Movie Classics? No more peculiar than MTV’s thriving for years without playing much music, right? Besides, in the era of “The Sopranos,” TV has revolutionized itself by often feeling more movie-ish than the movies. AMC, which reaches into more than 91 million homes, has never created its own scripted TV series. That’ll change with the July 19 debut of “Mad Men,” a stinging drama set in 1960 about Madison Avenue advertising executives that is so sumptuously filmed, you could turn down the volume and just watch the suits. But then you’d miss series creator Matthew Weiner’s crackling dialogue, soaked with casual bigotry and sexism, evoking, he says, “this textured world where Kerouac and Ginsberg are writing while Eisenhower is in the White House.” Weiner wrote the “Mad Men” pilot seven years ago, and it helped land him a gig on—whaddya know?—”The Sopranos.” “It was my writing sample,” he says. His new series is directed by another “Sopranos” alumnus, Alan Taylor. So while “Mad Men” is a gamble for AMC, at least it’s betting the house on a couple of made men. “This is the right next step for us,” says Charlie Collier, AMC’s executive vice president and general manager. “And it isn’t unprecedented. The network most heralded for making the transition from movies to TV is HBO.”
A successful show isn’t just a moneymaker in its own right. It’s like rocket fuel for a nascent network, with ad breaks serving as a weekly bulletin board for the rest of its lineup. So in recent years, nearly every channel on the dial has rushed into the original-drama business—FX, USA, TNT, TBS, even ESPN. And each year, they all try to sift for gold at the same time: now. “We’ve always used the summer as a launchpad because that’s when the broadcasters roll over and lay dead. It was a wide-open space,” says Bonnie Hammer, president of USA Network, which spawned its first summer hit in 2002 with “Monk” and should have another with “Burn Notice,” a snappy new spy caper featuring a Clooney-esque star turn by Jeffrey Donovan.
But the summer isn’t wide open anymore, and that’s great news for cable-TV viewers, who tend to be more affluent—and more picky—than audiences for broadcast television. The battle for eyeballs has turned the season into a science laboratory, with each channel trying to cook up something unique to entice new viewers. “On cable,” says “Burn Notice” creator Matt Nix, “the only way we’re going to distinguish ourselves is by playing our own game. We can’t just do a half-assed version of ‘CSI.’ That’s pointless.” Which might explain why “State of Mind,” another new drama starring indie-film darling Lili Taylor, kicks off its July 15 pilot episode with a surreal dream sequence, complete with falling ceiling tiles and blood oozing down the door of a fridge. And the show is on Lifetime.
Inevitably, some of the channels hoping to make a big splash end up diving into an empty pool. Spike TV’s inept bank-robbery thriller “The Kill Point,” premiering on July 22, is a classic instance of a channel pandering to its audience (in this case, young men) and plowing money into name actors (in this case, John Leguizamo and Donnie Wahlberg) rather than a decent script. There’s nothing wrong with pandering, per se. ESPN sure is with its July miniseries “The Bronx Is Burning,” about one crazy summer in New York: 1977, the season of Reggie Jackson and the murderous Son of Sam. But ESPN chose quality raw materials, and it’s a hoot watching Oliver Platt and John Turturro bang heads as George Steinbrenner and Billy Martin. AMC’s “Mad Men,” like “The Bronx Is Burning,” is a period piece that never feels like a musty history lesson. It transports you to another era with such care and commitment that Weiner says he often feels like he’s writing science fiction. In a way, he’s right. “Mad Men” is out of this world.
