I would say these shows ARE trying to capitalize on the popularity of Mad Men. Even if they don’t actually get why its popular and won’t be as good. i have the feeling that they think Mad Men is super popular because its set in the 60’s, not because its well written. They may even be overestimating its popularity because everyone they know (TV people?) watches it and talks about it all the time.

I’m sure that the Playboy Bunny show and the Pan Am show will do great for exactly the reason Amanda stated. How often do you see people in Mad Men discussions online talk about how great Don Draper is, and how awesome it would be to be able to fuck a bunch of hot women and drink on the job and take naps in your office. Those were the days.

Honestly, I’m not terribly worried about it. I’m actually kind of glad that the networks are starting to shell out money for shows again, instead of trying to produce everything on a shoestring budget with a mixture of:

1) World’s ________ police _______ shows where all of the footage is cop car camera footage
2) Any reality show where people aren’t paid actors and there aren’t paid writers
3) Copy-paste sitcoms that take place in a single apartment’s living room (ok, at least these have writers and actors).

Shows like Deadwood, Carnivale, Mad Men, and Firefly that actually used sets and locations and costume designers and hairdressers and writers were vanishingly scarce in the last decade. I was ready for stories the second networks went to all-game-shows-and-reality-shows format. So what if they’ve completely missed the point of why well-written, well-produced shows are popular. I’m ready for the gamble.

I like looking at the clothes. There, I said it.

But I like Mad Men for other reasons too. And yes, I have commented to friends half-jokingly that it would be cool to have bars in our offices.

Perhaps we’re forgetting about little program called That 80’s Show.

they’ll have the characters acting like they were people in 2011 instead of the 60s.

I remember reading about 40 years ago that Star Trek was “1960’s people in the future.”  This is the nature of any television—you’re going to essentially have modern characters in any period drama, whether it is future science fiction or past period dramas. 

Does anyone really think the behavior of the Romans in I, Claudius was the behavior of Rome?  Or of 1970’s Britons in a First Century fictional setting?

Kinda OT, but OMG. For years I have been skimming over Amanda’s discussions and analyses of Mad Men. A year or so ago I watched about 5 minutes of an episode & said, “Meh.”

But over Labor Day weekend I fell asleep on the couch and woke up in the middle of the night/middle of a Mad Men marathon.  I watched a couple of episodes and I was hooked. I watched NOTHING ELSE until I finished watching all of the episodes on Netflix last weekend.

Great show.

That is all.

I’m sure that the Playboy Bunny show and the Pan Am show will do great for exactly the reason Amanda stated. How often do you see people in Mad Men discussions online talk about how great Don Draper is, and how awesome it would be to be able to fuck a bunch of hot women and drink on the job and take naps in your office. Those were the days.

By industry standards, and by that I mean money spent on promotions and money spent per episode, Playboy bombed last night for NBC in its premiere. They got a 1.6 in the demo(those in the 18-34 age range I believe) and roughly 5 million viewers.  And since it is the premiere, those numbers usually drop off in subsequent weeks so unless by some miracle the ratings go up that show is doomed.

We’ll see what happens with Pan Am but it seems audiences don’t want what the networks are selling.

UltraMagnus:

I might note that the Playboy Club’s problem is probably a little more basic than that. Being a network broadcast show, it is unable to deliver the one thing people want from the Playboy brand more than anything else: titties. No titties, no ratings. QED.

While Playboy had cultural relevance in its day, now it’s just lame porn that isn’t even free. That show could have worked ten or fifteen years ago when Dean Martin and Sammy were about to die and Sinatra was causing Bono to say “Fuck” on television, but now most of the oldsters are dead and the youngsters who could have caught on to that era have moved on. The Playboy club wasn’t even the Rat Pack, but it was jazz musicians, Tony Bennetts, and Mel Tormes, and that era just isn’t today. And the idea of being a Playboy Bunny just isn’t that much of a dream anymore even for a woman who’d gladly get exploited with her clothes off. Suicide Girls and Abby Winters probably treat their models better. Or not. But still, Playboy just isn’t a big deal.

As for the Pan Am show, I like the concept in some boring historical ways, but I really don’t see how early commercial aviation seems exciting enough to make the characters anything more than bouncy mattresses for hunky pilots and exotic foreigners. I have a bad inkling it will be a 60s version of Sex and the City, with matching luggage being the new Manolos.

But what the fuck do I know? The only new shows I’ve seen this season are an episode each of Adventure Time and Regular Show. I love those stupid shows.

Period shows are a reflection of an idea of what we want them to be.  1950s is June Ward, 1960s is hippies and counter-culture, 1970s are the regression and failure of Vietnam…so on and so forth.  We distill these complicated pieces of history down and worse yet US culture turns on the 5’s not the 0’s so really what we think of as “1950s” is more so 1945-1955 or 1955-1965 (June Ward is the earlier, civil rights is the latter).  Mad men is like the Sopranos, Game of Thrones, Boardwalk Empire, or anything else put out there with a certain sophistication.  They take a setting and take the time to craft complex characters. 

If anything the greatest advantage a period show can have is either to be nostalgic or have anybody relevant already dead.  There is an awkward myopic blind spot we have as Americans about history where we fall in love with the nostalgia (Happy Days, That 70’s Show) or we tie into an already dead era and reapply our cultural standards to it (EVERY WESTERN EVER MADE, M*A*S*H [Yes, I know they weren’t dead but they were effectively forgotten]).  Mad Men is in that age category where Don Draper would be pushing 80+ as his youngest staff would be in their 60s.  The majority of viewers probably grew up with it in their cultural soft spot (9-13) or are viewing it for the complexity of the show. 

The Pan Am show reeks of bad feminism promoted by conformity.  “Look these girls were pioneers! In mini-skirts with matching little blue hats!”  Rather than focusing on pioneers in Feminism who didn’t simply fling themselves at an industry that was already becoming predominantly female. I just googled the time period to make sure I was correct and somebody already did the legwork for me.  The link gives a nice little timeline of why Pan Am is such an awful show in concept and I can only pray fails. 

http://femininityinflight.com/activism.html

Perhaps we’re forgetting about little program called That 80’s Show.

I didn’t. I still have a couple of tapes with all the broadcast episodes on it. I liked it, but even though it was made by the creators of That 70’s Show, they fell into the too easy trap of making lame and tired ‘lol80s’ jokes. The very first episode had the practically standard joke about how awesomely small portable phones were.

There were interesting things about it, but it didn’t have much to work with.

Anyway, I’m glad Amanda caught that MASH and Happy Days are particularly bad examples of ‘period’ TV shows. MASH was never really about Korea and after about a season or two, Happy Days was barely even about the fifties.

The reality is that period shows have a hard time hanging on for very long. The Wonder Years lasted five seasons. China Beach was four. The Dirty Dancing series lasted eleven episodes. You can find plenty of examples of period shows that simply can’t hang on. Likely due to the weight of the period they’re trying to maintain or other, more regular failures.

Even the US version of Life on Mars struggled to wrap up it’s own plot at the end. As That 70’s Show aged, they stopped referencing the era because they were too busy trying to stretch out the run. So much so that 1978 and 1979 took up the last five years. They probably could’ve rivaled MASH for how long they stretched out time just to keep the show going.

Period shows likely can only last for as long as the public is into the novelty of it. Mad Men benefits from being on cable, so they probably have fewer pressures to keep audiences fully interested and the episode count is fairly low. But if the viewing audience begins to tire of it, there is probably not much that will keep it around beyond pure stubbornness.

Does anyone really think the behavior of the Romans in I, Claudius was the behavior of Rome?  Or of 1970’s Britons in a First Century fictional setting?

Actually, if you read the novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God, the mini series, though laughably poor in terms of production values, hews reasonably close to the spirit of the books and the books are indeed somewhat accurate in many ways to Roman thinking. At very least, he doesn’t have Roman characters expressing 1930s British values or dressing in 1930s british ways. Graves, I mean to say, did his research.

Then again, he was making a very specific point about the political climate of his own era - he did live in the age of fascism, after all - and there is a big difference between using period setting and tone to talk about the modern world, and what Amanda is getting at when she rightly suggests they’ll tone down the 60s angle to make these shows less weird for the squares.

Hell, Mad Men is absolutely intended for modern audiences, but that doesn’t mean it gets a lot of the important period details exactly right.

but that doesn’t mean it *doesn’t get a lot of the important details right…

Or of 1970’s Britons in a First Century fictional setting?

I think it was more revelatory of a couple of actors with amazing talent, John Hurt and Derek Jacobi, and does anyone remember who played Sejanus?(No fair googling!)

“1950s June Ward”

It was June Cleaver, and her husband Ward Cleaver.

And “I, Claudius” was mostly ripped off from Seutonius.

How often do you see people in Mad Men discussions online talk about how great Don Draper is, and how awesome it would be to be able to fuck a bunch of hot women and drink on the job and take naps in your office. Those were the days.

This is exactly what the networks think viewers see in Mad Men, and for the most part they’re probably right. The new shows are targeted at the nostalgic sexist douchebag contingent of the Mad Men audience, which I’m sure is a huge percentage of it.

”...does anyone remember who played Sejanus?”

...Patrick Stewart, no Googling necessary on my part…

This is exactly what the networks think viewers see in Mad Men, and for the most part they’re probably right. The new shows are targeted at the nostalgic sexist douchebag contingent of the Mad Men audience, which I’m sure is a huge percentage of it.

But that’s weird, because a broadcast network would, I think, view a show as a failure if it only grabbed a fraction of Mad Men’s small audience, wouldn’t it?

mostly ripped off from Seutonius

You say that just because you don’t like gladiator movies.

I, Claudius was created by ripping off the most sensational parts not only of Suetonius, but also of Tacitus and Dio Cassius and Josephus and whatever other sources on the period Graves could get his hands on.  Along with some touches he made up himself.

I’m actually pleasantly surprised that the Playboy Club tanked.  I am so sick of this sex-object-as-empowerment thing for women lately, and I’m glad that it’s not as appealing to the general public.  It gives me a little glimmer of hope that society wants something more than that.

Remember the first season of Happy Days? It was shot more like “Gilmore Girls” inside real houses and diners. This is when they used the Bill Haley “Rock around the Clock” theme song. It possessed a ton of verisimilitude then - the plots centered around period themes like ‘juvenile delinquency.’

Then it got successful and they did the “live in front of a studio audience” thing with a sitcom ‘stage’ set and it immediately lost its charm.

MASH made constant reference to the period - remember when Marylin Monroe was supposed to show up? Or Ted Williams? Remember the Movie Tone news episode?

There was also the circa 1978 mystery show “Ellery Queen” about a novelist who solved crimes in the 1940’s.

Plenty of period movies in the ‘70’s too (MASH and American Graffiti had been the movie precursors, and you can quickly list a number of them - The Godfather, etc).

I wonder if the urge to look back on a perhaps better time is something our era shares with the ‘70’s.

I disagree that the audience for “Mad Men” is as dumb as people suggest. It’s really not that popular a show—-as witless notes, it would be deemed a 3 episode failure to be yanked immediately if it was on NBC or ABC.  It’s a small audience.  It’s perfectly possible that it’s composed mainly of smart people who grasp the emotional and historical complexities.  Unless you literally don’t think there are a million smart people in the U.S., that’s not hard to see how most of its audience is actually following along and getting it.  I think what you really need to follow that show is a tendency to engage in fiction that is challenging. Even some conservatives do that!  I realize it’s not a huge percentage of the public that does, but certainly big enough to create a following for what is still basically a cult show.

Sorry, KingElvis, but that’s like arguing that because they wore bellbottoms on “That 70s Show”, it was authentically 70s. That show’s characters read like the 90s, especially as the series dragged on.  I’ve watched “MASH” here and there in recent memory, and the main characters are just too enlightened and smug to be 50s-style characters. The pose they take feels more like a post-Bill Murray world, honestly.

Yeah, just looked it up: “Mad Men” has an average of under 2 million viewers. .6% of the population watches it on any given night that it’s airing. Unless you’re seriously arguing that reasonably intelligent people who can tolerate characters that they wouldn’t befriend because they understand fiction on a deeper level are so few in number that they couldn’t make up .6% of the population, the “most Mad Men viewers are dumb” argument doesn’t fly with me.

Maybe Mad Men is like Woodstock, in that a lot of people claim to watch it on a weekly basis who don’t because it gets selected buzz in fashion mags and The New Yorker (and the Emmys to the exclusion of all other programs), where the core audience is actually people who are following the long story arcs started in Season 1. I hate commercial programming and waiting a week to see a new episode (and haven’t mastered DVR), so I usually watch it as six two-hour movies after the whole set comes out on DVD, like I do with Breaking Bad or any HBO program (since I don’t have HBO).

Quick question, though: was Season 2 superfluous?

P.S. Instead of Pan Am, you could always watch Come Fly With Me has period authenticity, what with the documented spate of stewardesses marrying minor European nobles in the early 60s.

I was checking out the Mad Men dress line at Banana Republic, made fun of it a little bit and then wife bought one.  I’m drinking in the day more.

  This might just be me but I think a true period piece shouldn’t take place within the living memory of the audience. The BBC drama Lark Rise to Candleford is a true piece because nobody in the early 21st century really remembers what it was like in 1890s Oxfordshire. The same goes from Broadway Empire. People today might have been alive during Prohibition but very few have vivid memories of what it was like. In contrast, there are many people who have relatively accurate and vivid memories of the 1960s and 1970s. Also

  Part of this was because while everyday life was very different in the 1960s and 1970s because of some rather different values and differences in technology, a lot of people in the present time could imagine living everyday life as it was back then, especially if they happen to be white men. Part of the appeal of Mad Men to the less aware is the 1960s lifestyle. Pan-Am and the Play Boy Club are even more obvious in this appeal. In contrast very few people would want or could even briefly imagine living in the 1890s. The alien setting and extraordinary differences in life makes something a true period piece. A 1960s life might be a very different life than presentday life but it is close enough to be understandable and approachable by the audience.

  I do agree with Amanda that the most popular period pieces are those that gloss over the differences in ideology and thought between the period and the present day as much as possible because otherwise the audience wouldn’t really be able to approach them. Look how much the concept of social difference is glossed over in a lot of BBC period pieces for an example of this let alone atttitudes towards sex or even romance.

I’ve watched “MASH” here and there in recent memory, and the main characters are just too enlightened and smug to be 50s-style characters. The pose they take feels more like a post-Bill Murray world, honestly.
Comment #24: Amanda Marcotte on 09/21 at 10:33 AM

M*A*S*H was set in the Korean War, and the books it was based on were set in the Korean War, but its real target was Vietnam, and people were still fighting there when it debuted.  Your “post-Bill Murray” feel is actually spot-on (70s) period Alan Alda.

I think period drama has some attraction but it’s hard to sustain, as you said.  Semi-period drama where you have modern and period scenes seems to fare okay.  For example, Cold Case has scenes from the original crime as well as today.  That’s got seven seasons under its belt.  And with Quantum Leap, there was a new period every week.  Plus, Scott Bakula.

For pure period TV the pickings are slim.  Outside of already-mentioned examples:
Crime Story, a Dennis Farina/Michael Mann crime series set in 1963.  Lasted two seasons.
Nero Wolfe, 2001, though it wasn’t well known, and its charm was at least as much the ensemble cast work as the time frame.
Wild Wild West, yeah I went there, original steampunk.  Plus, Robert Conrad.

Which actually opens the floor to all the TV Westerns of all time.  Except of course most of them are not really period drama, more like “here’s your moral and if you don’t believe it then these cowboys will set you straight pardner and oh haha here’s Miss Kitty to service you menfolks needs wink wink.”

By industry standards, and by that I mean money spent on promotions and money spent per episode, Playboy bombed last night for NBC in its premiere. They got a 1.6 in the demo(those in the 18-34 age range I believe) and roughly 5 million viewers.  And since it is the premiere, those numbers usually drop off in subsequent weeks so unless by some miracle the ratings go up that show is doomed.

We’ll see what happens with Pan Am but it seems audiences don’t want what the networks are selling.
Comment #7: UltraMagnus on 09/20 at 10:27 PM

I saw a few minutes of Playboy and boy did it stink.  You could see they didn’t even spring for sufficient electricity, the lighting sucked so badly. 

The scenes I saw were about some woman worrying about whether “dating” one of the customers was going to be a problem, making comical frowny faces.  And the bunny mother being a bitch presumably with golden heart, and hey look at that old style bra let’s get six or eight shots of it lolol.  And fake Ike and Tina Turner not looking or sounding like Ike and Tina Turner at all.  I couldn’t shake the feeling it was people wearing store-bought “Mad Men” Halloween costumes except those would have the cheesy glamour of amateurism.

The industry newsletter I get calls it a fail.

All my friends who watch Mad Men understand what it’s about and aren’t fetishizing the era or Don Draper, but my friends are not in any way representative of the overall population, so I can’t make any statements about what the audience “really” thinks. I do feel, however, that it’s nigh impossible to portray protagonists negatively in film and television. Audiences are desperate to relate to and like characters, and they will do what they can to identify with them, no matter how loathsome the writers try to portray them.

Don Draper is sexy and awesome. Lester is a heroic character in American Beauty. Lt. Col. Kilgore is a totally awesome badass.

It gives me a little glimmer of hope that society wants something more than that.

As BrianX pointed out, what society wants is titties. Which I applaud as a more honest, emotionally healthy response than the desire to propagate the fantasy that being a sex object is totally empowering.

Also, Tyro, Archie Bunker was totally awesome and just telling it like it was.

I love Mad Men, and I think the people who really follow it are smart.  They are the same kind of people who loved The Wire and Deadwood and The Sopranos and Six Feet Under—the people who are hungry for smart, well-written drama.  These are people who can handle deeply flawed protagonists, long character arcs, and plots that don’t resolve themselves in one hour.  They also appreciate the glamor and rich period detail.  It’s apparently a small audience, but it’s an audience that lends some prestige to a network, which is why they make these shows. 

Other networks see the superficial characteristics and think that if they copy them, they’ll have a similar success, but unless you’re watching Mad Men just for the clothes, Pan Am and Playboy are not going to do it for you.

Sorry, KingElvis, but that’s like arguing that because they wore bellbottoms on “That 70s Show”, it was authentically 70s. That show’s characters read like the 90s, especially as the series dragged on.  I’ve watched “MASH” here and there in recent memory, and the main characters are just too enlightened and smug to be 50s-style characters. The pose they take feels more like a post-Bill Murray world, honestly.

I enjoy me some “That ‘70s Show”, but there’s no denying that it’s about how people in the ‘90s see the ‘70s, not really about the ‘70s. Which I suppose is the point you’re trying to make.

And actually, that’s why the show can be painful sometimes - because it isn’t a critical take on the era, you can really feel it when the creators are saying, with their modern perspective, “Ha ha, stupid feminism,” or “Ha ha teenage boys sure do want them some whores, don’t they?” It really forces a realization of the slow pace of progress, when misogyny is still a great punchline for a sitcom 20-30 years after the period in which the show is set.

Archie Bunker was based on a British TV series, and Lear’s father:

Lear’s father would tell Lear’s mother to “stifle herself” and she would tell Lear’s father “you are the laziest white man I ever saw” (two “Archieisms” that found their way onto the show). Three different pilots were shot for the series. Justice For All (1968) was shot in New York, and named in reference to Archie’s family name (later changed to Bunker), while Those Were The Days (1969) was made in Hollywood. Different actors played the roles of Mike, Gloria, and Lionel in the first two.

Nero Wolfe, 2001, though it wasn’t well known, and its charm was at least as much the ensemble cast work as the time frame.

Agreed, along with Toronto standing in for 1940s NYC, it was a great series, the music they used was evocative of the “larger than life” feel of America in the immediate post-WWII era.

There was the the earlier TV movie that ABC made based on the novel The Doorbell Rang, where Wolfe sticks it to the FBI, and premiered it late at night, for some obscure reason(this was pre-Nightline, folks, when saber-toothed tigers roamed the Earth, with a young Brooke Adams) , which is worth tracking down since they keep the original ending of the novel.

I don’t like TV shows that pander by making previously interesting characters more “lovable”, for instance

Ha ha, my first thought seeing this was The Office, but of course the prime example is the show you already mentioned: M*A*S*H. 

I personally prefer the later episodes, because the characters are given more room to be complex.  Margaret (for example) started as just a ball-busting comic foil for Hawkeye and Trapper’s wacky practical jokes.  By the final seasons she was fleshed out, and we were allowed to sympathize with her and the responsibilities she bore as head nurse.  But I recognize the counter-argument, which is that the show lost its edge as the original characters were phased out and the writers took themselves more and more seriously. Good riddance, I say. The original film was god-awful, and the humor was misogynist as hell.

This might just be me but I think a true period piece shouldn’t take place within the living memory of the audience.
Comment #29: Lee on 09/21 at 11:06 AM

It took me a long time to realize that when Happy Days was on, the period it was depicting was barely 15 years past.  To me, as a little kid, the wave of 50’s nostalgia was a fascinating depiction of a bygone era, and I ate it up.

But now I see that “Happy Days” would have been to my parents like a a show set in grunge-era Seattle would be to me.  My kids would see it as a historical piece, I would see the depicted era as so recent that “nostalgia” seems absurd.

Maybe Mad Men is like Woodstock, in that a lot of people claim to watch it on a weekly basis who don’t because it gets selected buzz in fashion mags and The New Yorker (and the Emmys to the exclusion of all other programs), where the core audience is actually people who are following the long story arcs started in Season 1

I and my husband love Mad Men, but a couple of years back we did the calculations and realized we were paying monthly cable rates to watch one or two shows a week. Thus, cable went away, and we no longer could watch it live. Since, we’ve saved each season for watching during a downtime in other television viewing.

We’re the type of fans that show creators hate ...

But I recognize the counter-argument, which is that the show lost its edge as the original characters were phased out

Along with inflicting “Hello, Larry” on the American TV-watching public as collateral damage.

As an old guy who actually saw “Happy Days” and “MASH” during their original network runs, I can assure everyone that Amanda is right.  “MASH” was always really a show about Vietnam (with some nostalgic references to Truman, MacArthur, and Eisenhower thrown in), and after the first couple of seasons, “Happy Days” gave up trying to be a period show and became a typical ‘70s sitcom that was nominally set in the ‘50s (as a look at the characters’ 70s-era hairstyles makes clear).

Sorry, KingElvis, but that’s like arguing that because they wore bellbottoms on “That 70s Show”, it was authentically 70s. That show’s characters read like the 90s, especially as the series dragged on.  I’ve watched “MASH” here and there in recent memory, and the main characters are just too enlightened and smug to be 50s-style characters. The pose they take feels more like a post-Bill Murray world, honestly.
Comment #24: Amanda Marcotte on 09/21 at 10:33 AM

I’m not trying to be willfully obtuse, but they make plenty of references to Truman,, the constant leitmotif of WWII surplus goods etc on MASH. Remember when Margaret gets hounded by HUAC? Remember the episode where Radar plays Col Potter the Doris Day record over and over? They make many references to people at home not even knowing about the war (Korea: the forgotten war). That’s as fifties as it gets. I think it’s an error to presume that nobody was cynical, sarcastic or morally outraged by war before 1970. The more I learn about bygone eras, the more presumptions like “The fifties wasn’t ironic” fall away.
I would say the Altman film was more Vietnam-y than the TV series by far - especially in that they focused so much on the bitter cold of Korea and the indigenous population in the series. The TV show was actually quite a bit less ‘zany’ than the movie - especially in the post Col. Blake years.

I will certainly accede that later “jump the shark” years of Happy Days were just generic sitcom fodder, but the first season - IIRC it also had no laugh track - wasn’t really a sitcom in that sense - even the theme was just Bill Haley’s Rock around the clock. This is another example of something being ruined by success.

I guess the point is that if we have such a high bar for ‘authentic’ period films or TV shows, we can make it so nearly nothing really qualifies.

Ha ha, my first thought seeing this was The Office, but of course the prime example is the show you already mentioned: M*A*S*H.

I thought The Office might be what Amanda was referring to as well. I’m sure the producers of Pan Am or The Playboy Club aren’t shooting for the Mad Men audience, but just the marketing cred that it embodies. Not many folks actually watch the show, but a lot have heard of it both because of critical aclaim and the award shows. These new shows are hoping that folks will tune in trying to convince themselves they are watching cutting edge TV without having to follow long term story arcs or complicated characters.

These new shows are hoping that folks will tune in trying to convince themselves they are watching cutting edge TV without having to follow long term story arcs or complicated characters.

I don’t think the studios have quite that unrealistic of an understanding of people’s motivations for watching certain TV shows. I think that whatever demographic is invested emotionally in watching cutting edge TV is probably interested in actually watching it. If I had to guess, it’s a combination of: a) period shows are pitched ALL THE TIME, and several got into the pipeline at once; b) a perception that period shows are hot right now (which may be, but really it’s Mad Men and… what else?) and a misattribution of the acclaim of Mad Men to the setting, rather than the writing and acting; c) some of the biggest hits in TV history have been period shows (e.g. Happy Days, M.A.S.H., to a lesser extent That ‘70s Show, and so it seems like a good pitch; see a).

I haven’t read the thread and hope no one has made this comment:

If they act more like 2011 than 1967, does that mean that they won’t be able to get birth control or abortions, and that Republicans will be interested in creating the EPA instead of denying science entirely?

Period show:  Freaks and Geeks.  Lasted fewer than 13 episodes, but, boy, was it loaded with memorable episodes and actors who made it big.

And, from someone who was in that age group, they got the feel of the time just right.  I recently saw a photo of my sister at Bryn Mawr in 1979, wearing the same type of army jacket that Lindsey wore in the show.  Just pointed it out to my son and said, “see, I told you.”

I’m sorry, but doesn’t this whole discussion hinge on the assumption that non-period television shows DO reflect reality for the current period? Really?

Nip/Tuck as a realistic depiction of plastic surgeons? CSI as the accurate day-to-day lives of the police? Desperate Housewives or Sex in the City?

Were Friends or Will and Grace realistic depictions of the lives of people in Manhattan? Was Roseanne really an accurate portrayal of struggling lower-middle-class factory workers? What kind of body count can a small town in Maine really have? I always said that if Jessica Fletcher actually walked into a room, people would not be saying “Isn’t that Jessica Fletcher, the famous author?” They’d be saying “Oh, my God, let’s get out of here - that’s Jessica Fletcher, and people are always dying around her! RUN!”

I’d say that the vast majority of television shows set in the current day are just as stylized and just as false, making the same sort of use of recognizable fashions and props as any historical period show.

I think it’s more that we’re conscious that Dr. Quinn wasn’t a realistic portrayal of prairie life, especially for women than we are that most radio show hosts don’t live like Frasier Crane.

We are another post cable couple who watched Mad Men online (ITMS). We hate watching shows that get canceled, so in a self defeating manner we wait until the full season is available. (In our defense, we don’t have a broadcast option. We only get CBC on our TV set which is in the garage somewhere.)

We liked Mad Men, but we got sick of Don Draper pretty early in the show. He’s the weakest thing in it. We liked a lot of the secondary characters, but also the advertising business itself which changed a lot in the 60s. If nothing else, television took over, but there was a huge restructuring and by the mid-60s a lot of new agencies were coming out of the woodwork with a whole new style of advertising and different business models. The whole business is full of stories, some of them quite funny. Remember, this was the swinging “creative” era with more emphasis on the copywriter/illustrator team as opposed to the throw warm bodies at it assembly line approach.

Sometimes I’ll just watch a movie for the setting. Parrish is at best a B movie, but it is fascinating because it is one of those poor boy and local dynasty stories set in Connecticut tobacco country. The trick for a series is to keep it open enough to include a lot of stories.

God, I need to start watching Mad Men. Just as soon as I’m done with Sons of Anarchy…

I remember a few weeks ago Amanda referred to a bunch of the same shows that are being mentioned in this thread as “prestige TV”—Mad Men, Game of Thrones, The Sopranos, Boardwalk Empire, Breaking Bad, etc—and I think that might be part of the “How Dumb Is The Audience Really” conversation. I think these sorts of shows create a fanbase by being well-written and engaging and requiring some paying-attention-effort to follow, this fanbase includes a lot of literary types, such as people who become journalists and critics and bloggers and stuff, and then there’s a contingent of people jumping on the bandwagon because all the smart people like this show and they want to be smart and hip and prestigious too. The more visually stunning the show is (or, if you’re HBO, the more tits you put in), the longer the networks can hold onto the bandwagon-jumpers without them realizing they don’t know what’s going on and getting bored. Which section of the fanbase is bigger? I have no fucking idea, but I like to think it’s probably the first one. I think with Mad Men it probably really is predominantly the first one, but I am somewhat more skeptical about some of the HBO and Showtime shows, because being “premium” they have a brand-name cool factor that AMC doesn’t.

I, personally, am a little surprised in the recent huge surge in popularity of so many dark and complicated stories without straight-up heroes that are mostly about intrigue and entire societies/industries/churches/other institutional systems that are just totally fucked up and rotten (Game of Thrones, Boardwalk Empire, the Borgias, even The Tudors was largely about how Henry is an ass and the court system is totally dysfunctional, and whichever wife he was on usually seemed to be more the “main” character than he was, whereas I feel like for most of the history of television any show about Henry VIII would have just been about how Henry was totally pimpin’). Are audiences getting smarter, or just more cynical? Or are TV networks just deliberately trying to reach a book-reading market that had previously not watched very much television? (I know I never used to watch a lot of television until about five or six years ago when I discovered the Sopranos and Battlestar Galactica, and now I’m driving myself nuts trying to follow like twelve shows, but maybe that’s just me.)

most of the history of television any show about Henry VIII would have just been about how Henry was totally pimpin’

Each of the six plays focuses on a single wife, often from their perspective and was written by a different dramatist. The series was produced by Mark Shivas and Ronald Travers.

The series was adapted into the 1972 film Henry VIII and his Six Wives, and spawned a successful sequel, Elizabeth R, starring Glenda Jackson

The latter is a tour de force by Ms. Jackson and is well worth watching.

The Six Wives of Henry VIII

Ooh, thanks. I’ll definitely have to check that out.

Are audiences getting smarter, or just more cynical? Or are TV networks just deliberately trying to reach a book-reading market that had previously not watched very much television? (I know I never used to watch a lot of television until about five or six years ago when I discovered the Sopranos and Battlestar Galactica, and now I’m driving myself nuts trying to follow like twelve shows, but maybe that’s just me.)
Comment #49: thecynicalromantic on 09/22 at 05:52 PM

I hate to use the term “post-literate,” but there are going to be people who aren’t really good readers, never got the practice in, but can follow deep and complex stories anyway.  Surely we had those people before most people could read.  Surely many of those watching Shakespeare plays actually got something out of them.

Those people are not in the book-reading market but are going to watch “premium tv” with interest.

Happy Days and M*A*S*H were successful in part because they minimized the cultural differences between the period they were covering and the period they were airing in. ..

I have to thank you such an article.

http://www.sewarumahsederhana.com
http://www.mynameistech.com