When I decided to watch Mad Men for the first time, this episode (season 4, #1) was the only one I had access to.
While I am not quite old enough to remember 1965, I have a pretty good memory of the period directly after, and I lived in a town that trailed in these sorts of things. Moreover, our family had plenty of stuff from the era.
I was looking to determine how faithful the historical rendering would be.
Some of the artifacts (Don's television, the Jai-Alai promotional literature) looked old, probably because they were authentic originals. The Griffin shoe shine kit was the same type we had, and a fixture in many homes at the time, an excellent touch.
The older execs, and the folks from Jantzen swimwear, looked and responded to Don's behaviour exactly as they should have.
I am suspicious of the IBM Selectric, it looks like a later model, but I could be wrong.
Costuming is fine, but I think Don was wearing his tie a little longer than was done at the time. The Dick Van Dyke show would be an excellent frame of reference for that kind of stuff.
I am a bit surprised that Don would be drinking Canadian Club ... that's pretty cheap stuff for someone like Draper. Of course, not everyone was a snob about booze, especially then.
There was one phrase that the writers got VERY wrong. At one point, Peggy tells Don "It was going well, until it didn't" or something like that. That turn of phrase only came in common usage recently. At that time she would have said, "Well it started out fine, but (fill in bad event)" I saw a similar blunder in a trailer where the female speaker states "That is SOOOO 1964," a common way of saying things now, but unlikely then.
I am doubtful that even a hard-drinking and smoking street smart room of male execs would use some of the coarse language, similes and metaphors employed in the show (e.g. "stuff her like a turkey"), I am SURE that it would not have happened with a lady in the room.
I appreciate the fact that the characters have varying degrees of awareness of where the advertising world, and the world at large is going, without preaching particularly in one direction of another.
I did NOT appreciate the bedroom scenes that were too explicit for a DSLV14 rating, and add nothing to the show. I know that the writers and directors are trying to present a juxtaposition of the tidy, well-coiffed office world, and the untidyness of the personal lives of the characters. However, the way it is done is so jarring that it ruins the presentation.
I found John Hamm's Don Draper to be charismatic, though sometimes wooden (that could be by design, as he is always thinking about how he comes across to other people, even when he is trying to come across as someone who doesn't care how he comes across.) I didn't see enough of Betty to get a read on her. The two ladies hired by Peggy were pitch perfect. I used to deliver the morning paper to them on my paper route.
A show like this requires the same kind of commitment that a soap opera requires. I wanted Mad Men to be the chronicling of the end of an old era, and in some ways it succeeds. The show is too unsettling, and not in a profound way but merely unsettling, for me to make that kind of commitment.
