TELEVISION Two important series began this week: important, that is, for TV’s future. If programmes of this quality keep being made, discerning audiences will continue to support the medium and individuals and teams of talent will continue to go there to do good work. Both of these series come from such people.
Mad Men (second series, BBC4, Tuesdays) is the long-nurtured brain-child of the writer and producer Matthew Weiner, who wrote episodes in the last two series of The Sopranos. The first series, set in 1960, revealed, in the fictional US ad agency Sterling Cooper, the mechanics of the advertiser’s craft, the teasing out of words and images to coax a mass audience into purchase by evoking dreams of ease and beauty, envy and desire. At the same time, it created – in characters such as the creative director Don Draper (Jon Hamm), Pete Campbell, Draper’s rival, and Peggy Olsen, the rare woman copywriter – a vividly dramatic micro-society grappling with new riches and status, with women’s changing role, with the slow unravelling of the suburban marriage.
This new series seems more prepared to mine deeper into the incidents that make up the Sterling Cooper world. The slogan for an ad for Mohawk Airlines is rolled round and round the table of writers, Draper snapping that each slogan misses the consumer spot – until Olsen, borrowing from a Valentine, links a girl’s joy at her father’s homecoming to the arrival of a Mohawk plane. The effectiveness of the scene is that it does not rub in the obvious comment – that here is a commercial transaction wrapped up in a child’s spontaneous joy, and isn’t that awful? That Olsen succeeds where the men have failed is a little feminist triumph. Mad Men lives on complexity: it is its calling card, the secret of its delight. In a scene in this coming week’s episode, the more bohemian of the writers is given a sharp lesson on the limits of his colleagues’ tolerance: you should watch to see what it is, and how subtly it is handled.
I asked the entrepreneur MT Rainey, who has led an agency and worked in US advertising, if it rang true: she thought the series brilliant in its evocation of a world, before her time, where the opening vistas of wealth and influence made admen masters of the universe. But she also thought that it underplayed the use of consumer research, then establishing itself as the tool to prise open hearts and minds, and slide in the message (in an early episode of series one, Draper consigns a research report, an insult to his instinct, to the bin).
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Iran and the West (BBC2, Saturdays) is authored by Norma Percy of the Brook Lapping production company, whose role in charting crucial episodes in our contemporary life is unsurpassed – a high accolade, in a culture as uniquely rich as is British TV in the documentary art. In the past 15 years, Percy has traced the collapse of Soviet communism, the end of Yugoslavia, the endgame in Northern Ireland and charted the relationship between Israel and the Arabs in two extraordinary series: high ambition meeting high craft. The hallmark of both the author and the company – a steady care for detail, a passion for coming at the hard truth as against the easy judgment, the dovetailing of interviews so that one narrator picks up where the other ends – makes this doleful story an intellectual pleasure.
It is doleful. Thirty years ago, an autocratic, modernising Shah was overthrown by a combination of popular clerical fundamentalism allied to secular leftism to create the Islamic Republic of Iran, which from that day to this has remained as adamantly opposed to the US and the west as it is to democratic and human rights for its people. The conjuring up once more of the humiliation visited on the US and President Jimmy Carter by the failure of a mission to rescue its imprisoned diplomats was exquisitely done and as exquisitely painful to watch – the more so, since Carter, to his credit, submitted himself to retelling the tale. Masters in the art of torture, the Iranian clerics delayed the release of the diplomats until minutes after Carter had relinquished the presidency to Ronald Reagan.
Two interim judgments. Whitechapel (ITV, Mondays), a three-part thriller, shows no development beyond the unwinding of the story – a series of murders carried out in London’s East End by someone closely imitating Jack the Ripper. It has the (large) narcotic allure of junk food: but the promise of less-than-stereotyped interplay between and within the characters, hasn’t happened.
The Old Guys (BBC1, Saturdays), remains, just, hovering on the brink of minor greatness. Of the two pensioners sharing, Tom and Roy, the latter has elements of comic pathos; and Amber, Tom’s daughter, given a greater role in the second episode, is a really funny bonehead. But Tom refuses to gel as a character; and the glamorous neighbour, Sally, remains unlikely. You can’t help (or I can’t help) invoking the great “One Foot in the Grave” as a comparison: and so far, there is none.
john.lloyd@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/lloyd
