Mad About Mad Men

• Jul 19, 2007 12:32 AM ET
• by Matt Roush

I can't remember the last time the most buzzed-about show at a summer critics' press tour had nothing to do with the broadcast network's fall offerings. But this week, the show we can't stop talking and thinking about, and wishing we had more episodes to watch, is AMC's Mad Men, a period drama about advertising men and their professional and sexual exploits at the dawn of the '60s. (It premieres Thursday at 10 pm/ET.) Here's how I logged my first impression of the show in the pages of TV Guide recently, where I gave it a score of 9 out of 10: "Wow. The period look is dazzling: the women's tight skirts, the men's slicked hair. If iconic director Douglas Sirk ( Written on the Wind) had made TV, it would have looked like this. But this sleek, sexy, smartly cynical drama about selling everything from cigarettes to Nixon also nails the era's attitudes of casual prejudice and sexual manipulation."

In this show, men are wolves and women are pawns, Jews are invisible or patronized, and gays are closeted. The writing is sharp ("Freud, you say? What agency is he with?"), funny, biting, and if the show becomes the hit it deserves to be, the backstory will become part of TV legend. Matthew Weiner, best known before now as a writer-producer of http:/ / www. tvguide. com/ tvshows/ sopranos/ 100522"> The Sopranos, landed his gig on the HBO classic by submitting Mad Men's pilot episode as a spec script to David Chase. Weiner went on to great success with Tony and the gang, and is now poised to make a name for himself on this stylish, thoroughly absorbing show.

Critics' ardor for the show may also have been fueled by a swank party hosted by AMC Sunday night for the Television Critics Association at the revered Friars Club in Beverly Hills, with cocktail waitresses in bouffanted wigs looking as if they'd stepped out of a vintage '60s AMC movie. Jeff Goldblum, at the piano, entertained the gathering with his swinging band, and Mad Men cast member Bryan Batt (a Broadway-musical veteran) wowed everyone with a soaring rendition of Cole Porter's Night and Day.

Regardless of the festivities, most of us were already sold on this one. (The only network show I'm hearing greeted with this much enthusiasm is the pilot for ABC's whimsical fable Pushing Daisies.) Mad Men is one of the sharpest, most entertaining new series of an incredibly crowded summer TV season. I didn't want the Emmy announcement, or the rest of the network news issuing from the press tour this week, to get in the way of touting this show. You really don't want to miss it.