Thoughts on Mad Men

Mad Men works as a series in large part because of the look. A lot of bright and hard-working people are evidently working very hard to get the 1960s right -- the clothes, the furniture, the cars, the ubiquitous use of cigarettes -- and it pays off.

But how often would you want to keep going back to the same museum? The show works, and is sustainable as entertainment, for some other reason.

Is it the plotting? As I believe all of the posts I have devoted to the question have helped illustrate: the plots are almost absurdly complicated. They deal with all the great themes that your undergraduate Lit professor told you were important: birth, death, commitment, abandonment, conflict, reconciliation, mystery. But every drama, and every comedy, treats of these themes. So what?

Is it the acting? The acting is serviceable but not, I think, in a stand-out way.

So (by process of elimination) is it character? I think there we have to say yes. The characters are indelible, and the otherwise rickity plots work only because these characters are interacting.

Why are the characters indelible? For those of us of a certain age, these characters are our parents, when we were kids and they were in their prime. (Yes, I know I'm not the first to make this point.) I was born in October 1958. Most of the events of the first season of the show took place before I turned two. But the world of the series, especially in seasons three and four, is decidedly my parents' world.

I had only the vaguest of ideas what my father did for a living, and the byzantine nature of the office intrigue at Sterling Cooper in a way captures this vagueness. The idea that the grown-ups were doing grown-up stuff and it wasn't something for me to worry about overly much.

The scenes in Westchester are priceless, they play to this sense of seeing events from a child's POV more directly.

What about for the younger fans of the show? I understand it has a lot of admirers who were born in the 1970s or later. My sense is that they pick up on the same inter-generational theme, even if it isn't meant for them in quite the same way.

The Anniversary of the Madoff Fiasco

It was one year ago today, Dec. 10, 2008, that the two sons of Bernard Lawrence Madoff informed authorities that their father had just admitted to them that his asset management operation was "one big lie." He would be arrested the following day. That makes this an anniversary worthy of some reflection.

Those two sons, Mark and Andrew, worked in the trading operation, not asset management, thus they just might have been innocent of any criminal involvement themselves, though I'm sure investigations are continuing, the books are not closed on that.

This distinction between the trading and the asset management side is crucial to the Madoff saga. Madoff's trading operation, formally known as a "market maker," launched in 1960, was legitimate. It was controversial in some respects (especially among those of us who consider the practice of payment-for-order-flow inherently dubious) but it was legal. It also may have been integral to the success of his ponzi scheme, formally known as an investment advisor (IA), although not integral in the way that was so often suspected.

Madoff was often suspected of attaining the unusually consistent results of the IA operation by "front-running," i.e. by making illegal use of information he acquired as a market maker. The SEC would periodically investigate Madoff, only to find that he wasn't front running, so he must be clean! The truth of course is that he wasn't front running because he wasn't really trading through the IA wing of his company at all. It was all a sham, and those surprisingly consistent results were simply invented. So the possibility of front-runing was serving perhaps two purposes. First, as noted it was a false scent that kept the regulators busy. But, secondly, it may have helped attract investors. "Pssst, this guy is likely front-running the info from his market maker side. We should get us a piece of that action."

Or ... maybe not. But it is an intriguing idea: that the victims were in part victimized by their own desire to get on the winning side of a con game. That con game wasn't happening. So they ended up on the losing side of another one.