Mad Men: it pays to advertise

Mad Men's creator talks about the third series of this addictive landmark series

"THIS kind of drama can be done commercially in Australia," Matthew Weiner is saying excitedly, leaning over the hotel room coffee table like a naval officer at the rail of a ship about to go into battle.

He's the creator, writer and producer of the hot, critically acclaimed US television series Mad Men, which launches its third season early next month on pay-TV's Movie Extra.

Mad Men is the latest "best ever" after The Sopranos, The West Wing and The Wire enshrined the notion in the popular imagination that TV could measure up against the best of any art form.

"It's completely dependent on having respect for the audience and finding artistic voices and not trying to adapt them to the mass market," Weiner says. "I believe in the specificity of storytelling and a show like this hopefully inspires people in Australia that there is actually money to be made in the individual voice."

Weiner's series is set largely in the smoky executive rooms of Madison Avenue's advertising agencies in the early 1960s, and looks at the ruthless profession that shaped the hopes and dreams of contemporary America. Yet while the gorgeously realised period of the show appears to be a time of conservatism, conformity and consensus, fear and distress are carving out positions of their own in his characters' lives.

The series revolves around Don Draper (Jon Hamm), creative director at the Sterling Cooper agency, a repository of sleek mid-century cool, where his ad campaigns and client relations have earned him partnership. With his insouciance and beautifully cut bespoke grey suits, he's like the James Bond of ad execs, charismatic and confident to the point of arrogance. But underneath he's in turmoil, not himself.

Make no mistake: deception and confusion lie just beneath the glamour of Mad Men. It's a show about disguises and how we create and maintain them, becoming more and more resistant to change.

"Wear a mask long enough and eventually you will become it," Weiner says.

If you've never seen this show, Draper really is, or he really was, Dick Whitman, product of an abusive and impoverished background who joined the army to get away from it all, only to find himself in the crucible of the Korean war.

That's where he seized the main chance. In a quirk of fate a combat accident he inadvertently helped cause allowed him to assume the identity of Don Draper, a well-educated officer who was nearing the end of his tour of duty.

"Like so many American success stories, Don is a completely invented identity, and I love that," Weiner says.

"He is a constructed personality like Marilyn Monroe, someone from nowhere."

Weiner, 44, is fascinated by events in the shadows of which he grew up and the way they look so dramatic in retrospect. "History gets used to tell a certain story but I'm always interested in the story of what it's like to actually live through these things; the way people try to be human beings while things happen around them."

Period dramas, Weiner argues, traditionally have an agenda to provide nostalgia and to reassure viewers that they are superior to the characters because they know what is about to happen.

"I want you to watch these people without any TV abstractions attached to them because of the time in which they are living," he says. "I want you to put yourself in the place of a man like Don Draper and take all the situations seriously."

Season two ended with Don's wife Betty (January Jones) pregnant with their third child and Don leaving for Los Angeles as Cuba was taking aim at the US during the missile crisis.

Six months later Camelot's bubble of optimism and prosperity is unravelling and the snooty British have taken over Draper's agency, busily firing staff and redefining how things are done.

The first image in the first show of the new season is of Draper's bare feet as they scuff across a floor, then one of a pot of milk being clumsily heated on a small burner. They are the images of a misplaced man, somehow starting his life again, somewhere.

Weiner says the new series is about lost innocence and an encroaching chaos that envelopes his characters; about how they try to hold on to the things that have mattered to them or throw them away and start again with what life brings.

All are unaware of the shocks that lie ahead but there are glimmerings in the first episode, a sense of foreboding and an eerie strangeness and tension around them.

"It's about those bare feet at the start, about who this guy Don Draper is and the way he can never get away from the horror of his background," Weiner says.

We can feel Draper's disorientation as his once rock-solid 50s America starts to alter and his sense of aloneness starts to haunt him. "I don't know," he drunkenly mutters at one stage, when about to bed a blonde air hostess. "I keep going to a lot of places and ending up somewhere I've already been."

Wiener says this line sums up the creative challenge he set himself for this season.

"It's the most important line in the episode and maybe the show."

As Weiner suggests, Mad Men is a series fans become evangelical about, desperate for others to share the experience.

"It rather dares the audience to take it seriously and allows them to hang in with it through entire seasons," he says.

It's in strict contrast to the mass of flashy, interchangeable courtroom, hospital and police procedurals with which commercial TV is infatuated.

We've entered a TV age, Weiner suggests, in which we are establishing new relationships with our favourite shows, watching them in different ways. They're no longer diverting pastimes but part of our lives, deserving of our passion in a way TV shows never were before.

But, as with The Wire, The Sopranos and The West Wing, Mad Men is also a show that also can bear occasional watching. If you've never caught it before, maybe deterred by the way it's spoken about as not just very good TV but art, it's surprisingly easy to dip into.

The writing is concise and fashioned with the sense of deliberate structure of a 50s movie. Each episode's main story is easy to latch on to and, although the subplots take a while to work out, it's rather tantalising to play catch-up.

One of the pleasures Mad Men offers is its measured, contemplative pace, with none of the hard-nosed editing and speedy, muttered dialogue of most contemporary TV drama. The characters pause and think before they speak, and their eyes acknowledge the subtle nuances of moment and the unspoken subtext that hangs in the air.

Mad Men is so tantalising to watch because the show never quite goes where you think it's going, yet heads in that direction all the same.

IT'S always a delight to see H. G. Nelson (aka the affable and surrealistically erudite Greig Pickhaver) back on the goggle box. His crescendos of comic abuse never fail to get a laugh.

Nelson has been one of our great comics for years. His boisterous, spontaneous style celebrates failure and stupidity with passion and surreal energy; it's an explosive rebellion against virtue and pretension. His face has always been haggard and lopsided and the wild, mournful eyes combine with his mug to register joy one moment, protestation the next; beaming surprise one moment and cunning the next.

But it's a subdued Nelson working in a far more sociable style in ABC1's Bush Slam, a slight if enjoyable half-hour arts series in which the comic hosts poets and songwriters as they explore Australia's rural communities. "They have three days to capture the soul, the magic, the drama of the place," he tells us at the start of each show. "And then perform their verse for the citizens of the place for a thumbs up or a thumbs down."

The show is also part travelogue and part local history lesson (if seldom rising above the most obvious touristic cliches) as Nelson takes his Bush Slam bus to towns such as Cowra in NSW, Stanley in Tasmania and Yarrabah in Queensland. As he suggests, in various ways, they all resonate with tales of explorers, adventurers and pioneers, and are all interesting repositories of Australian social patterns.

While the show features various bush poets and songwriters, the best known of whom are probably James Blundell and Melinda Schneider, the rest are largely unknown outside their artistic realms. But even if some of the verse is rather woeful (although some of the practitioners are so glumly earnest they're difficult to hate), the show links to a social tradition in poetry going back to the folk ballads of early Australia. And whatever their crudeness of literary form, the hastily written poems and songs often reflect a wealth of social history with some quiet originality.

This week's episode brings Nelson's Bush Slam bus to the Murray River high country in northern Victoria. Poets Emily Ballou and Ezra Bix are challenged to capture the spirit of the area that inspired Banjo Paterson's The Man From Snowy River.

Nelson sometimes seems to struggle to maintain interest but, still, the screen really only comes alive when he's on it. It is a far cry from his last TV outing, the Comedy Channel's Comedy Slapdown. That raucous series brought the high-wire art of improvisation to local TV, pitting comics against each other in a weekly mock game show, with hand slaps and body rolls echoing the style of World Wrestling Entertainment.

Bush Slam could do with a bit more, well, slam.