Kennedy: 'Mad Men' hits nerve with '60s realism

When it comes to television, drama is not normally my bag.

To me, shows such as "Law & Order" and "CSI" -- which seem to run in a continuous loop on cable -- are comically melodramatic.

That's why it perplexes me that I have become such a fan of AMC's drama "Mad Men," which won the Emmy for Best Drama Series last year. Incidentally, season three of "Mad Men" begins tonight at 10 on AMC (Comcast channel 19, or 429 HD).

"Mad Men," if you haven't seen it, is about Madison Avenue in the prefeminist 1960s. It focuses on the account executives and creative staff at Sterling Cooper, a fictional advertising firm. Sterling Cooper clients include Clearasil pimple cream, Playtex bras and Lucky Strike cigarettes.

Aside from a smart script and a stunning cast, "Mad Men" is one of those rare television shows that succeeds in transporting viewers to another place and time, in this case Manhattan in early 1960s. Historical evens such as Marilyn Monroe's death and the Cuban missile crisis are often woven into the show's plots.

There's no throbbing background music to "Mad Men," just the clatter of dozens of IBM Selectric typewriters, which were just as hip and ubiquitous in 1961 as iPhones are today.

"Mad Men" exposes the sexist office culture of 1960s when Hollywood was peddling Danny Thomas and Dick Van Dyke as examples of bright and sensitive American manhood.

The man character, Don Draper, is Sterling Cooper's creative genius who wears perfectly pressed pocket squares that look like they were adjusted with a T-square. Draper, a dashing veteran of the Korean conflict, smokes and drinks perpetually and removes his suit coat only to practice his favorite vice, serial adultery.

Draper's life philosophy, as shared in the series pilot episode: "You're born alone and you die alone, and this world just drops a bunch of rules on top of you to make you forget those facts."

Women swoon in his path. In almost every episode there's a shot of Draper brooding silently through curls of cigarette smoke, perplexed by his own ambivalence.

For their part, the women of "Mad Men" -- wives and secretaries, mostly -- cater to the whims of their emotionally detached husbands and bosses, who see them only as servants and sex objects. Or as Sterling Cooper's office manager, Joan Holloway, instructs a new member of the secretarial pool -- "most of the time (the men in the offices) are looking for something between a mother and a waitress."

All the parents in "Mad Men" keep a stoic detachment from their children, too. "Go watch TV" is a common command to the little ones.

I'm not sure why this adds up to such compelling television. Maybe it's just a guilty pleasure of watching the parents of baby boomers unbound by political correctness.

It's a little like witnessing a train wreck from a distance.

From the safety of nearly 50 years in the future, we know that the men will die young (two packs of Lucky Strikes a day and morning martinis will see to that), the secretaries will eventually burn those Playtex bras, and the children will outgrow Clearasil and confess their emotional blemishes to Oprah.

And advertising? Advertising, at its best, will continue to seek out intelligent art like "Mad Men" to sponsor. As ad man Don Draper muses in one episode, "Nostalgia, it's delicate but potent."

And "Man Men" is about as potent as it gets.