The Three Faces of Mad Men: Middlebrow Culture and Quality Television

Melissa Jane Hardie

doi:10.5130/csr.v18i2.2762

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Published: Sep 17, 2012

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5130/csr.v18i2.2762

Keywords:

quality tv, middlebrow, gender, identity

Melissa Jane Hardie

University of Sydney

Abstract

This article examines how history is represented in Mad Men and how anxiety about period is registered in the series' documentation of the relationship between pleasure and aesthetic experience. the author argues that the series re-animates mid-century debates about the relationship between low and middlebrow culture and does so by demonstrating the middlebrow's self-conscious representation of processes of mechanical reproduction. She shows that Mad Men's representation of historical period is intimately tied to its own status as "quality tv", and that this alliance is made available in the series' representation of gendered pleasure. Svetlana Boym's notion of the "off-modern" is considered as a way to think about Mad Men's historical detours and revisions, and its reckoning with questions of gender, identity, and aesthetic experience.

Issue

Vol. 18 No. 2 (2012): Secular Discomforts and On Mad Men

Section

On Mad Men (Peer Reviewed)

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Author Biography

Melissa Jane Hardie, University of Sydney

Melissa Jane Hardie teaches in the English Department, University of Sydney. Recent publications include an article on Kitty Genovese and chapters on Djuna Barnes and the editing of modernist texts, Law and Order: SVU and its fans, and Lindsay Lohan and her closet.

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Melissa Jane Hardie, University of Sydney