Flameouts and Mad Men

Last season was marked by two high-profile flameouts, one network, the other cable. Aaron Sorkin dumped West Wing, which although self-important (especially that 9/11 episode) and pompous and winded and haughty sported cracking dialogue, snappy performances, plot out the wazoo and a President on the couch about his abusive father. Sorkin's follow-up? Studio 60 On the Sunset Strip, which wallowed in self-pity and dramedy cliches, even as Amanda Peet transcended its hoariest damsel-in-distress cliches. This was a show about comedy that asked its audience to bring the laughs without serving up the funny. And Sorkin wailed on network mentalities far better at the end of Sports Night, now a classic. Unexpected turnaround: Matthew Perry was hard not to like.

David Milch dumped Deadwood, about the organic swelling up of law and civilization from the slimy, expletive-ridden dirt of the genre's wild wild west to make most other westerns look meek, and turned Timothy Olyphant into a "star." You had to admire Milch: if David Chase's Sopranos was supposed to extend Coppola's Godfather, Deadwood made mincemeat of Milch's parallel genre -- America's defining metaphors as a hollowed out drunk tank/gambler's den. Milch's follow-up? John from Cincinnati, which wallowed in self-pity and hoary cliches and worst of all... CHRIST metaphors until the best thing about it was its dreamy opening surf sequence (surfers are the new cowboys). There's supposed to be a Deadwood feature film, which could redeem all this but only just. Hurray for the return of Rebecca DeMornay, a respectable comeback Luke Perry (the new Matthew Perry), and an impossibly weird and broad wink of a turn from Austin Nichols in the title role.

But even all this quickly PALED when compared to MAD MEN, finishing up its first season on AMC... this time the title sequence ("falling man") blows while the scripts and performances have all been first-rate. Already this show sports two indelible images: January Jones as suburban housewife Betty Draper, the unknowing subject of Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique, pumping shells from her shotgun at her neighbor's pigeons while sucking hard on her cigarette; and Maggie Siff as Rachel, the heiress to her father's department store empire, explaining Zionism to Don Draper (and star, Jon Hamm) as he tries to pick her up over lunch. Tobacco, misogyny, ad culture as frat culture, the pre-Kennedy era as mutable force, anti-semites dreaming up Israeli tourism campaigns... Yeah, HBO's Tell Me You Love Me gives you naked testes but its characters are weepy clichés (except for Ally Walker, who could make you cry reading the phone book. Character as a self-destructive suburban housewife under the spell of her street pimp on last season's The Shield sent her into aesthetic hyperspace.) Mad Men stokes red-hot material before whacking it with a stick. Can't wait until that elevator operator gets his own episode and Nixon's defeat leads straight to Freedom Rides down South...