Page: Retro TV revisits 'culture war'

Do AMC's "Mad Men," ABC's "Pan Am," NBC's "The Playboy Club" and BBC America's "The Hour" exploit society's barely suppressed appetite for a more sexist, racist and conservative era? Fear not. The underlying message in these depictions of the bad old days is clear: We should be better than that now, even when we aren't.

Just as we can enjoy "Gone With the Wind" without feeling nostalgic for slavery -- or "The Sound of Music" without missing the Third Reich -- we can watch the chain-smoking white men and underpaid, underappreciated women of "Mad Men" without wishing we could bring back Jim Crow racial segregation and legal glass ceilings for women.

In fact, the best moments in this surprising new nostalgia craze for the 1950s and early '60s suggest glimmers of the social revolution that we, today's audience gazing back with the wisdom of hindsight, know is about to take place.

"Mad Men" led this craze by doing what cable TV does better than the big over-the-air networks: It took a chance on trying something new -- and won. The show found thoughtful drama in a New York ad agency in a time that today's much-coveted 18-to-35 demographic knows to be ancient history, the 1960s.

That era happened to be a time when the advertising-marketing world was hitting its stride. The best ads often seemed more entertaining than the media that carried them. The 1960 Kennedy-Nixon presidential race and the civil rights revolution showcased the rising power of television to move politics and government. Against this backdrop, we see how changing attitudes toward sexism, racism, homophobia and rising divorce rates play out in the lives of ad execs who are making change happen, whether for dollars or, in the case of the women in particular, respect.

"The Playboy Club" and "Pan Am," by comparison, are less engrossing over-the-air knockoffs inspired by a pathology that the late TV pioneer Ernie Kovacs described as "the beat-it-to-death syndrome." Every time somebody comes up with a successful new TV idea, he said, other programmers "beat it to death."

The most prominent theme that these new retro shows share is a trip back, as filmmaker-essayist Nora Ephron sarcastically wrote in a Newsweek essay, "to the early 1960s, to that golden moment just before the women's movement came along and ruined everything."

"Pan Am" is easier to like than "The Playboy Club." It employs "stewardesses," as flight attendants used to be known, to remind us of the days before deregulation -- back when airline travel was associated with a costly, glamorous experience, not a high-altitude bus ride.

The program starring Christina Ricci plays like a high-flying "Sex and the City," a time when airlines opened up a world of fun, travel and financial independence to a generation of white-gloved women who are portrayed as well-trained, well-educated and, despite the prevailing sexism of the times, variously skillful at navigating men into or away from their restricted air space.

"The Hour" is a recently completed six-part BBC America take, still available on-demand, of a fictitious BBC newsmagazine program during the 1956 Hungarian uprising and Suez Canal crises. Leave it to the Brits to give us a gripping noirish mix of love triangles, hardball office politics, a feverish hunt for a Soviet mole, genteel battles with government censors and, oh, yes, elegant bouts of class warfare between folks for whom class still mattered -- a lot!

This program, as in its American cousins, we see the beginnings of what we now call the culture wars. Ads, news media, the Playboy ethic, globalism and changing concepts of family still fuel emotions in America's political and cultural divide. Even seemingly dry issues like the economy -- and what to do about it -- take on a high moral equivalency in the battle between those who see a need for more liberal progress versus those who want to take American values back, at least to the days before Elvis.

To see where we're going, it helps to look at where we've been. The new retro TV dramas offer us sexism and other social problems in a comfortably distant form for today's audiences. They offer a past that was much worse than today in many ways, but it also suggests directions to a better future.

Email Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com, or write to him c/o Tribune Media Services, 2225 Kenmore Ave., Suite 114, Buffalo, NY 14207.