Via TVCriticism.com, here's a sneak preview from the debut episode of the second season of AMC's Mad Men, which plays like a stone knives and bearskins version of the replicants and their obsession with collecting photographs in Blade Runner:

One of Kyle Smith's readers commenting on a recent fawning New York Times profile of the series and its producer makes a great observation of the importance of the show's production design:

Regarding the article itself, I read a few pages and I believe the show’s creator said something like the show isn’t about the look of it. He’s dead wrong: it’s entirely about the look of it. Take away the look and you don’t have much.

I think that's exactly right. Sort of similar to the observation that the Don Draper character makes in the above clip, while the show's first season had some good episodes as it gained its stride and got past the hectoring tone of its debut (which I discussed at length over at Pajamas HQ last year), it's the extremely well crafted look of the show that serves as the real time machine. It's a reminder that, while Mad Men's establishment liberal Bobos In Paradise writers believe that the past is a strange, alien world, the series' production and costume designers certainly makes that world look remarkably inviting, especially when compared with today.

As James Lileks would likely agree, take today's computer technology and the aesthetics of the 1950s (that staid, conservative, gray flannel reactionary era that gave the world the Les Paul and Stratocaster electric guitars, the Ford Thunderbird and Chevy Corvette, Marilyn Monroe, Miles Davis, and Chuck Berry), and you've got the best of all worlds. Or as Rondi Adamson wrote last year, contrasting the rigid formula of Mad Men's writing with the joy of its production design:

The ad-men themselves, when they aren't drinking martinis for breakfast and smoking, are groping the hapless and/or slutty secretaries and making sexist and racist comments. The homelives of the ad-men are portrayed with equal subtlety. Every housewife is miserable and repressed -- though still managing some joyful smoking even while doing the dishes -- and every husband is adulterous -- though still around enough to drunkenly put together a dollhouse for his children. Every marriage fifty years ago, we are led to believe, was nothing but a loveless travesty, maintained for public perception only, secretly crushing the will to live of both partners.

In short, it's all great fun, but what I am enjoying most of all about Mad Men is the fashion and the etiquette. Say what you will about the role of women fifty years ago, but at least they didn't go out in flippity-flops or stretch pants, flab showing, hair out of control, even the wealthiest among them looking like they were on their way to the convenience store nearest their trailer-park in order to stock up on Doritos. And say what you will about the men, but they wouldn't have dared show up at even a casual weekend barbecue in crocs and shorts, wearing an "I'd rather be sailing" t-shirt or a baseball cap adorned with some silly sports logo, fingers poised to scratch inappropriate areas publicly. They were groomed and matching, even as personal happiness eluded them.

The second season of Mad Men debuts on Sunday, July 27th; in the interim, the first season is available on DVD, along with a soundtrack collection.