Mad Men and Made MenAMC's new series could have been the Sopranos of advertising. It's not.

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If Mad Men put its conventional story line of power and lust in this roiling context, the show would be far more intriguing. It was a similar tension that had worked so well for The Sopranos. Tony's was a world of great change, and the attendant social and personal stresses are what brought unexpected levels of depth and even poignancy to the show's depiction of a character who might otherwise have been just another ruthless killer.

Perhaps in future episodes, Mad Men will broaden its themes and really run with the opportunities afforded by its historical setting. I hope it does. Mad Men joins a long list of books, television shows, and movies—Ex-Lady, Bewitched, Nothing To Lose, Putney Swope, How To Get Ahead in Advertising—that have used the industry and the ad guy as palimpsest. Not all of them have become enduring works of art, and very few have ever matched the achievement of John Cheever's 1960 short story "The Death of Justina"—the advertising tale to beat all others. Yet the themes that make advertising such endlessly fascinating source material—the struggle between business and creativity, the art of shaping desire and creating mythologies around products—are still very much with us.

Indeed, advertising today again finds itself in a mad state of flux, as the fragmentation of media, the decomposition of traditional audiences, and the explosion of online advertising promise even more radical changes to the industry than those of the 1960s. This lurching to the unknown has released its usual smell of fear into the air. A show that could tell us something about how the world was changing in advertising in the 1960s might also have something to tell us about our own time.

I don't know what the Mafia thought of The Sopranos, but people in the ad industry would love to have their own version of the show. And I think the general viewing public would as well. If the historical record of popular entertainment is any measure, they're every bit as fascinated by people who sell for a living as those who kill.

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