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             This post compares and contrasts the role of gender, the target audience, and the effectiveness in reaching the target audience from the perspective of two television dramas: AMC’s Mad Men and CBS’s Madam Secretary.

Mad Men is a popular television show depicting the 1960s culture of a New York-based advertising firm (see YouTube clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfuMhXcLa-Q).  While both men and women are employed at the agency, men dominated it.  Males held and exercised positions of influence and power, while the women were primarily depicted in support roles such as secretaries and switchboard operators.  A stereotypical interaction of dominant men and subservient women in a 1960s workplace is portrayed.  Gender roles in Mad Men additionally typecast women as sex objects, capable of manipulation of-and-by men, while men were aggressive with other men and emotionally disconnected with women.  

In part, Mad Men’s males embody the husbands of Smithton women, who were emotionally unattached and unavailable to their wives.  Similarly, the women in Mad Men, like the stay-at-home Smithton women in Janice Radway’s article, appear rebuffed by a betrayal that life was not what they were promised.  While the Smithton women sought refuge using romantic fiction to rejuvenate them from dissatisfaction with the failures of patriarchal marriage, the women of Mad Men challenged their gender roles by manipulation, using sex as a form of power to maneuver men and challenge their control.  Oftentimes this approach backfired as Mad Men’s males became increasingly distant and indifferent toward women who were their sexual conquests.  Smithton women and the female characters in Mad Men craved nurturing and devotion from males.  Each found an outlet for their unanswered need, but neither was successful in attaining the emotional connection they craved. 

In her doctoral thesis “Feminism without Feminists” (2010), Linda Jin Kim asserted in that middle-class white women gained the most social benefit from the women’s movement and the civil right movement (24).  Lead character and Secretary of State, Elizabeth McCord, in Madam Secretary personified how a white female has been accordingly advantaged.  Appointed to assume a dominant role in American government, McCord is typecast as the powerful woman struggling in a male-dominated setting – quick to emphasize boundaries for her male public relations staffer and rebuff use of a stylist to improve her physical appearance (see YouTube clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZttHcUO5ND0).  McCord is portrayed as the modern, mainstreamed female – someone who can operate in a high stakes occupation and nonetheless juggle the demands of a personal life.  As such, she is remarkably unoriginal, representing Linda Jin Kim’s assertion that “today’s portrayal of feminism on television is commodified as a lifestyle rather than political ideology” (11). 

 

The target audience for Madam Secretary appears to be white women ages 25-50 who revel in the rigors of McCord’s efforts to lead the post-feminist lifestyle in a male-dominated workplace while balancing relationships with spouse and family.  White men and women ages 25-50 would be the target audience for Mad Men; both grasp the domineering male persona, oblivious to female needs for emotional connectivity.  According to “TV Series Finale,” the ratings for Madam Secretary were initially low, causing CBS to question if it would be cancelled after the show’s debut in fall 2014 whereas “The Hollywood Reporter” stated that AMC’s Mad Men, which first aired in 2007, enjoyed ratings growth into its sixth season (O’Connell).  Although planned for its final season in late spring 2015, Mad Men’s ratings are 8.7 and 8.8 out of 10 per IBDb.com and TV.com, compared to ratings of 7.3 and 7.0 for Madam Secretary from the same sources.

The ratings data could indicate that audiences gravitate to media showcasing stereotypical gender roles and, if so, that this attraction could be reinforcing the power of males over females in American society.  James Lull’s article, titled Hegemony, contends that “Hegemony requires that ideological assertions become self-evident cultural assumptions” (Dines 40).  It could follow, then, that the male-dominated workplace of Mad Men with its subordinated and sexually- manipulated females, which appears to be favored by men and women ages 25-50, might be representative of the mass media perpetuating male-centric power in our society.  It would be interesting to expose the Smithton women of the 1980s to several episodes of Mad Men and also to Madam Secretary, gauging their reactions compared to that of current audiences of these shows.  Would the Smithton women perceive the social roles in Mad Men as interconnected with the lack of nurturing they experienced?  Would the Smithton women react more favorably to Madam Secretary’s role of women than current audiences do?  While this is impossible to gauge because of the relative time periods involved, it could provide fascinating viewpoints on how mass media influences ideas and opinions of American consumers from different generations. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Works Cited

Dines, Gail and Jean Humez. Gender, Race and Class in Media. Thousand Oaks:  Sage, 2014.
          Print.

O’Connell, Michael. “TV Ratings:  Mad Men Returns with Steady 3.4 Million Viewers.”  The
          Hollywood Reporter. 8 April 2013. Web. 8 February 2015.

 “Madam Secretary: Cancel or Keep the New CBS Drama?”  TV Series Finale.  5 October 2014.   
          Web. 8 February 2015.