There seems to be an interesting dynamic showing up on television these days. The claim is that it all started with Mad Men, and then led to shows like The Playboy Club and Pan Am. However, I think reviewers are being a bit lazy in their approach, in that this revolution in programming started earlier than that, and we’re only see the second wave of what is most definitely going to be a norm in storytelling.

Some years ago, the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) developed a brilliant show that dealt with storytelling by looking at the “earlier” days through the lens of someone from today. The show was called Life on Mars. It dealt with a police detective of today’s time who is thrown back to 1973, a time where Manchester was just beginning to experience its sexual revolution, where women were still police assistants, and cops beat up suspects to get confessions. Shortly after this, an American series, of the same name, arrived and tried to tell the exact same story but in New York of 1973. Almost identical, the American series dealt with the trammels of unrealized feminism and a new era that was about to emerge in America (or the world).

Then came a few other shows, which were rehashes of previous shows from the mid-period of television history, that somehow tried to incorporate this new sense of feminism with modern day thinking, which for some reason has never really worked. I’m talking shows like Charlie’s Angels (movies and then a very recently bad television show), Dukes of Hazard (a movie), Starsky & Hutch (a movie), the various remakes of Star Trek and then the brilliant redesign of Battlestar Galactica (which had its own sense of dealing with feminism in the 1970s).

But Mad Men is obviously the biggest elephant in the room when it comes to discussing reviving history (or rewriting it). The show is sometimes brilliant, and other times it is somewhat annoying. It deals with feminism by showing how badly feminism was actually dealt with, and strangely enough it gives the biggest womanizer Don Draper the venue to somehow be the launching pad for the first woman to be a Manhattan advertising professional. Meanwhile, it sticks us directly in the 1960s and shows us that America had a long way to before it was going to get much better (if it ever did).

Because of the success of Mad Men, it was only a matter of time before the major networks attempted to duplicate it themselves. The first entry into the new era was The Playboy Club, which has essentially been receiving nothing but bad reviews, mainly because it tries way too hard to be both sensational and a platform to reinvent history by making it somehow appear that Playboy was a part of the feminist movement, rather than a direct impediment to it. Playboy ushered in the sexual revolution that would come in the 1970s, but it did very little for women, other than produce a platform for women to be seen as sex objects and a vehicle to produce masturbatory fantasies for young boys for several generations. While history wasn’t being all that helpful for the women’s movement, Playboy didn’t exactly empower anyone either, although people like Hugh Hefner would love nothing more than to leave his mortal coil believing he convinced more than a few peolpe that he was the progenitor of women’s liberation rather than the abuser of it. Coming from a man who spent his entire adult life cultivating young women to be his sexual playthings, I’m sorry but I just don’t see the positive role he wants to inhabit.

Pan Am is the next development in the attempt to detail women moving forward in the 1960s. My first quibble right off the start is with history itself and the television show’s attempt to place itself in it. The story starts off by talking about an event that occurred during the Bay of Pigs, shortly before the events of the first episode. The whole aircraft on the ground scene seemed a bit odd as the events of that day detail something much different occurring than what the authors tried to make happen, that somehow Pan Am pilots were more involved with the evacuation than may have been. But again, it’s fiction, so that shouldn’t be too much of an issue. There’s also another moment where one of the pilots talks about a scientific principle that wasn’t really a part of common vernacular usage in the 1960s (and wouldn’t actually be used until about 2004), but that’s more a complaint about continuity and nitpicking than anything else.

Where I have the biggest problem is with Pan Am’s attempt to reinvent feminism as some very present dynamic during the very early 1960s, when it basically wasn’t. The main character, the purser, seems to be the feminist “rebel” of the group, yet as much as they try to make her out to be that, she most likely would have been unemployed rather than the main player she is going to be written to be. And then there’s this whole espionage thread they have written into the series that seems kind of bizarre, as if the CIA was actively recruiting flight attendants to be their secret agents on flights. Okay, it could have happened, but it just seems a bit bizarre, knowing how the CIA works, or at least how it worked back then.

What concerns me most about this show is it is yet another attempt by Hollywood to rewrite history as being a lot more proactive towards feminism than it really was. As a matter of fact, Hollywood STILL has a long way to go as it would not surprise me if a number of actresses ended up having to sleep with someone to get the jobs they get on some of these shows, because that’s how Hollywood has ALWAYS acted. It would make me wonder how someone might feel pretending to be some enlightened feminist on a television show when she may have had to have done some very unenlightened things to get on the show in the first place. Yeah, there’s no evidence this ACTUALLY happens, but it is so engrained in the morality of Hollywood business that everyone somewhat expects that to happen, so it’s rarely even questioned.

What I would like to see is a show come along, like Life on Mars (the BBC version), that really examines the issues and doesn’t try to make it seem like we were historically more proactive than we really were. We did some crappy things in the past, and if we ignore those things, it only means we learned nothing from the experience, and we’ll probably do crappy things again in the future.