The much anticipated and over-hyped Mad Men (Thursdays at 10pm on AMC) held my attention for about a show and a half before it dawned on me: this shows is horrible. The show is named after the Madison Avenue advertising crowd in NY in the 1960’s. And for the past few months you couldn’t pick up an industry mag without seeing multiple ads for the show.

It was the premise that I thought was interesting. I’ve always been curious about the early days of advertising and how the industry really took off. But it’s like the writing staff decided they also wanted to make this a documentary about living/working in the ’60s and then somewhere along the way, after drinking multiple rounds of their own spiked Kool-Aid, the entire show became about the sixties and they over dramatized every little detail.

People in the sixties smoked a lot? Ok, great, I get it. Did every single person smoke in every single conceivable situation? They do on this show. The entire first episode was like one big smokefest where even the advertisers themselves were promoting a cigarette brand. By the end of the show I had to slap on a few Nicotine patches just to get over it.

There weren’t any seat belts in cars? Ok, yeah I understand that. Do I need to constantly be reminded of this and see kids climbing all over the place in the car and flying about when the mom gets in a wreck?

And the way they depict how women were treated back then - you half expected some guy to come out of a conference room dragging the secretary by her hair while he eats a huge, raw chicken bone. And all the men cheated in the sixties, didn’t you know that too? And don’t even get me started on the racism, which is probably the most believable bit.

But it really took the cake in the scene when two kids are playing and they come running into the kitchen to see their mom and the little girl has a big dry cleaning bag over her head. And while we all gasp in the audience about the potential suffocation of this poor kid, her mom simply yells that her dry cleaning better not be wrinkled and she should run along and keep playing, while she sips on her beverage of choice. She might as well have said, “Now run around and here, hold these scissors for me, and for fun why don’t you try to stick them in the light socket”.

The show had a good premise but they want us so badly to say, “Wow, the sixties were a bunch of sexist, racist, adulterous, smoking, reckless idiots”, that they forgot the reason they even created the show. I’ve taken the serious step of un-DVR’ing it so I won’t be seeing it anymore, thank God.

If you really want to, you can watch some Mad Men videos here - but I wouldn’t waste your time.