Tomorrow, Oprah devotes an entire show to the 1960's, a la Mad Men. Jon Hamm and January Jones will be guests, as will the cast of Jersey Boys, everyone will be dressed in the fashions of the decade, and she'll even have a list of 60's Favorite Things.
Am I the only one who thinks this is stupendously ill-conceived?
Yes, Mad Men is a very style-conscious show; that's part of its appeal. Its main character is also an unhappy, adulterous identity thief. And did she not realize that in this season alone, Mad Men has had one character perform in blackface and two others refuse to run an integrated ad campaign?
It gets worse when you move outside the fictional confines of the show. Oprah would have loved Chicago in the 1960's. Martin Luther King, Jr moved to Chicago in 1966 to help put an end to the slums but Mayor Daley himself used the city's political machine to impede his progress and the city's whites weren't exactly welcoming either. According to Wikipedia, he "received a worse reception than [he] had in the South." Ouch. And you're damn right there were riots in city after his assassination, which thanks to the 1968 Democratic National Convention, were only the SECOND worst thing to happen in the city that year.
But hey, they dressed snappier back then.
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