Kevin Riordan: His avenue for teaching history: 'Mad Men'

On the big screen, the sleek, smoky, shameless Don Draper was doing that voodoo he does so well.

And as another young lovely fell under his spell, another audience did, too.

About 60 people watched this compelling Mad Men clip and more as Camden County College launched what could be called March Mad Men Madness on Thursday.

A separate, five-week course about the hit AMC drama will debut, also at the Blackwood campus, on March 21.

"It's not a college course about a TV show. It's about an era," said longtime history professor John L. Pesda, who will teach students "The Early 1960s Through the Eyes of Mad Men."

Set in a swinging Madison Avenue ad agency, the show - a delicious mashup of highbrow soap opera and kitchen-sink (or dry martini) melodrama - has won 13 Emmys since its 2007 premiere.

Mad Men has made stars of Jon Hamm (Don) and Christina Hendricks (Joan). Its 52 episodes have drawn as much attention for meticulous costuming (groovy suits, tight skirts) as for substance (stunted relationships, professional brutality).

And with its attractive cast, dexterous writing, and glossy nostalgia, Mad Men has inspired fan sites, blog posts, and serious academic attention; Northwestern University and the University of California, Berkeley, have offered courses.

On Thursday, Pesda welcomed the audience into Civic Hall to watch clips and hear guest lecturer Rod Carveth opine about "Sex, Drugs, and a Little Rock 'n' Roll: The Role of Sex in Mad Men."

An enthusiastic fan (like Pesda and this columnist), Carveth is coeditor of a collection of essays, Mad Men and Philosophy, published last year by Wiley.

He started by challenging show creator Matthew Weiner's assertion that Mad Men's sexism is meant to be instructive. "I'll let you draw your own conclusions whether the show is liberating . . . or sexist," he told the audience.

Opinions among the crowd were as abundant as, say, the Lucky Strikes in virtually every scene.

Sandra Martin of Gloucester City warned against using contemporary standards to judge the show's fictional goings-on. Gloucester Township resident Barbara Nehmad said the sexual misconduct in Mad Men was all too true - today, in real life.

And a couple of young guys said the show was popular largely because of the breathtaking chauvinism of Don and other male characters.

Carveth's selected clips did make clear one unassailable point: Man Men is a seriously sexy show.

Watching great-looking people in glamorous surroundings get into and out of their clothes is certainly entertaining. The fact that the characters act like real people and not mannequins helps, too.

No wonder Pesda and Carveth, an assistant professor at Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts, insist that Mad Men can be a serious teaching tool.

"The show is able to dramatize certain aspects of the era, and convey the human experience, more than I could do just by lecturing or showing documentaries," Pesda told me. "It makes it easier to engage students."

His course will examine the show through subjects such as (surprise) sex, sexism, and racial minorities, who, at the end of Season 4, remained as scarce as seductions are abundant.

Carveth agreed: The issue has been far too fleeting, particularly given that the civil rights movement gained dramatic traction in the early 1960s.

The seeds of an imminent cultural revolution were germinating, and Mad Men depicts most of them with painstaking verisimilitude.

"It's fascinating stuff," Carveth said, adding that whatever its flaws, Mad Men "is still a really, really good show."

A show fans can examine for insights again and again: Season 4 will be released on DVD and Blu-ray on March 29.

But an announcement "has not yet been made on when Season 5 will go back into production," Olivia Dupuis, AMC's vice president for publicity, told me via e-mail.

Meaning there's no date yet for what has been a yearly late-summer return of Don and the rest of the gang.

It seems that Joan's pregnancy (will her husband in Vietnam realize he's not the father?) isn't the only cliff-hanger. And to any serious fan, the answer to this and other urgent questions isn't simply academic.