I'm Stephen Metcalf, and this is the Slate Culture Gab Fest, The Fine Line Edition.

This is also the daily podcast from slate.com for Wednesday, August 27, 2008.

On today's program, we're going to talk about madmen, stately and nuanced or portentous and boring.

Tropic thunder, hilarious and spot-on, or tasteless and self-regarding.

And finally, we'll literalize today's theme with Man on Wire, a documentary about Philippe Petit,

the man who wirewalked between the Twin Towers.

Joining me today are Slate's deputy editor, Julia Turner. Hello, Julia. Hi, Steve. And Slate's associate editor, John Swansberg. Hey, John. Hey, good to be here. Julia, let's start with Mad Men. This show, to put it mildly, is a huge critical darling. It's beloved. It has a growing audience on AMC. By the way, I should say we're about to discuss sort of major

plot points from season one. So if you haven't gotten all the way through season one, you

might want to skip ahead 10 minutes so we don't spoil anything for you. My sense is that there

are people who are still holding out against its charms. Where do you fall on this issue of

whether this is a brilliant period satire of the early 1960s and the

admin who gave us our modern sensibility, or is it slow and fatuous?

I fall somewhere in the middle. I don't think it's slow, nor do I think it's nuanced satire.

I think it's just a really, really pretty soap opera.

I mean, I think kind of the web of relationships among the advertising execs, their wives, their mistresses, their secretaries, is just dishy.

I'm enjoying it.

I think you said to me before we started recording, it's like soap wrapped in something kind of fru-frew and delicious.

But how can we separate here the soap from the wrapping?

I mean, John, this is one of the loveliest-looking television shows.

I think any of us has ever seen.

It certainly is a show that picks up on the kind of production values and seriousness of design and presentation of The Sopranos. It's very much a made-for-cable piece. Is there something more serious at the heart of it, or is there a lot of high-brow grasping? I think this is a good question. I'm trying to sort that out still. Matthew Winer, who's the creative man behind the show, told Alex Wichel and her New York Times magazine piece recently that the design is not the star of the show. I think that's very much open for debate. I mean, I think a big part of the joy in watching it is looking at this design. I mean, I was telling my colleagues last week that after sort of having devoured the first season in a matter of seven or ten days, I was seriously thinking about having some suits made and just coming to work in suits

from now on and buying a lot of skinny ties and redoing my apartment with, you know, all seren.

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