A few days ago I received an email from Twitter, informing me that I was being followed by Betty Draper. I followed back, and a few minutes later, Betty sent me a message, “You can’t sleep either? Thanks for keeping me company ;)”.

I’ve never been much interested in fan fiction or the fiction that inspires it, but there’s something about these characters moving in this medium that’s startlingly powerful. Both Mad Men and Twitter derive their stories and interest mostly from small revelations between carefully or carelessly controlled public and private personas (be it through multiple accounts or stolen dog tags). Like all fan fiction, the Mad Men on Twitter extend and bend the story beyond what’s possible in the stingy one-hour-a-week, one-way format of a TV show. But because Tweets are text and Twitter is a social space, @trudy_campbell and @harrycrane are able to avoid the visual dissonances that can befall a fat Batman at a comic book convention or a kitschy dinner theater performance at Disney’s MGM studios.

Within hours of @bettydraper’s email, I was following a dozen Twitterers in her orbit, including her daughter, her rival, her husband, his coworker, and his past. I followed as they converse with each other and us from 1963 – flirting, skirting, throwing dinner parties, and pouring gimlets, all using a technology that wouldn’t be invented for over forty years and whose only purpose is to capture “what people are doing right now”. @_PeteCampbell effortlessly closes the gap between his now and ours, simply by ignoring it.

Some of my favorite tweets:

“@ken_cosgrove I’ve got a stiff one for anyone who needs it. The Prosecco’s almost gone anyway. @Paul_Kinsey? @_PeteCampbell? Who’s ready?” – Sal_Romano

“Mrs. Draper is a cold, cold princess. Not much better than mom. I’m all alone.” – glen_bishop

Some articles:

• i am @bettydraper (Including dirt on her rivalry with @betty_draper
• Confessions Of A (Fake) Mad Man by @don_draper
• A Marketing Move the ‘Mad Men’ Would Love
• AMC decides to allow fans’ ‘Mad Men’ Twittering
• There’s Alka Seltzer in my Scotch (In which I trash Mad Men and AMC. What can I say, in retrospect, Season One was a necessary mess ;)

Like many, I was really taken in by the premise and pr front of Mad Men, the new drama series from AMC depicting 60′s Madison Ave. ad execs in all their three-martini-lunch, womanizing glory. Ten episodes later, I’m not so sure that this series has any staying power, and whether or not I want to watch any further. Here’s where I see trouble ahead.

First off, AMC is showing us too much of the inside of the sausage factory. If you go to their website they have short interviews with actual ad men from the period, character-by-character costume analysis by the designer, and a corny 60′s trivia quiz. While AMC intention is surely to build up the culture on which Mad Men is based, they are effectively exposing the show as raw elements, and in doing so destroying the walls holding in this highly-convincing fictional world. The whole effort seems at once desperate and self-congratulatory.

Coincidentally, it was this very kind of analysis, by the creator Matthew Weiner talking to Terry Gross on NPR, that roped me in in the first place. Weiner enthusiastically described the way visible drop ceilings, slightly dated-for-the-time costumes and stray hairs add realism to the office of Sterling Cooper where most of Mad Men takes place. He was right to focus on them, since these details are convincing, the best part of the show by far.

Yet after ten episodes, I have absolutely no emotional attachment to any character. Don Draper is too clever and too distant, and the rest of the cast is either unlikable, too shallow or two dimensional. But even unlikable characters can be brought to life by a coherent plot that raises questions and surprises us with how they are answered, but both are hard to find in Mad Men.

It would seem unfair to draw comparisons to the Sopranos, had AMC not reminded us again and again that Weiner wrote and produced for the show-to-beat. But since they brought it up, the Sopranos got everything right that Mad Men got right, and everything right that Mad Men is tanking on. The Sopranos was at least as convincing a modern-day suburban New Jersey as Mad Men is a 60′s Madison Ave (even with the benefit of a doubt M.M. gets from someone born well after Don Draper’s prime). But the Sopranos also managed the oft-applauded feat of making a very likable murderer, and put this murderer through plot arcs both wide and narrow, allowing the show to be enjoyed on a episode, season and series level.

I hope Mad Men pulls out of this early dive, but to do so, it’s going to need to get over its flawless style and start putting these witty, well-dressed mannequins to work.