By Kurt Brokaw

Poor Don Draper. We’re deep into the fourth season of AMC’s Emmy-winning “Mad Men” (AMC, Sundays, 10:00 p.m. EST), and Don’s drinking is on a slippery, slippery slope. The impeccably buttoned-up Madison Avenue agency creative director is now forgetting his apartment keys at office parties and paying a hooker to slap him into ecstasy. He’s fallen far from his daily commute to and from a big house in Ossining where his blond wife Betty and their three children saw him off to his commuter train. That all went when Betty divorced him. Don’s still trying to put the moves on any woman he can – his former secretary, the agency’s research director, the gal living down the hall in his gloomy building, almost anyone but his one loyal copywriter, mousey little Peggy. This vulnerable young woman is slowly becoming Don’s enabler, helping him when he throws up and nursing him through the night on his office couch. For his part, Don runs the show but he’s not taking direction well from his advertisers who pay the bills. Worse, you may have noticed he’s drinking earlier in the day, way before lunch now. More and more Don’s coming to resemble his management partner Roger Sterling, who’s a functioning alcoholic though he (and “Mad Men”’s writers) would probably deny the label. T: 10 Best Films About Alcoholism and Addiction

This glossy soap opera is not the best show in the world for anyone in recovery to be viewing.

Week after week it romances alcohol endlessly and portrays the in-office bar as a business accessory and after-hour drinking as a business necessity. The series has given us two employees in recovery – “Duck,” who migrated to the bigger Grey agency last season (but is back drinking and seems to have been fired)…and Freddy, the chap who was ousted for his drinking but who’s back running the Ponds account. We sense Freddy is working hard on his sobriety because he tells Peggy he has to meet his Ponds client “who’s in the same fraternity” at 79^th and Broadway for a noon meeting. Remember, this is 1964. Don, Roger and even oily young Pete (who’s married now though he fathered a child with Peggy) appear to look down on clean-and-sober Freddy, clearly because drinking has become a core essence in their lives. They don’t pity him being out of their drinking loop, but without booze there’s no social connection.

The author as a Mad Man.

THREE-HOUR LIQUID LUNCH

“Mad Men” used to position its series with the line “Where the Truth Lies,” which is one of the great double-edge lines of 21st century marketing. There aren’t many truths in “Mad Men,” but the drink is one of them. This culture editor also started as a “Mad Man” just like Don in 1961 and became a creative head on a slew of Fortune 500 accounts over 30 years in four major Mad Ave agencies plus a huge record company. Writers and art directors in this supervisor’s operations didn’t get hired unless they passed a rigorous three-hour drunken lunch, because many major business decisions were being made with sales and marketing and advertising execs at 4:00 a.m. over Last Call. It helped to drink well. No, let’s say you had to drink well, because day after day and night after night, you were doing so much of it.

The glitz and glamour of “Mad Men” is inextricably fused to its lifestyle projections wrapped around smoking, drinking, infidelity, betrayal and deceit. It’s held a chunk of America spellbound for four long years, though this fourth season is darkening rapidly. We know, of course, that Don Draper’s entire existence is built on a web of lies. The advertising industry he inhabits is based on illusion, too, on “adjusting the truth” as George Clooney would say in his role as the lawyer/fixer in the recent film, “Michael Clayton.” Don Draper’s major ally now in helping him fix things is the bottle, which he turns to for sustenance, courage, and even forgiveness. He’s becoming trapped in the disease that’s assuring him he doesn’t have a disease.

If we look at “Mad Men” and the Sterling-Cooper agency in the hard light of 1964, this agency can’t and won’t survive. The creative revolution headed up by brilliant innovators like Bill Bernbach and Mary Wells was changing Madison Avenue rapidly with off-beat themes, while giant full-service agencies offering a multitude of services were starting to put small agencies (except for the top boutiques) out of business. The Sterling-Coopers of Mad Ave, neither large nor creatively distinguished, were stuck in the middle. Virtually all perished.

At the end of the day, the only thing driving Don and Roger is their next drink. They’re living the lie together. That’s the truth “Mad Men” creator Matthew Weiner and his writers ought to ponder.

Kurt Brokaw is Associate Teaching Professor at New School University and teaches courses in film noir and early lesbian fiction at the 92^nd Street Y in Manhattan. He’s film critic of The Independent (Independent-Magazine.org).