The long march of the fictional-history TV series from "The Forsyte Saga" to "Mad Men"

Following the commercial comes a brilliantly uninformative preview of Season 4 of Mad Men, which premieres next Sunday. ("Brilliantly" uninformative because, hey, you don't want to have the surprises spoiled, do you?) A five-episode mini-marathon of Season 3 airs tomorrow night.

"The present is rooted in the past, the future in both. There's no escaping it."

-- Soames Forsyte (Eric Porter), to his daughter Fleur
(Susan Hampshire), in the 1967 BBC Forsyte Saga

by Ken

I've been gobbling up a couple of extraordinarily good serial dramas on DVD, and without offering any grand philosophical considerations, I can report that they have more in common than one might think.

First, there's AMC's still-ongoing Mad Men, the story built around the men and women of the Madison Avenue ad agency Sterling Cooper (and their families and other known associates), centered around the riveting (and, yes, quite gorgeous) Jon Hamm as pathologically secretive creative director Don Draper -- starting pointedly in 1960, with the Nixon-Kennedy presidential race as a backdrop to Season 1. As I've mentioned, I came late to the show, but have been catching up via "On Demand" and then DVDs of Seasons 1 and 2, and then upon release Season 3. I got diverted, though, and only recently began to feel the heat of the impending launch of Season 4, which takes place next Sunday. So I've resumed where I left off in Season 2 and have gotten halfway through Season 3.

(Note: I see that AMC is now two-thirds of the way through a three-Monday "marathon" featuring five favorite episodes from each of the past seasons. It concludes tomorrow night with the opener and finale plus three viewer-voted in-between episodes from Season 3.)

Meanwhile I finally took the plunge into the 1967 BBC Forsyte Saga, the 26-episode series, made on a shoestring budget (in black-and-white), which I must have seen several times all the way through when it was first shown and then repeated here on public television but of course haven't seen in decades now. I worried that its obvious budget-related shortcomings (you get the feeling that even adjusted for inflation the whole 26 episodes were made for about what a single hour's worth would cost today) and the undeniable staginess of the acting would make it look hopelessly passé, as indeed some online commenters have complained.

CUE THE FORSYTE SAGA THEME MUSIC

National Orchestra, Eric Coates, cond. Decca, recorded Nov. 14, 1944

The episode-opening music was an abridged version of the introduction to "Halcyon Days," the first of Eric Coates's Three Elizabeths of 1940-44 -- i.e., in our composer-conducted performance the first 44 seconds of the movement, with the end of the introduction grafted onto the opening fanfare. Then for the episode lead-out music, we jumped to the up-tempo main section of the movement,at 0:56 of our version.

To the contrary, I've been riveted. I actually enjoyed the 2002-03 Grenada version -- which I also have on DVD, and will be most curious to look at again once I've gotten through the 1967 series -- but it's a much more conventional costume drama. The first 12 episodes in particular were about as wrenching an emotional experience as I've experienced, despite the DVDs' frequent sync problems. The screenwriting goes beyond adroit storytelling to a gripping investigation of how we live our lives and why, starting with the concept of what it means to be a Forsyte, overridingly concerned with ownership -- with a certain amount of variety allowed as to what exactly is owned, though a clear focus that ownership of people exceeds the bounds of acceptability.

Of course I can't escape the way the old series is intertwined with my own history. For one thing, it's a jolt to be watching the thing now when I'm much closer in age to the dying-off older generations of Forsytes -- and since the story covers 40-plus years of family history, there are several generations of dying-off Forsytes -- than to the successive young generations. (In the photo we see the forbidden youngest lovers, the breathtakingly beautiful 1967-vintage Martin Jarvis as Jon Forsyte and the young Susan Hampshire as Fleur Forsyte.) It's also the first time I've seen the series since my mother died. Way back when, it was a an important shared experience.

(I'm watching an irresistibly cheap U.K. set on my multi-system, region-free DVD player. However, there is a Region 1 (i.e., NTSC-U.S.) edition,which can be found not-all-that-expensively.)

I've still got the the slipcased set of the six volumes of Galsworthy's Forsyte Chronicles. (Properly speaking, The Forsyte Saga refers only to the trilogy of the first three volumes), acquired as a public-television membership premium way back when. I was rather surprised when I turned my glance from the TV and instantly spotted the set, having survived all those decades and a number of moves, which have taken their toll on most of my other books of that age.

It would be going too far to say that Forsyte Saga and Mad Men are telling the same story, but in its carefully reconstructed '60s setting Mad Men is just as surely a period drama, and the concerns of creator-producer Matthew Weiner not only involve a modern version of what we might call "Forsyte-ism" but go equally to those fundamental considerations of what we live for and how, with a present and future inextricably linked to a past that's often mysterious if not actually falsified.

The cast of characters of Mad Men has been created with remarkable human insight and depth, and Weiner has capitalized on that range in the imagining of the successive seasons -- it's interesting to hear him say in the above promo that he refuses to write the same thing over and over. That has been clearly the case in Seasons 1-3, and I expect it holds true for Season 4 as well.

I've been particularly taken by the numerous episodes' worth of audio commentaries included with each season's DVDs, involving different combinations of actors, directors, and other key show contributors along with Weiner. I've found it fascinating to hear Weiner describe the kinds of detail that went into the writing, casting, and visualization of the shows, and while much of that detail may have to be picked up on repeat viewings -- and it does seem to me a show that will bear repeated viewings -- I've found that the commentaries have helped me to become a more alert viewer of later episodes as I've proceeded through the series.

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