TNT's Trust Me Advertising Show: New 2009 TV Program is a Modern Contrast to the Sixties’Mad Men

While AMC’s Mad Men celebrated its television awards in preparation for a third cable season, TNT rolled out a much riskier Trust Me, switching the time from the sixties to the present, the setting from New York to Chicago and the mode from drama to drama/comedy.

According to the TNT website, Trust Me follows a set of "memorable characters as they try to navigate the waters of inter-office politics, personality conflicts, easily bruised egos, professional jealousies and unreasonable client demands." That sounds like a sequel to Mad Men, but the stars of the new show insist it is not.

While most 21st Century viewers have no idea what advertising was like in the post World War II era, Trust Me courts an audience that is reasonably well aware of an industry that is undergoing tsunamic change, even as the show runs through its first season.

A Fine Daytime Soap Opera

Mad Men, for all its awards, portrays a profession of conceited, self-centered men and women obsessed with money, personal power, and on-the-job sex, booze and tobacco, not necessarily in that order. It forces viewers to accept, on faith, the professional talents of its heroes because their advertising skills are seldom illustrated in the show. The program would make a fine daytime soap opera.

Fortunately, Mad Men's portrayal of the profession can be brushed aside as the product of another era.

True to their time, the Mad Men, even the creative types, are a coat-and-tie crowd. In keeping with their time, the Trust Me gang is much more casual.

Trust Me stars a couple of 45-year-old Canadians, Eric McCormack and Tom Cavanagh. They portray two friends who form a talented ad creative team at a Chicago agency named Rothman Greene & Mohr.

Really Is About Advertising

Karla Peterson of the San Diego Union-Tribune says that the problem with Trust Me, unlike Mad Men, "is that it really is a show about advertising." She adds that the first two episodes of the show "are mostly about the importance of taglines and why a guy needs a corner office. It's diverting, but not particularly absorbing."

Describing their Trust Me roles in an interview with Marc Allan of the Washington Post, McCormack said he and Cavanagh play guys who "are the masters of the old (advertising) ways, and the old ways are being destroyed by 18-year-olds who blog."

Requisite Females

Both Mad Men and Trust Me pay the requisite attention to females in advertising with women copywriters. In Mad Men, Peggy Olsen rises past her less talented male rivals while having a baby out of wedlock, a real no-no in the 1960s. The pony-tailed Peggy is played by Elisabeth Moss.

In Trust Me, Sarah Krajicek-Hunter is a smart, divorced, award-winning copywriter who is considered arrogant by some of her male colleagues. She is portrayed by Monica Potter, who was previously seen in Boston Legal.

Dave Shiflett may have summed it up best for Bloomberg.com when he wrote that Trust Me is "an enjoyable hour that clearly doesn’t want to be taken too seriously."

That doesn’t mean that audiences won’t take its portrayal of the ad profession seriously.

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Jan 27, 2009 12:39 PM

Guest :

For the love of all humanity. PLEASE STOP WRITING SHOWS ABOUT ADVERTISING!!! Nobody can do it well, sans MadMen, and that's only because it's based in the 60's and that's what all of us in the business want to think is was like and nobody around to tell us differently. I get how an Ad Agency is a good setting for a show. But please stop trying to base the show around what it's supposed to be like. Sorry, TNT you're not even close. Or maybe more accurately, representing the .005% of CW/AW teams that are allowed to behave like those two dufasses portrayed. If you want to do it, get some real life ad people in there and leave the hollywood bozo's to continue messing up Law Firms and Doctor's Offices. P.s. If you would like a show based on what it's really like, I'd be happy to set consult. Truth is stranger than fiction.

Feb 9, 2009 7:49 AM

Guest :

I agree with the previous coment. I too work in "advertising" and find neither of these shows gets close. Steven Weber's brother Eric wrote and directed a movie called Suits about five years ago. Watching that, I had the funny feeling that I was at work and should try and look busy. Creatives will know what I am talking about. The truth, though, is that the dysfunction and dishonesty that are part and parcel of working in advertising would make stomach-turning viewing. So would the commonplace contempt hipsters, aka younger creatives, have for consumers. Also, this is a business which has been waylaid by the well-founded fear that bloggers can overturn any corporate apple cart. MySpace and Facebook both have seen declines in usage in their post-monetization phase. That's definitely a case of the medium being the message. Voracious/religious will not be co-opted. IF you try, they will destroy you. Prehaps that is why neither of these two shows really tries to capture what it is really like.

Feb 9, 2009 7:28 PM

Guest :

Besides, it really is hard to like a coke-addled bi-polar Creative Director who still thinks its 1978 and stlyes his hair accordingly. Interestingly, I used to work for that guy and he was, without question, the best creative adman I have ever known of. If hired, he'd walk into Chiat and immediately fire everybody with a skate- or surfboard in their office. How stupid of them to think that they we going to be anywehre else but in the office, churning out creative. But that, my friends, is where great creative is made:your tiny office, Sunday night, midnight, praying for the Ad gods to toss the tiniest jewel your way. Dont believe it? Read Ogilvy on Advertising or check out the lore surrounding Leo Burnett.