'Pan Am' Flies Into Early '60s TV Airspace

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- The early 1960s is the hottest era in television. Nothing is going to stop it until it jumps the shark.

After Mad Men collected its fourth Best Drama Emmy last weekend, a new show looking to capitalize on nostalgia for the era will take flight this Sunday.

ABC's Pan Am, set in 1963 and starring the alluring Christina Ricci and a cast of stewardesses in pillbox hats along with a crop of closely cropped pilots, will look to recreate that bluesy era.

Judging by the trailer below, Pan Am has some potential, particularly when it comes to costume design.

Now that this genre is at maximum altitude (The Playboy Club debuted earlier this week), what is it about the early '60s that is so appealing to audiences?

One aspect of it is the style. In Pan Am, the blue uniforms are so smart and crisp and the dialogue delightfully breezy. But it's not just about the airlines, it's more the imagery of the era.

Notice how in old black-and-white photos of sporting events then that many fans in the stands were wearing hats (no, not baseball caps, fedoras), some even jackets and ties. And in football seasons, they wore dashing overcoats and scarves.

A crowd at Yankee Stadium after Roger Maris hit his 61st home run in1961.

Then you had the golden era of advertising, which Mad Men exalts. I found the cigarette ads of the day particularly rich (Taryeton: I'd Rather Fight Than Switch; I'd Walk a Mile for a Camel, etc.), which, to the detriment of the lungs of millions of Americans, portrayed smoking as cool. Either way, no one could argue with the confident, urbane tone of the ads in picture book magazines such as Life and Look.

Then there was the imbibing, risque culture. You had stiff martinis (in the office, even), long lunches on Madison Avenue, and married men living in bedroom communities likely wishing to consort with their secretaries, such as Christina Hendricks' Joan Holloway character in Mad Men.

Mad Men's Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks)

Why don't we have elegance and style en masse anymore? Sure, we have some of that (Fashion Week is a phenomenon in New York) but not across such a wide swath of the public. Why is dressing like a slob more acceptable?

Other people see ulterior, perhaps repressive motives in harkening back to an era when women were mostly homemakers and a family could get by with one breadwinner, usually dad. Salon.com wrote about "TV's new nostalgia for sexism."