'Mad' About the Asia Society
Asia Society received a major (and unexpected) boost on the pop culture radar this week with a mention on Sunday night's Mad Men, the AMC show set, as all TV lovers know by now, at Sterling Cooper, a fictitious high-end New York advertising agency, during the early to mid-1960s.
In this week's episode, "The Chrysanthemum and the Sword," the conniving young accounts manager Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser) smugly informs his colleagues that "a dinner for the Asia Society" he attended has put Sterling Cooper in the running for a new and potentially lucrative client—a Japanese motorcycle manufacturer called the Honda Corporation that is still relatively little-known in the US. This sets up a major conflict with Roger Sterling (John Slattery), the firm Partner whose memories of World War II have left him with an (apparently) undying enmity towards all things Japanese.
Interns are still scouring the Asia Society archives for any documentation of the Sterling Cooper connection. In the meantime, we can all hope that Don Draper himself might swing by to check out the Rockefeller Collection some upcoming Sunday night.
Related link:
Mad Men official site