Mad Men's Joke Is On Us
MAD MEN: “TIME & LIFE”
AMC
THE NATIONAL POST
After all the time we've spent with Sterling Cooper, saying goodbye seems cruel
I like Mad Men. I would never miss an episode. I would rank it fourth among the great longform TV series of recent years, after The Wire, The Sopranos and Deadwood. But I'm not as invested in it as I was in the other three.
Maybe this is because it lacks their exoticism. The New York advertising world isn't mine but it's closer to my experience than the streets of Baltimore, the New Jersey Mafia or the old Wild West. It's also blander. The stakes are lower. People in Mad Men can lose their jobs, their marriages can break up, and there have even been a couple of suicides. But they don't go around under the daily threat of violence. They don't have the dramatic advantage of being disadvantaged. And they don't constitute a society, even - as those in the other shows do - a society of outsiders.
This past Sunday's episode was a joke. That's a description, not a value judgment. It began, more or less, with the news that our friends at Sterling Cooper, the little agency that could, were about to be vanish into the maw of McCann Erickson, the big advertising devil with whom, last season, they had made a deal that seemed good at the time. Don Draper, resourceful as nearly always, came up with an identity-saving alternative plan; the old firm would preserve its independence by retreating to its office in Los Angeles, taking some choice clients with it. McCann then pulled the rug from under the partners' feet by telling them not to worry, there were luscious accounts waiting for them in the big house. They - Don, Roger, Joan, Pete and Ted - seemed uncertain whether to laugh, cry or, the majority choice, get plastered.
If the joke was on them, it was also on us. We had spent an hour worrying about a threat that turned out to be no threat at all. It was well set up and well sustained, and there are no hard feelings. I was pleased things turned out as they did. I had no desire, with the show at the precise halfway point of its final season, to see it pick up sticks and live out its declining episodes in California. Its previous forays out west have been among its duller moments. It belongs in New York.
I know that Mad Men is generally regarded as reflecting a society, as mirroring the changes in mainstream American life from the 1950s to the '70s. It's certainly true that the show takes infinite pains in getting the clothes and furnishings right. But that's just decoration. You can get nostalgic if you were there at the time, or wish you had been, but that hardly constitutes dramatic interest. (I confess that Sunday's instalment had me pining for the days of the personal answering service.)
The advertising business has traditionally been, in plays or movies, a subject for satire. There's some of that in Mad Men, and it has the probably salutary effect of making the ads in the show's own commercial breaks look ridiculous. But there's something self-defeating about it; we're being told that the characters are involved in a superficial business while also being asked to root for their success. One sales pitch comes to seem much like another, and the same goes for corporate guys in suits. The characters, outside the central group, are hard to keep track of; likewise the office politics. In memory even the mergers merge.
Mad Men is more than a soap opera, but it does face the dilemma common to workplace soaps; it has to keep switching between its characters' business and personal lives. Unlike a routine soap, it has to establish some connection between the two. It doesn't always do this; there was an egregious lapse on Sunday when Pete Campbell got into fisticuffs with a descendant of his clan's historic foes, the MacDonalds. (See Glencoe, Massacre of; and talk about far-fetched.)
The character whose public and private lives have always most satisfyingly coalesced - for us if not for him - is Don Draper himself. Moralists like to cite him as a walking symbol of the emptiness of the world the show depicts. Why, his very existence is a fraud; he stole somebody else's name and identity. But the show hasn't made much of that recently; and besides, as the much-missed Bert Cooper said back in the first season, who cares?
In fact, Don's ability to create his own place in the world could be seen as admirable. It's also given him a capacity for empathy that in this show is practically unique; it takes extremes to bring it out, but when one of his colleagues is under the gun, Don is the only one with anything to say. All right, both his marriages fell apart, but they were impossible anyway. I like Don (and I especially like Jon Hamm's performance now that I've seen, from his performance in the BBC's Black Mirror, that he can do other things, too).
He can't unify his show, the way Tony Soprano did his, but dramatically he's in reverse, the good points outweighing the bad. And, though it seems to be a minority view, I hope that the waitress who's his latest flame reappears. She won't be his salvation, and she knows it, but she's interesting. My favourite character, though, remains Don's perpetually solicitous secretary Meredith, who's finally been granted some depth. Don is an outsider, incurably, though posing as the opposite; unlike the patrician Roger whose wit, in John Slattery's performance, remains irresistible, or the incorrigibly decent Ted, both of them afflicted, in their current time frame, by fashionably outlandish facial hair. The other outsiders, their status unsparingly denoted in the show's very title, are of course Joan and Peggy, alternating being nice and mean to one another; one of the show's recurring strengths lies in showing how colleagues with little in common can nonetheless make common cause. Joan (Christina Hendricks is continually surprising) was last seen remarking bitterly that she, alone among the partners, had been promised no goodies at their new corporate HQ. In this very cool show, her advance - sometimes through her sexuality, sometimes in spite of it - has been the most moving ingredient; now she seems to have hit a glass ceiling without waiting for the phrase to be invented. What really awaits them all at McCann Erickson we have of course yet to learn, but the omens aren't hopeful. (I'm always surprised, by the way, that Mad Men gets to use the names of real companies, especially when they're cast as the villains.)
We left with a sense of foreboding; Don's attempt to rally the troops with a motivational speech having sent the rank and file scurrying to their own corners, obviously skeptical, probably afraid. Perhaps it's as well that there are only three weeks left for them, and us, to find out. It will he hard, after all the time we've spent with Sterling Cooper in its various formations, to see its constituents as cuckoos in somebody else's nest. For our favourite Mad Men, and Women, disillusion surely beckons, maybe even despair. Don wouldn't even need to fall out of that window.