This Had Better Be Good
MAD MEN: “PUBLIC RELATIONS” (Preview)
AMC
THE NATIONAL POST
The last season of Mad Men ended on an uncharacteristically up note. The top guys at the Sterling Cooper ad agency decided to resist being sold to a new owner by the British concern that had taken them over the season before, and to strike out on their own. A buccaneering spirit was abroad in the season finale as our hero Don Draper egged on Sterling and Cooper, a.k.a. Roger and Bertram, to abandon their gold-plated retirement schemes and start again from something like scratch. They even persuaded their English overseer Lane Pryce to thumb his nose at London and join them. They enlisted Peggy Olson, the super-talented copywriter with the secretive smile, and Pete Campbell, the oddly endearing worm of an accounts manager. For administrative assistance Roger placed a call, thunderously applauded by all regular viewers, to Joan, his busty ex-mistress and office manager, currently languishing in a hopeless marriage; he knew that she'd be the exact person to organize the midnight flit and to tell everybody where to locate the files they wished to loot. Welcome to Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, new home of all the SC personnel we actually cared about, plus Harry Crane.
Well, not quite. Nobody thought of rehiring Sal, the closeted gay art director fired for resisting the advances of the son of the boss of Lucky Strike. Since that account is one of the new firm's biggest assets, it seems doubtful that we'll ever see Sal again. And even discounting him, the finale wasn't all rosy. As Don's career burgeoned, so his marriage collapsed. Good though Don has always been at compartmentalizing, he must have been struck by the coincidence of having to find two new homes at the same time.
The parallel telling of the business and domestic stories has always been one of the prime strengths of Mad Men, and never more than in the past season. After two years, the show had to outgrow its period appeal, basically the thrill of registering how a time as chronologically near to us as the early 1960s could seem so sociologically far. The references to actual political events sometimes seemed dragged in.
The Drapers' marital breakup was among the rawest things in TV drama, on a par with the one in The Sopranos. The last straw for Betty wasn't one of Don's multiple infidelities; it was her discovery that he, the scarred remnant of a Depression childhood, had taken another man's name and identity to give himself a passport into a more prosperous world.
Jon Hamm's superbly smooth performance took on new depths, as his face, voice and shoulders went into a slump befitting a man unsure of whether he exists; while January Jones continued her remarkable portrayal of a woman awoken from a different variety of mental and emotional sleepwalk.
Obviously there are going to be more threatening breakers ahead for the new Sterling Cooper. There could hardly be a show if there weren't; and even in real life, the euphoria of a new enterprise is bound to fade. Not to mention that the youthful idealists of the new set-up are for the most part middle-aged and up. When we left them they were working out of a hotel suite; just see how they behave when they get a real office.
Also, The Beatles are coming and the '60s are about to become the '60s, even on Madison Avenue. Or especially on Madison Avenue. In the meantime, word from the spoilers is that Don will find playing the field when single harder than when married. Nor does Betty's new romantic arrangement, with a stuffy aide to Governor Rockefeller, look that promising; her three children are going to hate their new stepdad. Betty was never a good mother, anyway; her response to any problem with the kids has been to tell them to "go play" and Don's claim that they'd be better off with him was probably justified. The scene where he and Betty told the kids about the divorce was a legitimate heartbreaker.
I have high hopes for Season Four. But it has a very hard act to follow.