Until Sunday, I’d never seen Mad Men.
Mind you, I was aware of Mad Men: I am, after all, on the Internet. I run with clever artist-types, and read a lot of media criticism, which lets me stay vaguely afoot of cultural zeitgeists even as they whoosh past me. Still, as one season turned into two turned into five, I wrote off catching up as more trouble than it was probably worth--but I stayed curious. With the season premiere approaching, I decided to find out if it was possible to dive blind into the AMC period drama.
Even in continuity-driven shows, I reasoned, seasons tend to be at least a little self-contained. Serial media--TV shows, books, and comics--tend to bleed audience the longer they run, so failing to provide at least semi-regular jumping-on points for newcomers would be ratings suicide.
Come Sunday, I found a bottle of Scotch and an accommodating neighbor, poured myself a stiff drink, and dove in.
Here’s what I learned:
Mad Men is a show about sexy people with sexy problems. All those sexy people struggle to reconcile their subsumed personal identities and increasingly fragile public facades in the face of advancing age and rapidly changing society, with the possible exception of some guys with beards, who seem to have their act pretty well together. The ad agency and its work function as an extended allegory for society at large as well as the characters’ personal conflicts.
Which is to say: Mad Men is basically Raymond Carver Story: The Show. These are the kind of assholes who have miserable one-night stands with each other and then write short stories about it. Last season’s climax apparently centered around the suits’ willingness to prostitute someone named Joan to get a lucrative contract, in exchange for which Joan got a full partnership in the firm and everyone, including the viewer, got to feel like slightly worse people.
This season on Mad Men, the guys in the expensive suits are having heavy-handed confrontations with their own mortality: Roger, through the death of his mother (and later, his shoeshine guy), and his own waning relevance; Don, through doomed young soldiers, symbolic-suicide fantasies, and his dedication to never under any circumstances having a good time. If we don’t see Don Draper seriously contemplating--if not outright attempting--suicide by the end of the season, then I will eat not only my hat, but also your hat and the snappy fedora Don puts on before going to fuck his neighbor’s wife.
Meanwhile, a passel of young company guns led by Connor from Angel are circling in like a flock of highly-motivated corporate vultures. Peggy is living with a nice bohemian guy who brings her meatball subs when she has to work late, and coping with the demands of being the only genuinely likeable person in a position of power. Megan is coping with professional insecurity as a not-quite-star of daytime television. Joan is coping with several shades of purple. Somewhere in the suburbs, Betty is working hard to achieve her long-term goal of actually living Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.
I suspect that I’m supposed to care about Don’s looming breakdown, his obvious misery, and his out-of-control drinking, but I really don’t. This is the mid-life crisis of a rich-white-professional-man-as-allegory-for-mid-century-America: Don Draper’s problems are universal only inasmuch as we’ve all been conditioned to treat men who look like Don Draper as our eternal stand-ins.
Maybe seasons one through five established a more complex and sympathetic Don than the one I’ve seen so far, one who does more than fuck around and drink too much to justify his seething self-loathing, but my personal canon is not crying out for one more self-consciously literary deconstruction of a rich white guy who’s so infatuated with his own misery that he brings Dante to the goddamn beach.
To what extent I’m pulling for anyone in this particular Purgatory, I’m pulling for the ladies: Peggy, because the fact that she’s obviously written to be The Character You’re Supposed to Root For doesn’t mean she’s not also worth rooting for; Megan, because she’s sincere and (at least as far as I’ve seen) uncompromised in a way no one else seems to be; Betty, because she’s both evil and genuinely complex, and that’s a combination rare enough to be worth savoring; and Shirley, because she fucks someone else’s husband under a crucifix that looks exactly like the one that hung over my grandmother’s bed, which may not be a legitimate justification but still disconcerted me to an extent I kind of respect.
Ultimately, Mad Men is roughly the same mix of familiar and uncomfortable as dinner with someone else’s dysfunctional family. It’s breathtakingly stylish, infinitely clever and quotable; its narrative clockwork is intricate and beautifully paced, and if many of its characters read as clichés, none come off as two-dimensional. The acting is fantastic, and the cinematography is solid if a trifle heavy-handed.
From a critical angle, I recognize that it’s both important and very good, the kind of painstakingly honest (if limited) deconstruction of Who We Were on the Way to Who We Are Now that is almost invariably worthwhile. I’m even flirting with the idea of going back and watching the first five seasons. But I’m still not sure I like it.
