Every week, WIRED takes a look at the latest episode of Mad Men through the lens of the latest media campaign of advertising agency Sterling Cooper & Partners.
Pete Campbell has a problem, and that problem is success. That's pretty much always been the case for the guy. For all his old-money privilege and solid business acumen, his character arc on Mad Men has long been a matter of repeating the tragedy of Don Draper as farce.
While Don's secretive past, selfish behavior, and personal demons have not exactly led him to a happy place, he at least looks the part of a handsome, successful executive. Makes a point of it, in fact, dressing up in suit and tie just for the sake of his two-minute interaction with his pseudo-secretary/mole Dawn between day-long booze-and-Ritz-cracker binges in front of the boob tube. Indeed, he cleans up so nice that a lunch with a potential new employer attracts a rival suitor from mega-agency McCann-Erickson, whose dialogue with Don is indistinguishable from any given creep-of-the-week's attempts to pick up Joan Harris.
Pete, on the other hand, makes an art out of looking and acting as uncomfortable as possible at all times. His hairline recedes, his waistline expands, his affairs are joyless catastrophes, he's been bested by long-con colleagues not once (Don) but twice (Bob Benson). Yes, he climbed the ladder from hungry young accounts man to partner at SC&P and prime mover of the agency's rudimentary West Coast office, but it's like he bumped his head on every rung on the way up.
Not even his biggest California coup to date seems able to turn the chump into a champ. Pete schmoozes his way into a deal with a massive auto dealers' association, one that he says would bill just about as much as the agency's auto manufacturer, Chevy. But as has often been the case for the sprawling post-merger Sterling Cooper & Partners, someone spots a conflict: Puckish partner Jim Cutler insists that they reach out to Detroit for a union blessing before they make the deal. Perhaps Jim's just trying to increase the power of his protégé Bob Benson, the agency's Chevy pointman; perhaps he's having a pissing contest with his pre-merger counterpart Roger Sterling, who's uncharacteristically gung-ho about Pete's accomplishment. Whatever the case, he'd rather ask permission than forgiveness. On this show, that just might be a first.
Throughout "A Day's Work"—a brisk, funny episode rounded out by meaty material for the show's young breakout, Sally Draper, and its first prominent African-American character, Dawn Chambers—characters are repeatedly confronted with Campbell's choice. Should they be up front about their desires and dislikes, in hopes that the static they get in response won't prevent them from getting what they want? Or should they bullshit their way through it, thinking things will go smoother for all involved if they keep their mouths shut? It's the stuff that both great Depeche Mode songs and great Mad Men episodes are made of, though in the end, Matthew Weiner's outlook is considerably more optimistic than Martin Gore's.
Foremost among the liars is (duh) Don Draper. If it wasn't already clear, Don is keeping his forced leave of absence from the agency a secret not just from his wife Megan, but from his kids as well—as Sally discovers when she visits the office (in the middle of her own lie-based excursion into the big city) and finds noxious gasbag Lou Avery in her dad's office. A complex, perversely touching scene at Don's apartment follows: Sally, realizing her father is lying to her yet again, almost visibly makes the decision to allow him to do it rather than call him out, marking her as the more mature Draper.
A quick call from Dawn sets Don straight, however, and so begins an awkward period during which Don knows he's being protected from his own lie by his daughter. When they spar about it on the way home to Sally's boarding school, Don's instinct is to get all "Because I'm your father, that's why" about it, going after Sally for lying about her whereabouts during her roommate's mom's funeral but adamantly refusing to discuss his own deceit. But in keeping with his season-ending decision to reveal his backstory to his kids last year, Don eventually comes clean: "I told the truth about myself, but it wasn't the right time, so they made me take some time off, and I was ashamed." A rapprochement is well and truly brokered when he pranks Sally into believing he wants to skip out on their dinner check; in suggesting a dine-and-dash for Sally to disapprove of before admitting it's just a joke, Don's embracing and endorsing Sally's sense of his immaturity and fallibility.
Back at the office, Don's secret agent Dawn has some lying to do herself, in ways both overt and covert. As the only black faces at the agency, she and Peggy's secretary Shirley endure all manner of discrimination and disrespect, from Bert Cooper's overt racism to Lou's thinly veiled grumbling about their politically mandated inability to be fired. They blow off steam by greeting each other by one another names, a what-else-can-you-do subversion of what must be countless cringeworthy cases of mistaken identity by their white peers. When Lou kicks her off his desk, Dawn leaps at the chance to tell him how she really feels. And when Shirley finally gives in after a full day of biting her tongue and tells Peggy that the roses she believes are a last-ditch gift from Ted Chaough were in fact from her own fiancée, she gets yelled at both for not saying something sooner and for saying anything at all. Tell the truth, keep your mouth shut—to Peggy, who at that moment is doing her best impersonation of a Girls episode, there was no right course for Shirley to take.
But the gods of Mad Men were in a giving mood this week, and things work out okay for the women of the office thanks to the unwitting intervention of Jim Cutler, the same guy who caused such problems in the West Coast satellite. Stumbling into the gale-force fury of an incensed Joan, who's been dealing with secretarial reshuffling caused by the whims of the old wise men of the office all day, Jim realizes she's one person doing two jobs and, on the spot, offers her new digs better reflecting her status as a partner who manages accounts as well as seating charts. Dawn, who can work neither with Lou nor at reception per Bert's bigotry, winds up promoted, into Joan's old head-of-personnel gig. Shirley, given the boot by Peggy, segues smilingly into working with Lou. As with most things Jim does, there's the side benefit of messing with Roger, but Joan and Dawn's respective moments of triumph are worth savoring anyway. And if no one knows the gory details of why it all panned out this way, perhaps that's for the best.
As Pete's vivacious real-estate agent girlfriend Bonnie Whiteside puts it to him in a speech that turns his frown upside-down, "That's the thrill. Our fortunes are in other people's hands, and we have to take them." "An act of god"—an ill-timed office visit, a dick-swinging contest between two old accounts guys, a peevish overreaction by a creative type, a wildfire— may screw you up. But however you respond, high road or low road, white lie or truth, the course is yours to set. And if you get where you want to go, the victory's yours to savor.
