'Mad Men': The End of a Great Season
As the curtain falls on the second season of “Mad Men” Sunday night, and marriages and careers hang in the balance, one thing is certain. The AMC series has found solid footing in the category of TV’s best-ever dramas, alongside the vaunted likes of “The Sopranos” and “The Wire.”
The dreamy first season could have been a lucky throw, a fascinating fluke, a exquisitely digitized photo of a smoky, Polaroid past. But now we can clearly see the breadth of creator Matthew Weiner’s vision, the depth of his 1960s revisionism, and the richness of his literary sensibility. Like Richard Yates in his 1961 novel “Revolutionary Road,” which is due as a movie this winter, Weiner has managed to transform and deepen our understanding of an entire era. I’d always seen the late 1950s and early 1960s as a time of innocence and flatness, but now I can’t help but feel its great subterranean mysteries and pain.
All the themes that lurked slyly beneath the first season of “Mad Men” -- male repression, male oppression of women, the tyranny of unmet appetite, advertising and the emptiness of the American dream -- broke through the show’s elegant surface this year, sometimes violently. Last week, when Joan’s fiance raped her on Don’s office floor, it was one of many recent moments when the show abandoned its trademark elliptical nature. Likewise, when Betty Draper vomited after learning about Don’s affair, or when she told Don not to come home -- a direct statement she formerly seemed unable to make. Even the usually contained Don’s actions have become more aggressive, notably when he accosted and threatened Bobbie Barrett in the back of a restaurant.
Just the presence of the character Jimmy Barrett, the coarse comedian played so effectively by Patrick Fischler, lent the season a bluntness, a foreboding of the louder, more expressive decade emerging. “I go home at night and laugh at you,” Jimmy spat at Don.
Season two has also proven that the “Mad Men” characters are among the most psychologically intriguing people on TV, a group of individuals who can stand as much analysis as viewers might want to bring to them....
MORE AFTER THE JUMP
No matter how shallow they seem at any given moment, they evoke complex interpretations -- even the secondary characters such as the alcoholic Duck or the closeted Sal, who harbors an unwitting crush on Ken. On one level, Betty, played so prettily and tensely by January Jones, is paper thin; on another, she is a mess of loneliness, despair, and misplaced anger, as she vents hostility on her children. Joan, too, is the classic sassy secretary, but look closer and she is a subverted achiever filled with loathing, tragically settling into life as an object both at home and at work.
One of the master strokes of the season was the way Weiner and his writers revealed Don and Peggy Olson as two peas in a pod. They are the parallel leads of “Mad Men,” different and yet so much alike. They are both frauds, living double lives -- which oddly qualifies both them to be ace advertising executives who can wax with almost spiritual intensity during sales pitches. Don and Peggy intimately understand how to build a convincing artifice, and they struggle against genuine emotion. As Don put it last week, “I have been watching my life. It’s right there. I keep scratching at it, trying to get into it. I can’t.” The performances by Jon Hamm and Elisabeth Moss as Don and Peggy were as compelling as any on TV right now.
This season, “Mad Men” has matured into the story of both an unsatisfied country heading fast into a fit of change, and the human potential for change itself. As the series proceeds, and the 1960s progress, and Don and Betty and Peggy and Joan continue to search for meaning, I suspect Weiner will continue to heighten the tensions and confrontations. Will the characters and the country change over time? Unquestionably.
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Spot on!
Will Don stay in California and abandon his family and Sterling/Cooper? Will he get into the early ‘60’s Cali car culture somehow? Will he meet the Beach Boys? Will he change his name (again) to “Al Jardine” and join the Beach Boys? Remember, in MM time, it’s only around autumn of 1962. The Cuban missile crisis is just around the corner (October ’62) and Bob Dylan’s about to write “A Hard Rain’s A-gonna Fall”, which he wrote about the missile crisis. And it’s a little over a year away from the Kennedy assassination. (It’s also two years before Barack Obama’s birth!)
Meanwhile, back in NYC, will Duck’s behind the scenes machinations to get that British company to buy Sterling/Cooper enable him to actually become the ad agency’s president, which is what he got the Brit to promise him, unbeknownst to Sterling and Cooper. Since Roger mentioned that Don (remember Don’s a junior partner, with a 12.5% share of the company) would stand to make half a million from the company’s sale, that would mean that both Sterling and Cooper and Cooper’s sister, who are majority partners, would each make around $1.5 million in the sale, if it goes through. That may not sound like much, but in 1962, that would make them, as Roger said, “rich”.
And will Joan go through with her wedding? Will Peggy become a ruthless careerist? Will Betty go back to work to support the Draper kids? Will Sal fall for the Russian gay guy? Will any of the men in the show ever exhibit any redeeming characteristics?
Can we wait? Especially if they leave us with cliff-hangers until next season? No, no, no!!!
That California episode two weeks ago, when Don met the rich “nomads”, was one of the best hours of television ever! “Who are you people?” Don (and we) kept asking. Priceless. So far, the show, set in the early sixties, has still resembled the end of the fifties, as we knew it. The full force of the “real” sixties is about to fall on these people. The Kennedy assassination! The Beatles! Long hair! Very tight pants! Barry Goldwater! Martin Luther King, Jr.! Mary Quant! Andy Warhol! Look out – next season could be really amazing, as these folks try to make sense of the changes happening around them. “Well, something’s happening and you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?”
A reminder: Jon Hamm (Mad Men’s “Don Draper”) is the host of this Saturday’s Saturday Night Live.
I absolutely love Mad Men, I can't wait for it to be on every week, and that Jon Hamm is drop dead handsome, I would do him in a heartbeat !!!!
Beautiful writing and analysis. Thank you!
Isn't it great when TV can be so artistic and profound.
This is TV worth staying up (late?) for.... Perhaps there'll be a cliffhanger like
"Who killed JR?" of "Dallas" in a previous time.
i don't smoke, but that show wants me to light up a cigarette. best show on t.v.
Great review analysis, would that foresight could be like hindsight and we could all be given the same insight as to what we will look like in fifty years. Fools, I'm afraid. We seem to be careening along mindlessly as our leadership provides no rudder and those whose voices attempt to give wisdom are not heard.
Jon Hamm in a Beatle's haircut? Betty wearing light pink Slicker lipstick and Pucci prints? Peggy, now that she's seen Dylan live, wears a beret, black turtlenecks and pegged black pants? Pete will really be into bleeding Madras, and Joan, poor Joan, is going to go all Feminine Mystique on us, and do the bra-less thing! Yay!
I got into Mad Men last year and liked it enough to watch it again this year. It does help to have a DVR to record and then save episodes for later viewing. I see references about Don made by females and I would say the same about Joan! Bravo to AMC for conceiving and bringing into our homes this fine show. And a big laugh at HBO, which casually took a pass on Mad Men and surely now wishes they hadn't.
It's Magic, pure Magic
Joan will be reading Marylin French, and wishing the novel had come out sonner.
Thanks, Matt, for calling it what it is - rape. It will be many years in MM time before Joan is able to - and you can bet your bottom dollar that Joan will be teaching her daughters how to avoid it! Joan will sacrifice herself, but not her children.
What a reward this show has been for someone like me who lived through this, marrying and beginning a family in the mid-west, and then resuming a career as a professional secretary after moving to Southern California at about this point in the drama. I just want it to go on and on......
I lived through that era. Not sure I want to relive it. I have been enjoying Foyle's War much more. Also for greatest tv series ever try and find RAID from Finland.
I did not like the later 50s and early 60s the first time around. I never liked ad men. Why should I care about these people. The sets and people remind me of STEPFORD WIVES and I see no difference in the plots from Desperate Housewives which I also do not like. This is just another souped up soap opera.
I also did not like The Sopranos. Another bunch of people that I could care less about. Deadwood I did like. Watched it all. Loved it. Ad men and their problems with the Stepford wives and girl friends is not interesting to me. I would rather watch a tv series about the 60s and hippies.
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