Mad Men

Matthew Weiner, AMC, 2007-2015

Season 1 – 2007 
The last time I watched Mad Men, I decided it was the greatest series of all time. If you’ve read this far, you know that I’ve now ascribed that title to both The Wire and The Sopranos as well. To be honest, I think my pick will just be whatever is the most recent series I’ve seen between these three and Breaking Bad. But I do have to say that out of this Mount Rushmore, I think Mad Men is by far the most enjoyable. It’s probably the funniest of these shows. It’s the most visually pleasing. Along with The Wire, it has the deepest cast. It’s probably not as ambitious as The Sopranos or The Wire. And I know from watching that it is certainly not as consistent as Breaking Bad. But for whatever reason, it’s the one I most easily return to. That has to count for something.

Season 2 – 2008
I fear I was overly negative in reviewing Mad Men’s first season. Not that I was all that negative – I did say I thought it was one of the four greatest series of all time – but I did also say that it was clearly a step below The Wire and The Sopranos. I’m actually not sure that’s the case. In Season 2, I was reminded of just how masterful Mad Men can be, particularly in its storytelling structure. The series has an incredibly deep bench of talented actors. I think it clearly has the greatest assembly of characters of any show. And it’s extremely funny. While those are its greatest strengths, they can also make the series so enjoyable that you don’t see the work. Which should be a good thing, but probably plays against it in this instance. Mad Men wraps its stories and arcs so neatly, you sometimes forget how meaningful they can be. You can watch the show as sheer entertainment, but you can also dig deeper into it. If you work, you’ll see how Don’s storyline mirrors Peggy’s, or how Harry Crane’s mirrors Joan’s. It’s exceptionally thoughtful and it’s incredibly fun to watch. What more could you ask from it?

Season 3 – 2009
For whatever reason, Mad Men‘s events and seasons have always seemed to blend together for me. This is now occurring even as I watch. This is my third time through the series and I am still being surprised by when events occur or when characters show up. And it isn’t just because it’s a long-running series. It was easy for me to separate seasons of The Sopranos. It was even easier to do so for The Wire. But something about Mad Men seems to resist this categorization.

One theory for this is that Mad Men doesn’t center on major events the way most other shows do. Breaking Bad is obviously focused on the ups and downs of a man as he pursues meth-making. It’s easy to have a Tuco season or a Gus season because of this set-up. Same goes with The Sopranos. You can remember that Season 1 is Tony vs. Livia/Junior or that Season 2 is Tony vs. Richie Aprile. While Mad Men certainly has events and even villains, they’re kind of all the same: Don has an affair, he loses a client, the firm has to get out of a bind. It doesn’t make the show any less compelling to watch, but it does make it blend together.

So if this is true, why? Is the series trying to be a procedural? Maybe. Its strongest moments actually seem to be when it functions as a workplace drama. But I think there is a particular artistic reason for why Mad Men blurs its events. The series is an exploration into whether or not personal change is actually possible. On its surface, it’s about an ad-man who stole his identity and reinvented himself only for his past to keep catching up. As the show goes along, we see that this is more or less true for every character. Whether it’s Don, Roger, Peggy, Joan, or Pete, we see that they face the same situations again and again. Sometimes they even face situations we’ve seen other characters experience. This is especially true of the mirrored relationships between Don and Peggy or Joan and Peggy.

Maybe this is all just a long-winded excuse for Season 3 not standing out? But I don’t think that’s really true. Honestly, I thought Season 3 might be the best yet. There were a couple of lulls, but the additions of Connie Hinton, Lane Pryce, and Henry Francis are all tremendous. Moreover, the last two episodes of the season along with episode 6, “Guy Walks Into an Advertising Agency” are as good as the show has ever been. I guess I’ll just have to keep watching to see if my theory is right.

Season 4 – 2010
I was struggling with how to sum up this season. In general, it’s mostly more of the same. The series is always very good and occasionally excellent. And there are, of course, a few lulls. Don’s storyline reaches a necessary low point. This is the season in which he’s finally out of control with his drinking and clearly mentally unwell. But the season contains some high watermarks for many of the other characters. It’s painful to watch Joan deal with her marriage and all-around shitty husband, but it’s an incredible showcase for the character and Christina Hendricks. Peggy is as dynamic as ever. I love the introduction of her beatnik friends. And the additions of Jay Ferguson’s Stan Rizzo and Jessica Paré’s Megan Calvet are terrific! It’s kind of insane to think that they don’t enter the series until halfway through its run.

So, like I said, a pretty good season. But then I remembered that this season contains “The Suitcase,” arguably the greatest television episode ever. One of the things that I especially love about Mad Men is that it was never apologetic about being a TV series. That’s not the case for many other “Peak TV” shows. It’s clear, for instance, that The Sopranos always wanted to be a film or that The Wire really wanted to be a novel. And as good as those shows are, they almost seem to have a disdain for their medium. Mad Men, on the other hand, leans into the fact that it’s a TV show and actively recognizes all of the advantages of being one. That, for example, you can build undefined and complicated relationships like Peggy’s and Don’s. Or that you can slowly build to a character’s breaking point without forcing the issue. Or, especially, that if you spend 40 episodes doing one thing, you have a real opportunity to knock out the audience when you change up the formula as happens here. “The Suitcase” is so amazing precisely because it’s a TV episode. The writing, performances, and even historical backdrop of the episode are obviously flawlessly done. But what makes the episode really shine is that we waited 3 and a half seasons to get to this point. It was worth the wait.

Season 5 – 2012 
I have to say, I think Season 5 is in the running for the best Mad Men season. Everything I’ve said about the series and earlier seasons still applies. And before rewatching, I don’t know if I could have told you what specifically happens in this season. But after rewatching, I was struck by how much more of a thematic tie there is between these episodes than in seasons past. Up to this point at least (there will be plenty more in 6 and 7), this is the death season. Throughout Season 5, we see moments, images, and harbingers of death everywhere. While loaded imagery has always been in the series’ wheelhouse, explicit foreshadowing like this is a deviation from Mad Men’s formula. Major events have rarely felt destined to happen in the show thus far. On the contrary, the series often suggests the opposite. It’s largely about how these characters, and maybe humanity in general, can’t escape routines and habits.

The inevitable death in this season is that of Lane Pryce. It’s one of the series most tragic, and well-done arcs. It also feels like a major turning point for Don (perhaps not in action but in psyche). Lane’s arc here mirrors Don’s secret past. He’s someone who has wholeheartedly adopted a new identity (American) through Madison Avenue and seems willing to do anything to preserve it. When Don confronts Lane over his forged check, he tells Lane that he’s started over many times, that this is the worst part. That’s only half-true. Don has never had his secret exposed in a truly compromising way. When Bert Cooper found out, he didn’t care. When Betty found out, she left him (a subconscious relief for Don). The closest Don gets to being compromised is when his identity was flagged by National Security. In that instance, he was anything but calm or ready to start over.

So Don’s advice to Lane here isn’t based so much on past experience, but perhaps a subconscious wish for how he might behave if/when faced with this dilemma himself. Don needs a sign that if he were exposed and had to lose everything (money, partnership, reputation, Madison Avenue) he would be able to remake himself. Earlier in the season there was a moment in which the elevator doors opened for Don to reveal an empty shaft: the abyss. The sign that Don gets from Lane is another version of this. Faced with a dilemma that could always arise for Don, Lane kills himself.

Season 6 – 2013
Oh, Season 6. This was the place where, my first time through the series, I stopped. Then, when I rewatched the series, I discovered that bingeing made it a whole lot more tolerable. The third time around? I’m obviously not in any danger of quitting the show, I know that it rebounds. But man oh man, it’s just a tough season. I think it’s pretty easily the worst season of the Sopranos, Wire, Breaking Bad class of shows.

So how is it so bad? In some respects, you’d expect Mad Men to be able to avoid down seasons more than other series. And as I’ve said elsewhere in these reviews, the show mostly does the same things over and over. What’s more, it barely relies on plot in the interest of developing characters and themes. These are all aspects that, again, you’d think would insulate it from a forced storyline or arc. But I think what Season 6 shows is how fine a line Mad Men was walking between being a great show and being a mediocre one.

For instance, there’s nothing drastically different about Don here than in Season 5. He’s at another low point in his drinking, depression, and general lousing. But this time it just feels like an ounce too much. For someone who at the start of the series was one of the most exciting characters in TV history, Don is just unbearable at this point. The same generally goes for the series’ point of view. In the early seasons, I am able to forgive the lack of perspectives (particularly from any Black POV). The series takes place in a Madison Avenue office. It makes sense to me why the show would be so focused on WASPy men. On top of that, Weiner and his team have shown strength in portraying some types of diversity. Peggy and Joan are probably the two best characters on the series and Michael Ginsberg is one of the series’ best additions. But at this point, the lack of Black stories and representation feels like a major problem. I have to agree with Matt Zoller Seitz’s assessment that it feels like Weiner & Co. are just terrified of getting it wrong.

So what does this all mean for the series? Even at its best, it was criticized by some for being, essentially, an extraordinarily well-done soap opera. I think that’s pretty stupid. At its best, Mad Men was as good as anything that’s been on TV. It was complicated, funny, and profound. If you thought it was just a soap, I think you were missing what the series really had to say. But at its worst, that may be a fair assessment. It feels like by Season 6, Mad Men has mostly run out of things to say. And when it comes to issues of race, and the late 60s in general, it seems uninterested to even join the conversation. It’ll be interesting for me to see how the series rights itself in Season 7 (I know it does, I just can’t remember how). But again, I think the takeaway from me is how close the difference between being brilliant and tired can be.

Season 7 Part 1 – 2014, Part 2 – 2015 
Mad Men’s final season is technically divided into two parts, but I think works as one piece. The first half, in a lot of ways, is business as usual for the series. It is a version of the show as if it were going to continue on in perpetuity. Don is on leave, fighting for his old role back at SC&P. He’s working (yet again) on self-improvement, especially in the wake of some low-points in Season 6. Most importantly, he’s constantly putting off the inevitable. He’s carrying on a dead-end marriage with Megan, he’s fighting to keep his job even as his partners look to remove him at the first opportunity, and he’s grappling to compete against the tech-centric future of the industry. The same can be said for many of the other characters. Joan works, and struggles, to establish herself in accounts. Peggy fights to get the respect and status she deserves and would have already received had she been a man. Pete tries to establish a viable wing of the business in California. Even the first half’s finale fits this mode. As Matt Zoller Seitz points out in his book, Mad Men: Carousel, it literally embodies specific aspects of every season finale to this point. It centers on one last impossible (and yet successful) scheme to save their business.

The second half of the season largely mirrors Part One as well as the rest of the series with a major exception. The show, along with these characters, can no longer prolong the inevitable. The run of episodes is appropriately titled, The End of an Era. Don’s marriage is finally over. He’s no longer fighting for his position. Instead, he has to finally just work as a creative director (something that despite his title, he’s never really done throughout the series). Eventually, SC&P will learn their scheme at the beginning of the season actually failed: they’re being absorbed by McCann. It is the end of the line in advertising for characters like Joan and Roger who have money but no longer a viable career. For Don and Peggy, they’ll have to claw their way back to what they had earned in the first seven seasons. For Pete, it’ll signal a new beginning and he’ll leave the industry (and New York) for the first time in his life. This statement of finality extends beyond the firm as well. Betty is diagnosed with terminal cancer. She tells Sally that she knows when it’s the end. As opposed to Part One, in which Matthew Weiner & Co. gave us a version of the series as if it were to run forever, Part Two gives us finality. We get endings to the stories we’ve been following for the past 7 seasons.

When I watched this final run of episodes originally, I was a bit thrown. Finality and ending seem almost antithetical to Mad Men‘s premise. As I’ve said before, this is a show that largely explores whether personal change, growth, or reinvention is actually possible. I think the answer you’d expect to that question is no. So when Matthew Weiner shows us countless instances of change at the end, it’s disorienting. Yet as I rewatch this series, I realize that Weiner’s answer to this question has probably been yes all along. That change is in fact possible (and perhaps even inevitable) but occurs so slowly that we hardly notice it. How else would you explain how Betty goes from being unable to discuss mortality at the beginning of the series to confidently facing her own death at the end? Or how Don goes from being unable to discuss his past with his own wife to being able to tell his kids, strangers, and even Peggy? And look at Peggy! She starts out in the series as a frightened and timid secretary and ends as someone who thinks waiting until 1980 to become a creative director is too long (it is). Or Joan, who starts out by telling Peggy that if she plays her cards right she’ll wind up with a husband and yet ends her own story by turning down prospects of a happy marriage to pursue a career.

This third time through the series, I’m astounded by how beautiful and poetic this ending is. I’ve gone from thinking that it was a relatively weak finale to thinking it’s perhaps the strongest close of The Sopranos, The Wire, and Breaking Bad class of shows. The fact that it took me so long to see this I think speaks volumes of the show’s complexity and depth. As I reach the end once more, I have this feeling that there has to be more somewhere. Like a lost season I forgot to rewatch. My impression of these characters is just so deep, I feel as if I’ve spent more time with them than I actually have. It’s the greatest example of a show being more than the sum of its parts. It’s the reason why this show remains endlessly rewatchable.