WTOP's Jason Fraley honors 'Mad Men'
Jason Fraley
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April 1, 2015 4:20 pm
WASHINGTON — Forget that it has won the Emmy for Best TV Drama a record four times.
Forget that it has won four Golden Globes, three for Best Drama and one for Best Actor (Jon Hamm).
And forget that it was just enshrined by the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.
Even without such accolades, AMC’s “Mad Men” rivals history’s best TV dramas on merit alone — a debate that’s impossible to settle until we see how creator Matthew Weiner wraps up the final seven episodes beginning this Sunday. Think of it as one last sales pitch for historic greatness.
“The Sopranos” deserves the title for its unrivaled originality, literally inventing the format for original cable content, introducing a new cinematic quality to television, launching Weiner (“Mad Men”) and Terrence Winter (“Boardwalk Empire”) and a killer finale that still has folks talking.
“The Wire” deserves the title for its unrivaled efficiency, sticking to just five seasons, each exploring a different aspect of corruption through an ensemble of memorable characters, while so many other shows got “Lost” in meandering subplots and “jumped the shark” while playing the ratings game.
“Breaking Bad” deserves the title for its unrivaled urgency, feeding us cliffhangers with a daring array of quotable lines, daring camerawork, character development and power performances.
Likewise, “Mad Men” deserves a place among these all-time greats for its unrivaled historical commentary, offering a profound interaction between actual events and narrative fiction, layered right down to its clever title of manic ad men on Madison Avenue. No other show explores who we are, where we come from and where we’re going quite like this one.
Aside from the era-evoking suits, smokes and drinks, what exactly makes this show so special?
It’s the same thing that makes “Citizen Kane” and “The Godfather” iconic American tragedies. The show’s anti-hero, Don Draper, suffers from the same tragic impulses as Charles Foster Kane and Michael Corleone, blinded by American Dream ambitions while longing for the lost innocence of a corrupted youth. As Don says in “The Summer Man” (Season 4, Episode 8), “We’re flawed because we want so much more. We’re ruined because we get these things and wish for what we had.” These words could echo from Kane’s “rosebud” lips, while recurring shots of a lonely Don — sitting alone on Betty’s staircase or Megan’s balcony — reflect the hollow stare of Corleone’s Lake Tahoe eyes.
Don grapples with his scarred past by pursuing insatiable desires — namely, booze, money and women. His past is so horrific that he now lives in the present with no regard for the consequences of his future. As he says in the pilot, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” (Season 1, Episode 1), “What you call love was invented by guys like me to sell nylons. … You’re born alone and you die alone and this world just drops a bunch of rules on top of you to make you forget those facts, but I never forget it. I’m living like there’s no tomorrow, because there isn’t one.”
This fatal flaw of insatiable desires is best articulated in “Commission and Fees” (Season 5, Episode 11) as Don says, “Even though success is a reality, its effects are temporary. You get hungry even though you’ve just eaten. … You’re on top and you don’t have enough. You’re happy because you’re successful — for now. But what is happiness? It’s a moment before you need more happiness.”
But this story isn’t just of one flawed man. Don’s story is America’s story, a series of reinventions through willing self-deception.
On the most basic level, characters reinvent themselves to deceive their families and co-workers. Just as Oz said, “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,” this protagonist wants us to pay no attention to the Don behind the Draper. Starting over with a clean slate requires simple willpower. Just decide it, and it is so. As Don tells Peggy Olson in the “The New Girl” (Season 2, Episode 5), “Get out of here and move forward. This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened.”
On a deeper level, companies reinvent their brands by reinventing material products, from Kodak to Lucky Strike, Heinz to Hershey. Behind each sales pitch is a deception of the firm you’re trying to persuade. Behind each product is a larger deception of the public that everything old is new again.
On the deepest level, the show chronicles how the 1960s reinvented America, from a historic election in “Nixon vs. Kennedy” (Season 1) to the Cuban Missile Crisis (Season 2), from the assassination of JFK in “The Grown-Ups” (Season 4) to the assassination of MLK in “The Flood” (Season 6). The latter tragedy sparks an argument between Pete Campbell and Harry Crane that sounds as if it could still be made today: “Did you know we were in the presence of a bonafide racist?” Pete says, to which Harry replies, “That’s the latest thing, isn’t it! Everybody’s a racist!”
In “The Beautiful Girls” (Season 4), Peggy argues that women suffer similar oppression. “Most of the things Negroes can’t do, I can’t do either,” Peggy explains, to which her boyfriend jokes, “All right, Peggy; we’ll have a civil rights march for women.”
Have we really moved past these issues? Or are we fighting these same battles under new names? Is America — like Don — deceiving itself in its ability to change? Are we doomed to a tragic “Vertigo” plunge like the falling paper cutout in the opening credits?
Or does America — like Don — have the power to learn from our original sins? We saw a hint of redemption in “The Flood” (Season 6, Episode 5): “I don’t think I ever wanted to be the man who loves children. But from the moment you’re born, that baby comes out and you act proud and excited, hand out cigars. But you don’t feel anything. Especially if you had a difficult childhood. You want to love them, but you don’t. And the fact that you’re faking that feeling makes you wonder if your own father had the same problem. Then one day they get older and you see them do something, and you feel that feeling that you were pretending to have. And it feels like your heart is going to explode.”
This is what hangs in the balance in the final seven episodes. Don’s fate is our fate as a nation — or at least, Weiner’s interpretation of our fate as a nation. If that’s not reason enough to watch, nothing is.
Whether it will go down as history’s greatest TV drama remains to be seen, but Weiner is striving for artistic greatness. As he told The Daily Beast, he wants a finale similar to “The Sopranos,” one that may be controversial upon release but is revealed as genius in hindsight.
“There’s an immediate reaction to it and there’s a long-term reaction to it,” Weiner said. “If people behaved about ‘The Sopranos’ the way they do now — with the reverence and understanding about what it was — it would have been a lot more pleasant for everybody involved. But there was such an uproar. Now we know that was the perfect ending for that show, and now we know that show is in the pantheon of the greatest shows ever. Did the ending affect that? Yeah. There are good ones and bad ones. As a writer, I want to end the story [of ‘Mad Men’] the way I think the story was told.”
In an era of Hollywood special-effects spectacles, “Mad Men” repeatedly fulfills a promise Don made in the first season finale: “There’s the rare occasion when the public can be engaged beyond flash.”
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“There’s the rare occasion when the public can be engaged beyond flash.” Don Draper’s line is a reminder of the fleeting moments of greatness awaiting TV viewers when “Mad Men” begins its final seven episodes this Sunday. If you need to catch up — or simply need a refresher — we’ve compiled the three most important episodes from each season for your binge-watching glory.
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