In a cosmic coincidence, just days before Netflix announced that it was doubling its rates and renaming itself “Poops Deluxe,” I finally started watching the Mad Men discs I’d had out probably for the duration of wife’s pregnancy and our child’s first six months of life. Guess what? It’s a good show! I have the following spoiler-free thoughts about it in particular after watching the first four episodes:
1. Whoever cast this thing deserves a Congressional Medal of Honor. Jon Hamm is an enormously pleasant man to look at for an hour at a time. He’s like the human equivalent of Craig Thompson’s drawing: No matter how daunting the size of the undertaking, on a visual level it’s just like, “Hey, this’ll be nice.” And supporting players from Christina Hendricks to Bryan Batt are similarly enjoyable to look at for various reasons.
2. There was a twist in one episode involving a firm decision Don made, the kind you really can’t back down from, being undone by forces beyond his control, and I sat there watching it unfold thinking “How is he going to recover from this mess?” Then another character swooped in and fixed it for him by doing something I never in a million years would have thought to do, either as the character or as the writer. That impressed the hell out of me. Writing that’s smarter than you are is a rare gift, frankly.
3. Tom Spurgeon has this thing about contemporary superhero comics being, basically, competence fantasies. The reason all the characters have gradually been powered up into unstoppable badasses is because that’s what the audience is identifying with. They don’t want to see challenges dealt with, they want to see challenges overcome. Nerd culture has a problem with this generally — I see it a lot in A Song of Ice and Fire fandom, where readers “stop liking” Character X when Character X fucks up or does something stupid or reckless or naive, as if doing so makes them less interesting or worth reading about. I watch a show like Mad Men — or The Sopranos, or Deadwood, or The Wire, or Battlestar Galactica, or even Lost, which as the nerd-culture-est of all those shows had to deal with this problem over and over again as they made Jack and Locke progressively less heroic/antiheroic and more unpleasant — and wonder how the fuck those kinds of people process someone like Don Draper. Do they just not watch? Or are these the sociopaths who watch this show and feel like it’s brought back early ’60s smart-haircuts-and-suits-and-cigarettes-and-scotch coolness again, ignoring that all those things are basically just the pointy tails and pitchforks adorning this particular hell on earth?
Tags: Mad Men, reviews, TV, TV reviews
Can you elaborate on point #2 with some spoilers? It’s been a while since I’ve seen Season 1 of Mad Men and I don’t remember it well enough to figure out what scene you’re talking about. But I absolutely love this show and the way these defining character moments creep up on you. It’s a show in which “not much happens” (on the surface, at least) for several episodes, and then wham! But even when it seems like not much is going on, all these little scenes that on their own might be insignificant have a cumulative effect and add to our understanding of the characters and what shapes them. So apart from the big game-changing moments that advance the plot (and which tend to be stacked toward the end of seasons), the storytelling moves vertically instead of horizontally – or digging deeper instead of moving along in a linear fashion.
I really don’t think there’s anything else quite like it on television.
Sure–I was talking about the bit where Don fired Pete Campbell for pitching his own ideas to a client behind everyone else’s back, but then his and Roger’s boss reverses the decision because Pete comes from a well-connected family. I was like, “How can Don possibly go back to Pete and un-fire him without virtually guaranteeing that he’ll see that his behavior has no consequences and he can now run even more amok?” But Roger swooped in and presented the reversal to Pete as Don’s idea — he and Cooper wanted Pete gone, but Don personally fought to keep him. I think I said “Wow” out loud. Such smart writing!
Ah, yes. Thanks. Now I just want to rewatch the whole thing.
YES.
I think the points you make in #3 is fascinating.
The competence fantasy is there in many kinds of fiction and you are so right, with online fandom we can really observe how some fans depend on those fantasies to stay loyal to some fictional characters. Are you saying that Don strikes you as incompetent, or as immoral? Obviously both, but which one relates more to your point here?
Please don’t forget to write more about the “hell on earth” of this nostalgic period. I remain surprised that the anti-semitism of the first series is so under discussed.
Finally, Jon Hamm is a total hunk, its crazy! He’s pretty hunky in Bridesmaids as well. As a queerdo, I love when you call out the hotness of male actors in your writing. I have no idea how you identify, but you’ve always seemed straight to me and I love straight writers on pop culture who can get in there and mix it up with the Jason Adams-style male hotness appreciators of the world.
Oh shoot, now I’ve “Asked!”
Thats okay, ’cause “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is gone from the blogosphere as well!
“Are you saying that Don strikes you as incompetent, or as immoral? Obviously both, but which one relates more to your point here?”
Ha, this is where it gets interesting. I recently wrote about a character from A Song of Ice and Fire (haha, BREAKING NEWS!!!) who some readers hold up as the single most effective/competent ruler the series has seen, despite the numerous war atrocities committed at his express order, his abuse of one of his children, and just generally being a terrible, terrible person. But because he’s a Hard Man who Gets Tough with his enemies and thus vanquishes them, he gets a pass for all that for some reason, and he’s held up as a “better” “ruler” than comparatively decent characters who are insufficiently Hard and thus die/fail. It struck me as a bizarre definition of competence, to ignore whether someone is cruel and deliberately immiserates innocent people.
So in terms of how the competence fantasy applies to Don Draper, there are a few ways to look at it. What I meant first and foremost was that since he doesn’t always do the most awesomest thing at any given juncture, I wonder how such viewers deal with that. My suspicion is that they would criticize, say, a goof-up that caused Mrs. Draper to find out about his infidelity or any of his other lies, more than they’d criticize the infidelity or lying itself. Failure to be uniformly badass is a greater sin than failure to treat people with honesty, decency, kindness, and respect.
I’m really tilting at strawmen here, though, I know. Anytime you watch one of the Great TV Dramas About Terrible People there’s a temptation to differentiate between why you watch them (the right reasons) and why those other, bad people watch them (the wrong reasons). The funny thing is that sometimes the creators of those shows take a run at those other, bad people too, and at times (David Chase) I’ve supported this, and at other times (David Simon) I’ve hated it.
Re: hunky Jon Hamm — I am pretty enormously straight, I would say. No matter how handsome I find a guy, I can virtually never picture wanting to make out with them (or anything else with them), which I guess would be my queerness barometer. Not even Thin White Duke/Man Who Fell to Earth-era David Bowie. (Okay, okay–Adam Lambert. But there’s an exception to every rule!) But I can certainly appreciate a handsome man. Sometimes I think that years spent writing about comics has opened me to writing about the physical appearance of both male and female actors the way I’d write about the quality of someone’s line or coloring. The way actors look has an impact on how the film or show they’re in comes across.
I think the way the competence fantasy plays out with a lot of Mad Men fans is that his handsomeness — 30 Rock had that great line about Hamm looking like a cartoon pilot — mitigates against some of it and that the scenes where he displays hyper-competence, really nails something in a meeting (or nails someone wherever), are latched onto with a greater enthusiasm than the scenes where he’s weak or screws up. Like when I heard people talk about the show during S1, it was those elements that were enthused about. I know from talking to friends that were huge Sopranos and Entourage fans from basically a wish-fulfillment basis that Mad Men is pretty much the surface elements that you describe, but that with some of them Draper’s fuck-ups are almost kind of cathartic.
The first place I encountered that kind of thing, by the way, was watching how people approached tabletop gaming back in the ’70s and realizing that none of those guys would ever, ever want to “play” Boromir, even though I was pretty sure he had the best character arc.
Oh, I remember you mentioning that Boromir insight before, Tom–that’s dead-on. Fun fact: Davey here was one of my D&D buddies during the relatively short period of time that I played D&D, and I still remember the storyline from our gaming so fondly precisely BECAUSE we failed, spectacularly. Dave, can you back me up on that?
Absolutely. I actually got a chance to play a character that on the surface was very much bad-assed and anti-hero, but his moral ambiguity crossed lines a number of times in nasty ways that often did not benefit the group’s goals when everything played out.
Bill, that dungeon master, was always good at allowing us to stumble into very unfavorable consequences for the kind of “kill ’em all and loot their homes” heroism that DnD kinda encourages. That sort of indefensible total superiority due to player-character status thing. I remember a storyline that he and I ran as a solo side mission that ended up involving the whole group where what had started as a dungeon crawl let loose some monster plague or something, some crisis far worse than we could believably solve ourselves, and we just left that continent alone from then on. sometime bill would give us some news about how horrible things were there. and we tried to just keep on merrily dungeon crawling anyway.
I was lucky, as the other Dungeon Master in that group, that Bill actually let me in on some of his plans, so right at the end, when we were playing a little bit every once and a while after you guys had all gone to college, as opposed to twice a week after high school and in my basement, the “its okay to fail in service of drama” aspects (of my character at least) were contrived between us.
actually, it is all reminding me of the (glorious) last couple of years of BPRD, now that I think of it.
Glad you started watching this. Hope to see many more thoughts from you on my fav series.
Ditto
(One of my fave series anyway)
Also ditto. I’ve watched the whole thing through, twice. If those are the kind of writing moments you respond to (not specifically but in general effect), you’re in luck.
Are there *other* kind of MAD MEN fans than “the sociopaths who watch this show and feel like it’s brought back early ’60s smart-haircuts-and-suits-and-cigarettes-and-scotch coolness again”? I’m not even being entirely facetious – really, that seems to be pretty much all the show is to a vast majority of its viewership.
There’s you and I, Tim. Always, there’s you and I.
“Or are these the sociopaths who watch this show and feel like it’s brought back early ’60s smart-haircuts-and-suits-and-cigarettes-and-scotch coolness again, ignoring that all those things are basically just the pointy tails and pitchforks adorning this particular hell on earth?”
I think the idea that the show presents its milieu as “hell on earth” is as much a misreading of the show as seeing it as presenting it as the paradise of your hypothetical sociopaths. It seems far more equivocal about that time & place than, say, Bigger Than Life, where the suburban-centric American Dream is a really a nightmare, or All that Heaven Allows, where it’s a trap. It seems to me that the makers of Mad Men really are lamenting the passing of a certain kind of sophistication, certain kinds of pleasure, and (most importantly) a certain kind of freedom (most apparent when Don goes to L.A.). They’re too honest (for the most part) to just lament – or to leave out complicating details – but that aspect is obviously part of the (intended) appeal of the show, and not, I think, just for “sociopaths”.
What can I say? It looks like a total fucking nightmare to me, I don’t care how nice the haircuts are. I mean, you’re right, it’s not an Orwellian dystopia where everything is relentlessly dreary and awful. Everyone (by everyone I mean every rich white person) looks nice, and has a lot of money to spend on tasty food and drinks and pretty cars, and they’re good at bantering. On many levels it’s pleasing to the senses. But at what cost? Certainly not one I’d be prepared to pay. The parenthetical in this paragraph more than merits the “hell on earth” description, I think.
Maybe I’m just generalizing from my personal disinterest in the aesthetics of this milieu. I suppose I like a man in a good suit as much as the next guy — I do enjoy Bowie’s suit-wearing phases, for example — but in general I’ve never gone in for the Rat Pack shit. See also Darwyn Cook’s Parker adaptations. The difference between those comics and this, though, is that I don’t feel like I’m SUPPOSED to go in for it. That’s not the point.
Actually, it’s very easy to misread MAD MEN. I had a co-worker lament to me a couple of years ago how he wishes he lived back in the 60’s when times were easier, “you know, like in that show MAD MEN.” There’s always that group of fans that love something for “the wrong reasons.” See: SCARFACE, SAPRANOS, FIGHT CLUB. I think it’s a mistake to fault MAD MEN, though, for the failings of some audiences to grasp the underlying themes of the show. I mean, let’s be honest here- -for all its greatness, MAD MEN isn’t exactly subtle when it comes to decrying the values and gender politics of the period in which it’s set. Anyone who thinks the show is all about living the swingin’ 60’s high life either hasn’t watched past the first episode or is actively trying their best to overlook the forest for the trees.
As for Cooke’s Parker series – – I see where you’re coming from, but man, as a fan of the books, I love what Cooke does in there. Admittedly, I do feel like his style is a bit more antiseptic than I have always pictured Parker’s world. Still, it’s not the milieu that’s the big draw in those adaptations (at least, not for me) but Cooke’s dedication to keeping the material rough and true to Westlake’s prose. But that particular 60’s vibe is Cooke’s shtick, even with his Catwoman work; even if he were adapting some of Westlake’s later Parker novels set in the 21st century, I think it’d still have that “Rat Pack” vibe that leaves you cold – it’s in his line work, his characters, etc. I understand that there’s an appeal for some people harkening back to that shit (see first paragraph), but for me Cooke’s strengths as a storyteller far outweigh his strengths (and weaknesses) as a champion for an aesthetic created by the minds (and values) of the very people MAD MAN is about.
I was going to mention Parker, because its basically one huge sociopathic competence fantasy, which is part of why I love it, but y’know at least in the later novels there’s all these characters who basically look at Parker and go “uh, this guy’s a bit weird”.
Frank said: [Parker is] “basically one huge sociopathic competence fantasy…”
Absolutely. He totally is, and I have no shame in admitting that’s a BIG part of the appeal for me. Parker is the archetypical Master Thief whose greatest obstacles are usually the fuck-ups of those far less competent and dedicated to “the job” than he is. I think it was Mamet who pointed out that there’s a distinct pleasure to be found in reading/watching people who are at the top of their profession just do their jobs. I know I enjoy stories in that vein – whether it be Jason Bourne or Jason Voorhees.
I think In Draper you get the best of both worlds really, depending on your bent. You get to see a guy work his craft and appreciate how gifted he is AND you get to watch his own fallibilities force him flat on his face, despite that creative genius. So you get your competence fantasy and you get to indulge in the perverse pleasure of seeing someone successful fail because they have made poor personal decisions. Personally, I root for Draper (and I think most people do) to get his shit together but I’m sure the slow-mo car-crash aspect of Draper’s arc is part of the big dramatic appeal, at least as much as the competence fantasy. That seems to be a core element of the central protagonist in many great serial dramas, actually – not just the simple “fall from grace” but the ricochet of seeing them bounce back and forth between greatness and personal failure.
It’s one of the great narratives of sociopathic competence fiction, where the ultra competent man is posed with an inextricable problem, solves it, but then the solution proves to create an even greater problem whose solution creates another problem which eventually leads to his ultimate downfall. It’s the thread that links Hammett to the Sandbaggers to the Shield to Mad Men.
As you’re one of my favorite interlocutors, Sean, I wish I could jump more fully into this discussion, but I actually just plunged right into the last season of MAD MEN without watching any of the previous ones. Not ideal, I admit, but still rewarding in its own way. After one scene or another really hit me hard, it was fun reading online reactions from longtime fans who got hit all the harder because they had much more context in mind. I hate to beat this drum again, but even starting in media res with one series and getting in on the ground floor with the other, WALKING DEAD really suffered from comparison, with MAD MEN as my baseline for an AMC original series..
While BREAKING BAD is my favorite AMC show, I would have to admit that MAD MEN is technically superior in many ways. In terms of writing, consistency, balancing tone and theme, etc., MAD MEN is one of the best television series I’ve ever seen. WALKING DEAD isn’t even one of the best horror series I’ve ever seen.
The show that did the most to cement my low opinion of The Walking Dead — next to The Walking Dead itself, of course — was Game of Thrones. A short-season prestige-cable adaptation of the most acclaimed example of its particular genre in its particular medium? You don’t get more apples-to-apples than that.
Er, maybe slightly insulting, Tim. Pretty sure that’s not why I watch it, or indeed why anyone I know watches it.
Pingback: Mad Men thoughts index « Attentiondeficitdisorderly by Sean T. Collins