I’ve now finished all four seasons! SPOILERS AHOY
* The back half of Season Four began with two of the series’ very best episodes. First there was the surprisingly innovative decision just to take the series’ two lead characters and have them talk to each other for an episode. Duck’s arrival added some emotional and physical pyrotechnics to the proceedings, but for the most part it was simply a pleasure to watch Don and Peggy hash out the depth of their relationship to one another, first angrily, then drunkenly, then with the genuine hand-holding tenderness that reduces me to a misty-eyed marshmallow anytime the show goes there. This episode was, in its way, the payoff for Peggy’s newfound openness with Don at the beginning of the season. And as much as a part of her resents it — not because she wants it any different, but because, well, would the possibility really have been that difficult to entertain — it’s also nice for Peggy to offer proof that Don can have a platonic, loving friendship with a woman other than the one whose husband’s life he stole. Seeing that glimmer of a good man when Peggy’s around is sort of like the audience reaping a reward Peggy earned through years of hard emotional, creative, and intellectual work. It connects us to her.
* Next up was an episode with the evocative title of “The Summer Man,” which wasn’t just one of the series’ best episodes but also one of its most…experimental? Tactile? Sensuous? I’m not sure I could sit here and tell you what really happened in it, necessarily; the more important thing was the parade of sensations it presented us with. Don’s new hobby of swimming, the sound and vision of his body swimming through the cool and pristine water of the pool, was contrasted with the slow-motion muted-sound shots of booze being poured into an endless succession of glasses as Don realizes he needs to dry out, at least in part. Don began keeping a journal, so you had his mellifluous baritone actually narrating the episode — a first — providing not just a rich and pleasant sound, but a series of ruthless insights into his life and the lives of those around him. “I bet she was thinking of that line all night,” he writes of his date’s farewell after she blows him in the back of a taxicab. Brutal. But hey, let’s talk about that blowjob, too, another example of the show understanding how crucial and sexy the initial stages of a hook-up are: Bethany smiling at Don as she unzips him, him smiling back as he realizes what’s up. Let’s talk about the summeriness of it all, too, particularly the shot of Don exiting the athletic club and watching young women and couples (to coin a phrase) go by dressed in their summer clothes. And let’s talk about the show soundtracking Don in all his glory with the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction,” which made me think of nothing so much as the writers having a eureka moment: “Holy shit—we can show Don walking around to ‘Satisfaction’!!!” Indeed they can! What an episode. I’m almost afraid to google for reviews.
* Just before we got to that episode and discovered what I like to call Conscious Don, I got to thinking about the challenge it must have presented to Jon Hamm and John Slattery in particular to play characters who are in a state of perpetual inebriation. After a while you no longer notice it, but when they go into someone’s office, and I mean pretty much every time they go into someone’s office, they drink. When they get home they drink. When a meeting ends they drink. Certainly when they go out to dinner they drink. Might the actors forget about this too, or do Hamm and Slattery always remember to play Don and Roger as self-possessed guys covering up a slight buzz?
* If I recall correctly there was another strong pair of episodes in there, basically a girl episode and a guy episode back to back. In the first, Peggy’s would-be boyfriend gives her guff about her gig, Joan has sex with Roger after they get mugged, Sally runs away from home and Betty comes to claim her, Faye whiffs on trying to soothe Sally, and Miss Blankenship dies. In the second, Don is nearly found out by the Defense Department, Pete has to take the bullet for Don by canceling the agency’s aviation gig, Lane confronts his father, and Roger learns both that Joan is pregnant and that Lucky Strike is leaving. I’m not sure that either of them stands out as cohesive units, but as a demonstration of how many balls the show can keep in the air within a short stretch of time, they’re tough to top.
* While the sequence with Lane’s stiff-upper-lip father and his Playboy Bunny girlfriend rang as false — okay, not false, but at the very least broad — as anything on the show since Peggy and Rizzo’s nude brainstorming session, the portrait it painted of Lane as an overgrown boy was one I really appreciated. I had already found myself returning repeatedly to the way he chose to explain to his wife what he liked about living in New York: “I’ve been here eight months and no one has asked me what school I went to.” That line’s obviously loaded with centuries of English class bias, but it also speaks to how fundamental his time as a schoolboy is to Lane’s conception of himself. And from the dutiful employee of PPO who resigned himself to transferring to Bombay in under 90 seconds, to the rebellious son who couldn’t wait for his father to disapprove of his new relationship, you see it repeatedly.
* “It’s like drinking a hundred bottles of whiskey while someone licks your tits.” Man, Midge sure makes heroin sound more appealing than Lou Reed did, and I don’t even have tits! Ah well. It was nice to see the first of Don Draper’s Great Brunettes of the 1960s reappear, if only for a sordid attempt to extract cash that was skeevy enough to make my arms itch. As I write this paragraph I realize that it was actually a rather well-played scene given how shopworn the fallen-idealist junkie thing could be. The contrast between her and her husband’s jocularity and their obvious desperation was an engaging detail from writers and actors alike.
* Speaking of pale brunettes, big Megan fan here, obviously. But that aside, I appreciate how the show slowly seeded her in, first with a standout role in Faye’s focus group about Pond’s cold cream, then by making her a tourist attraction for Peggy’s bohemian friends at the front desk, they by having her step in for the late Miss Blankenship, then by making her the control group for Faye’s failure to connect with Sally, then with a seemingly random shot of Don staring at her at the end of the day as she touches up her makeup to go out. You can certainly detect Matthew Weiner’s background with The Sopranos there — the best show ever at organically building up bit parts into major players. (Cf. Jaime Hernandez in Love and Rockets too.) And yeah, my initial reaction to their initial hookup was “Oh no!!!!”, a reaction that received some confirmation when Faye shows up at Don’s apartment later that night revealing that no, she had not in fact dumped him after all. But that wasn’t on Megan, who really legitimately seemed to be okay with things never going any further than that, even if it would be nice if they did. And I really really loved that they had her directly address her big teeth. She’s endearing and attractive and intriguing, with enough of a hint of potential “sees an opportunity and takes it” no-bullshit-ness that if she sticks around at the agency next season, she could make for a multidimensional foil for both Don and Peggy. And Joan! And Jane! So yes, thumbs up for Megan.
* I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Nothing warms the cockles of my heart like grown men cooperating and treating each other with kindness, especially when they have all sorts of incentives not to but do it anyway. So when Pete went out of his way to take the blame for North American Aviation dropping out, and when Don secretly paid for Pete’s share of the agency’s collateral with the bank, I all but audibly said “Awww.” When Don told Pete he could run the agency if Don had to skip out? My heart’s swelling even now. I think it’s not just that I value cooperation and kindness so much — it’s that the two of them started on such bad terms. They hated each other! So to see Don trust Pete like that, and Pete sacrifice for Don like that…I don’t know, it’s almost like it gives me hope for the world. People can change. And that’s a place where Mad Men differs from The Sopranos in a big way.
* The season’s final arc took the Season Three finale’s pulse-pounding heist storyline and stretched it out into a slow-motion trainwreck. Instead of a race against time, it was an attempt to arrest the agency’s downward momentum before they crashed into the bottom. It was a series of “oh-no”s. Oh no, the Defense Department! Oh no, Don’s sleeping with another co-worker! Oh no, Faye didn’t dump him after all! Oh no, the Lucky Strike asshole is about to tell Roger they’re leaving! Oh no, they’re going to lose two huge accounts at once! Oh no, Glo-coat’s dumping them too! Oh no, Betty’s gonna catch Sally with Glenn! Oh no, Betty’s gonna catch Sally with Glenn again! How many times can the bottom drop out of your stomach, you start to wonder. This has the effect of creating a genuine sense of dread where perhaps none need exist, too. I spent several episodes convinced that at any moment, Betty would truly beat Sally, or that one of the kids was gonna drown in that pool out in California, or that Faye was going to out Don in retaliation, or that Lee Garner Jr. was going to coerce sexual favors out of Roger, or or or or…It was grueling. Fitting, then, that rather than the spectacular saves that capped off the first three seasons, this ordeal was ended with Peggy and Ken securing a small account — a relatively minor turnaround for a comparatively spectacular downward spiral.
* If you take the two previous items and combine them, you have some sense of why I’m also so happy that Don and Betty’s final scene of the season worked out the way it did. I wasn’t sure what I was more afraid of, that Betty would snap in some profound and even dangerous way, or that Don would try to sleep with her again. Instead they shared a drink after Don procured both a bottle and a genuine laugh from Betty, and Betty reacted to the news of Don’s engagement with a congratulations that, while not happy, at least didn’t sound like she was lying through her teeth. This season Betty emerged as one of the show’s most fascinating characters, taking her shady Season One shrink’s diagnosis that she has the emotional life of a child and running as hard and as fast with it as she could. Consumed with the same kind of rage that troubles her daughter, insisting on seeing a child psychiatrist, driven into paroxysms of life-altering jealousy when Sally befriends the kid she herself once inappropriately confided in, and overall refusing to take yes for an answer from anyone. Not to repeat myself again, but January Jones is absolutely perfect in this role, a Hitchcock blonde playing Jimmy Stewart’s Vertigo role. My hope for Betty is that now that Don’s moved on, she can find a way to do so too.
* So there you have it: Mad Men! I’ll take your recommendations for things to read/watch/listen to about it in the comments, if you’d be so kind…
Tags: Mad Men, reviews, TV, TV reviews
Pingback: Mad Men thoughts index « Attentiondeficitdisorderly by Sean T. Collins
Nothing to add other than to say I’ve really enjoyed all of these Mad Men “thoughts,” Sean.
One of my favorite things about this show is that the season finales feel much more like real endings than most shows–at least seasons 3 & 4. There’s no big, scary cliffhangers. The episode ends and, because they are so secure in their storytelling and their characters, they know you will be aching to know what happens next–without creating artificial drama or tensions.
One of the many things I am curious about the show from here on out–now that we have finished the middle season of the projected seven–is who will the main characters be in the last seasons? Will Don continue to change so dramatically as he has in the first four? Will Peggy? Betty? Roger? Joan? (Peggy & Betty have my bet of having the most changes ahead. And, I totally agree with you about Betty’s story this season.) This show has accumulated so much good will from me that while I like daydreaming about future occurrences, I pretty quickly lapse back into, “Ah, whatever happens it’ll be better than what I come up with.” That feeling, for me, is rare.
The quick cameo of Ray Wise, as Ken’s Father-in-Law-to-be, sent me into nerd/good-acting love paroxysms. He is so iconic to me (and most rational Twin Peaks loving folk) as Leland Palmer that I felt like his casting for one scene was very purposeful. Matthew Weiner has stated Twin Peaks as an influence (and so has David Chase and so has Damon Lindelof and so on). So when Ken is asked to go to his in-laws in the final episode, I kept mentally shouting, “Yes! Leland! Leland!” And then it didn’t happen. Either that was the desired effect–stunt casting as a surprise dead-end and we’ll never see ol’ Ray again–or he’ll come back in a big way somewhere down the line. I kinda hope he does, because I love Mr. Wise and also because I think there’s more to Ken than meets the eye. Either way, there is no chance Matt Weiner randomly cast Leland Palmer (one of the great performances of television, IMHO) in his show.
Your Sopranos comment reminds me of a weird theory I have about, possibly, my two favorite shows of all time: The Sopranos & Lost. I told this theory to a friend of mine a while back and she thought I was crazy and over-thinking (a typical response to something I say). I think Lost & The Sopranos are the same story: “It is hard to change.” Lost takes the more typical, satisfying route of showing us the difficulties and triumphs of trusting yourself to a different way of being. While The Sopranos goes a much darker, Brechtian route of showing what happens when people have momentary bouts of clarity, only to drown them in shit–over and over. Both are stories about characters who grew up in difficult circumstances that they need to overcome. Both are stories told in revolutionary and highly entertaining ways. But with the same point. Change or die. It might be a slow death and you may convince yourself–over and over–that you’re having a good time, but it’ll kill you and not in a way you’ll like. As Patsy Parisi says to Gloria Trillo: “It won’t be cinematic.” Let it go. Let it all go and see what happens.
Two small scenes from the finale I love:
The milkshake scene at the diner in California–wherein Don, and the kids, realize, a) how simple Megan is and b) how aggressively self-centered Betty is and how used to it they are. Also, as someone who had “difficult” parents. That scene got a hearty, rueful laugh out of me. Yup, not everyone is a drama queen. It’s shocking.
Speaking of, the other favorite is the scene between Henry Francis and Betty. Henry gets two great, profound lines. He neatly sums up Betty: “No one’s ever on your side, Betty.”
And, perhaps, provides the thesis statement of the entire show: “There is no fresh start. Lives carry on.”
Personally, I want more of the characters who, comparatively, have their heads on straight–like Henry and Ken. They are mysteries I’d like more of. I hope Mad Men doesn’t go The Sopranos route of largely leaving out the saner characters like Tony’s sister Barbara or characters who have epiphanies and then are left out of the show, like Artie Bucco and Dr. Mefli. I understand why they were marginalized. I just would like to see some good writing about people like them.
Thanks so much for your TV writing. You’re a smart guy and a joy to read.
These were fantastic, I hope you start on a new show I like ASAP!
Great stuff, Sean!
BREAKING BAD. You will shit all over yourself.
These ‘thoughts’ have been excellent reads, Sean. It’s always a pleasure to see somebody write with such eloquence about something so brilliant.
I always really, really liked Mad Men, but I didn’t fall totally for it until the last half of the latest season – it might have been that incredible partner’s meeting where everybody (except for Bert) has some sort of secret that will change everything, but isn’t saying anything, or just the astonishing performance from Hamm. He’s such a big and handsome actor that it’s easy to overlook how bloody good he actually is, whether it’s that quiet little moment of zen when he really sees Megan for the first time, or that phone call he gets from Betty about the government checks, where he goes from Master Of The Universe to Scared Little Boy in less than two minutes.
Actually, it was probably the bit when Don pay’s Pete’s share. Those moments of kindness in that kind of atmosphere are always beautiful.
Pingback: Carnival of souls: Special “post-Shamus/post-BCGF” edition « Attentiondeficitdisorderly by Sean T. Collins