I started to watch Mad Men awhile back while it was in its second season, and I simply couldn't convince myself to continue watching. I really could not put my finger on why it didn't appeal to me. It's literally the sort of show that is catnip bait for for diehard television and film fans. It's well-written, well-acted, the period details are spot on and enthralling, and when Mad Men is on top form, it really is undeniably the best show on television (Case in point: Nixon Vs. Kennedy, The Wheel, Three Sundays, The Suitcase, Shut the Door. Have a Seat, etc. A solid list of episodes I would be willing to argue are the best television I've ever watched). I decided to give it another go, and I've slowly but surely been meandering my way through the series. I've discovered a number of reasons to give pause for overtly praising the lauded status of the series: it can be too on the nose, too subtle for its own good, a frustrating slow burn where the show just seems to be repeating itself, completely drop plot lines that were seemingly of grand significance (I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about how they handled Meghan towards the end of season 4), and at times far too gimmicky in a: "hey, it's the 60's, aint' that quaint" sort of way.
But I've finally made it half way through the fifth, and most recent, season, and I'm becoming increasingly captivated by the series. And not just in a way that I appreciate its vision and how it attempts to achieve that vision, but rather in the more compelling and exciting way where I really do enjoy the series and look forward to the next episode. I believe that has to do with (ironically enough, as I've chalked it up to being a flaw earlier) the slow burn aspect. The Sopranos and The Wire so famously pioneered the engineering of serialized dramas that took their sweet time with doling out their stories. (Matt Wiener, creator and showrunner of Mad Men, got his first big break writing for The Sopranos). Ever since, shows have taken their cues from this kind of storytelling, including the equally compelling and awesome AMC series Breaking Bad. Early on it could be frustrating because there wasn't a familiarity with the program and its aims. Mad Men needed to court my favors. Jon Hamm, Elizabeth Moss, Christina Hendrick, and the rest of the major players nailed their performances and I generally liked them. But there was a problem; one Noel Murray (of the excellent A.V. Club) explained well for Buffy the Vampire Slayer (another series I'm currently working my way through):
"By [this point] ... the Buffyverse has become so intricate and
self-sustaining that ... the action is far more specific to Sunnydale and
the characters we’ve come to know."
Which isn't huge deal until you consider this in the context of specific characters from Buffy, "We’ve hung out with Willow for three years now, so we can recognize this trait, because it’s a Willow trait, not the 'nerdy smart girl' trait it would’ve been in the early days of the character." Joan isn't just the unflappable, sultry head secretary. Peggy isn't just the starry eyed new secretary (now copywriter). Don isn't just the impossibly dapper, and brilliant ad man. Over time they've ceased to be based on familiar templates and taken on a spark of life unique to their individual characters, and we come to like them, even at times care for them. And that allows for later seasons to be that much better. It's telling stories that intrigue me about characters I want to see stories about. And it also builds upon the solid foundation its already built, using callbacks and our familiarity of the program, to make interesting insights, spot on character moments, and compelling conflicts. In fact, I occasionally get wary when the show introduces new characters and shoulders a great deal of storyline to them (especially when it's characters like Duck Phillips, Midge, or Faye Miller. They're characters I come to like, only for the show to write them off as if they weren't hugely important to begin with. The only upside to this being that these characters real purposes are to reflect back what we're supposed to see in the other more important characters).
Beyond simply its characters though (which in my opinion is perhaps the most important part of a show, right after writing), Mad Men really is superb television. This is mainly due to its storytelling capabilities (which some have rightfully noted has a literally quality to it). It's so confident and bold in everything it does that whenever you begin to question or doubt what's going on, it chooses to shatter your expectations. Take Shut the Door. Have a Seat, the brilliant season three finale, for example. The episode manages to destroy everything that's been built up over the course of three seasons. Betty asks Don for a divorce finally. Sterling Cooper is no more. Roger, Bert, Lane Pryce, and Don conspire to start up a new firm to save themselves from being bought up by a larger company that would see to them be useless cogs in a bureaucratic machine. It's a fresh new start for all of them as they take a select few former Sterling Cooper members and excitedly head towards an uncertain future. Wiener has essentially blown up everything we've come to know. There is no way to say where the show is going after this. It's lost one of its major sets and removed a number of minor characters (including surprising ones like faux-Bohemian Paul Kinsey and closeted art director Salvador Romano). There's no longer the ever increasing tension building towards Betty and Don's calamitous marital failure. The shows rewritten its genetic code without sacrificing quality, intelligence, or believability.
This wouldn't come off as completely audacious if it weren't for a glance at what the rest of television programming is doing. Consider one of the top watched television series, The Big Bang Theory. It's highly formulaic. The characters are types; there are clear beginning, middles, and ends with resolutions we probably could have figured out within the first ten to fifteen minutes. The jokes are someone setting up the punchline, which then someone else plays off of. It is something we've seen in sitcoms since the dawn of the sitcom. There's no experimentation. There's no deep character analysis or complicated/thought provoking decisions or stories. And sometimes that's not necessarily a bad thing. Some of the best sitcoms currently on television don't stray too far from television tropes. For instance, Cougar Town relies on banter playing off its characters, but it has enough quirk, inventiveness, and unabashed love for its characters that it rises it above the formulas. The same was true of Friends, which if nothing else took advantage of sitcom tropes to tell meaningful stories about its central characters. It's something to take note of for other shows who's only goal is to get to the syndication finish line without considering what's the point of getting there. TV is ultimately a business. One where shows need viewership to garner advertisers in order to survive. One where shows are more valuable to a studio in syndication than they are when they currently air because the rights to show the episodes in re-runs sell for far more than the studio could make off simple advertisement.
But Mad Men has the guts to tell the story it wants to tell without compromising, which at times can be frustrating (and at times can be to its detriment), but it's hard not to appreciate a show that's so wonderfully dedicated to making a unique vision in a marketplace that should have killed that vision. The truth of the matter is that people want to watch compelling and original television. They probably want it to relate whatever market niche they come from, but they they don't really want to see the same old, same old (at least, I know I don't). I've always felt for movies, studios had it completely wrong in trying to market movies that were essentially the movies they've always produced. People like familiarity, but they want you to take what's familiar and spin it on its head. If The Avengers recent success doesn't prove this, than I don't know what else will. It was a based in superhero franchises that as good as they were, in all honesty, had very cliched origin stories. When the studio went to Joss Whedon (who coincidentally also created Buffy the Vampire Slayer) they simply said put these superheroes together and have them fight the bad guy. Whedon said No. You are not going to to put them together and just have them fight the bad guy. You need to justify putting them together. You need to put them through the ringer in order to justify bringing them together. Justifying it made the film that much more fun to watch. Sure, it would have been cool to see Thor, Captain America, Iron Man, and the like battling evil together. But having them battle evil together not just because it's simply cool, but because it's justifiably necessary is all the more awesome. And justification is everything when it comes to pop culture. It's what distinguishes what we consider good, and what we consider bad. It's what we choose to watch, and what we choose not to watch. We justify. The studios justify. The creative people behind the work justify. And somewhere in that intersection a dialogue begins. Mad Men needed to justify itself. It needed to justify its existence beyond simply being a seemingly accurate depiction of the 60's and the way people lived through it. And I believe it has. It's become an intelligent, and complex character study not just of the character flagship of the series Don Draper, but of Joan, Peggy, Pete Cambell, Roger Sterling, etc.
The more Mad Men justified itself, the more confidently it strode forward, knowingly saying, "Hey, don't worry. We know what we're doing, and it's going to be good". The more I eased into watching the series, and began to appreciate and enjoy it. Here's hoping the rest of the series proves itself to be as justified as the first five seasons have.
