JOIN USIt's a mad world
Even the best shows lose creative energy over time. In Season 6 of ‘Mad Men’, life-altering moments kept repeating themselves in true soap opera fashion. Alessandra Stanley writes
It was a far, far better thing that he did than he could have done. In the finale of Season 6 of Mad Men, the alcoholic, debauched Don Draper (Jon Hamm) does something completely out of character, which is almost like a Sydney Carton-like act of selflessness turned upside down.
It was a bitter, late-’60s twist on Dickens’s famous story of look-alikes switching places at the guillotine, and by now it is somewhat to be expected that the allusion is laid out elliptically. It was a previous episode, the one in which Don gets high in Los Angeles and hallucinates his own death, that was labelled ‘A Tale of Two Cities’.
This season, which is the penultimate one in a series that spans the 1960s, from the end of the Eisenhower administration to Nixon, was at war with itself.
The show is a literary-minded work (Don in the season premiere was reading Dante’s Inferno on a Hawaiian beach; another episode was titled ‘The Quality of Mercy’, a reference to The Merchant of Venice). Yet Season 6 couldn’t resist the less exalted approach of soap opera. The most apt echo wasn’t Dickens or Shakespeare but To Have and to Hold, the show’s fictional daytime melodrama in which Megan (Jessica Paré) played the role of twins.
The distinguishing mark of a soap opera isn’t that outlandish things happen, it’s that they keep happening: evil twins reappear; dead husbands come back to life; people keep coming down with amnesia. Even the best shows lose some creative energy over time. On Season 6 of Mad Men, life-altering moments kept repeating themselves.
Don’s young daughter, Sally (Kiernan Shipka), walked in on her step-grandmother having sex with Roger (John Slattery) in Season 5; in Season 6 she walked in on her father having sex with his neighbour’s wife, Sylvia (Linda Cardellini).
In Season 6, Roger’s elderly mother died, and he gave his daughter her grandmother’s jar of baptismal water from the Jordan river. Later, the elderly mother of Pete (Vincent Kartheiser) died: she was lost at sea — having fallen or having been pushed over the side of a cruise ship. Don is an impostor living under an assumed identity. It turns out that the unctuous people-pleaser Bob (James Wolk) is also an impostor living under an assumed identity.
All that gothic melodrama squeezed some of the fun out of Mad Men.
One of the more disappointing aspects of the season has been that so much of it was joyless. The ‘60s did turn bleaker, as that period’s early optimism faded into violence and rebellion, but advertising was still in its heyday at the end of the decade.
Don may be hurtling his way to death or self-destruction, but that doesn’t mean that others in his world have to march in lock step with his decline.
It made poetic sense that Don’s most eloquent client pitch this season wasn’t on behalf of his own creativity, but to save an existing account with St Joseph’s aspirin, which he did at the expense of Ted and Peggy.
But Peggy, modelled on pioneer ad executives like Mary Wells Lawrence and Shirley Polykoff, the storied creator of the Clairol commercial line “Does she ... or doesn’t she?” is rising in the ad world without a convincing show of talent. Viewers have watched Peggy’s love life turn sour, again and again, without the corresponding sweet smell of success. This season, viewers didn’t see Peggy do much brilliant work. She was mainly shown mistreating younger staff members.
The improving status of women was always the bright spot on a show that revels in decline, depression and dark satire. Joan (Christina Hendricks) began as a secretary and is now, at considerable personal cost, a partner; one of the better scenes of the season depicted Joan’s effort to secure the Avon account. But Joan’s storyline kept getting pushed aside by the dolors of Pete, Roger and others.
Betty (January Jones) changed her hair colour, then dyed it back to blond (she looked like her own evil twin), but her personality splits were also too often eclipsed by other, less compelling women, like Sylvia.
Mad Men was first and foremost a naughty, knowing look at the bygone world of advertising, but lately viewers can rediscover its élan not in the show itself, but in real ads on television that feature its stars. Joan is her most alluring self not in the office, but on spots for Johnny Walker Red; Don is his most confident, compelling self not in bedrooms or boardrooms, but in voice-overs for American Airlines and Mercedes-Benz commercials.
The show’s creators may be as dispirited as their main characters: 2012 was the first year since the show’s premiere that it was shut out of all the major Emmy Awards. That made all those “For Your Consideration, Emmy 2013” spots, aimed at academy voters, seem all the more desperate.
The season finale wisely stripped Don of all his commitments: Megan stormed out of the apartment; his partners have forced him to go on leave. Next season, Don can keep tumbling further into oblivion, or rise anew.