Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Mad Men’s Delicate, but Potent Nostalgia
I sometimes weep at series finales and — writing this shortly before the final episode of Mad Men airs on AMC — I’m almost certain to so again tonight. Regardless of the final scene and music, I’ll likely tear up when it’s time to ritually delete the program from the Series Manager list on our DVR, in which Mad Men has held the #1 priority position since its 2007 debuted (the #1 slot tells the DVR “if you must record only one program, let it be this one.”)
It surprised me when I suddenly began bawling on March 1, 2005 after the final episode of NYPD Blue aired, and I deleted it from the auto-record menu of the DVR. It wasn’t just that brilliant final crane shot which completed the transformation of Andy Sipowicz. It was all the memories of that classic program flooding back, and knowing there would never be another scene, another frame of the show.
Nostalgia for Mad Men is a special punch to the gut because of The Wheel, the Emmy-winning episodic masterpiece from season one wherein Don Draper references the emotion to pitch the Carousel campaign to Kodak. I could list for you dozens of moments and episodes from the show which moved us, or made us laugh, or made me recall the 1960′s or the human condition, or perfectly typified the essence of a character. (Maybe you have some to share?)
Great moments from great shows stay with our family (I’ve watched it all sitting next to my wife) in a way that others are moved by the Bible, or Shakespeare. We reference Seinfeld every day around here.
Some TV shows limp to the finish line — the final two years of Seinfeld weren’t as great as the rest — but others are walk-off winners. The finale of The Fugitive on August 29, 1967 was a thriller ending with the final exoneration of Dr. Richard Kimble, falsely convicted of killing his wife. Everything in the series built up to that moment. Although summer was dead time in TV ratings in the 1960s, it reigned for years as the most watched American series episode of all time.
The Fugitive was the first purely adult series I ever got hooked on. Kimble took on all kinds of jobs, usually working-class gigs in the heartland, laying low while keeping an eye out for the murderous one-armed drifter. He worked for a sail-maker, or as a ranch hand, and often had to risk his own anonymity to right some wrong. It opened my eyes to worlds outside my experience as an urban teenager.
For me, Mad Men has been a more personal sojourn. I grew up in Manhattan during the 1960s, my dad’s name was Don, and he worked in advertising in the Time-Life building. I can vouch — as many have — for Mad Men‘s authenticity. It got the details right, including the details of character. Many of the men had fought wars, and were living it up in an economic boom of their own making. The women in advertising were ahead of their time. To paraphrase what Marshall McLuhan said at the time about media, they shaped the 1960s, and the 1960s shaped them.
Still, for all Mad Men built around the truth of that time, our real “Mad Men Era” has been those Sunday nights since 2007 when its stories unfolded in our living room, and fed our conversations about it in my classes and in restaurants. Well, we’ll always have reruns, and Blu-rays with commentary tracks.
I’m curious which television programs have affected you the most, and which series endings you remember.
Published in Culture, Entertainment
One scene that summed up Mad Men perfectly:
Draper gets on an elevator, there are two young junior exec types talking about various women in their office in very vulgar terms. There’s also an older woman who is clearly very uncomfortable.
Don faces the men squarely, and grabs the hat off junior’s head and thrusts it in his chest. He glares at them while they look sheepishly at the floor.
The message: He may be a philandering husband, drink too much in middle of the workday, or bail on his son’s birthday, but he knows to remove his hat and watch his language in front of a lady.
That scene was set mid 60’s. Illustrating the transition in manners from the urbane to the vulgar from 1960 to 1970 was one the great achievements of the show.
This article from the Wall Street Journal takes on the somewhat controversial final episode romance between Peggy and Stan. The author also discusses Joan Holloway Harris, and the way she and Peggy weren’t about to give up their careers for some guy.
Peggy’s arc was always my favorite in the show. No male American television writer writes substantive female characters as well as Matthew Weiner.
Fellas, I don’t get your animosity to this show. As a working woman, I have never seen a better depiction of what it was like in those earlier years to be a serious, talented woman in a challenging business. The lead women on Mad Men worked. They loved it. They were nourished by their own creativity and ability to contribute to the business. They slowly grew in capability and self-confidence and stature in the eyes of their colleagues. And they were real people, with foibles and fantasies. The show captured real women as well as anything I’ve ever watched. Sure, it was sometimes difficult to go through everyone’s highs and lows. Sort of like life. To me, Matt Weiner is a creative genius and I thank him for the art he shared with us over these last 8 years.
Im going to address a couple of the criticisms I’ve read in this thread.
__________________SPOILERS_______________________
Criticism 1: Plot and Characters are underdeveloped
A:
It is without a doubt a character-based show. But not everything has to be plot. The fun and intrigue of Mad Men is watching the core characters change in response to the times they live in. There’s not a sense of goals to be achieved, people to kill etc. The interest is whether these characters will evolve and improve as people, or find satisfaction in who they are. Everyday stuff. After the finale, I didn’t get a sense that there was a “happily ever after” for anyone. We’ve seen them go through too many ups and downs before. Maybe the new romances and businesses will fail, maybe Don will revert to type. But we do leave them all on about as good an ending a you could hope for.
2: There’s no “Red Wedding”
So there’s not enough death? Strange to say that. The show almost got derailed after Season 4 because the network wanted a couple of characters to die, but it is obviously not meant to be that kind of show. It would completely destroy its realistic credibility. Besides, there were couple of deaths, and one of them I never felt comfortable with (Lane) as it seemed only to be at the behest of AMC. But the show had suspense, even blood.
3: Small viewership
quality not quantity!
Speaking as someone too young to have lived through the era, I have always marveled at the visual attention to detail and cinematography of the show. But it wasn’t too long ago and we still relate the era closely with our own times. To take such ordinary settings (the suburban home, the office) and elevate them to such beautiful heights was another part of what captivated me about the show. Nostalgia has been mentioned as a big theme, and I have to agree. I find the viewing experience of Mad Men similar to the movies of Frederico Fellini – often the plot is absent, but you are looking at a beautifully constructed moving painting, and just serenely drift along with it.
Lastly, as a Millennial, there were things I learned through MM that no one ever told me. Prior to season 1 I had no idea how advertising worked. I had no idea about the lives of people behind “the corporate machine”. I never saw such structured manners and customs in my own life, never saw such a need by everyone to show pride in your appearance and conduct at all times. The rigidity of the 50’s was also very simplified to me prior to Mad Men, as was the ‘groovy hippie’ stereotype of the sixties.
I think I like Mad Men for not being Game of Thrones. If you want to talk about overratted shows… :P
Just watched the finale, and I’m so glad this show is over. The entire final partial season was, to quote the cinematic masterpiece Pitch Perfect, “like an elephant dart to the neck.”
By the time MASH was over, I did not care about it at all. Can’t even bring myself to watch it in re-runs.
Yeah, I just don’t agree. When you listen to Weiner talk about the episodes, he usually has a theme relating to human nature he wants to explore. So he just invents scenarios where he can make the characters act out that theme. But the way he brings the scenarios about often seems forced and sometimes even ridiculous (Pete having an affair with a neighbors wife who is getting electro-shock therapy so she doesn’t remember him????) And often the way the characters react to the scenarios feels out of character and their motivations not set up or supported properly (Don chasing this frumpy waitress across country???) It’s all just a little too internal and arbitrary and incoherent.
The frumpy waitress storyline was the worst. You’ve got half a dozen episodes to close this thing out and that’s what you come up with?
How long til the spinoff with Roger and Meghan’s mom?
But they had Tupperware! *BURP*
To reply to the question posed, a couple few years ago there were a plethora of sitcom series finales, ‘Friends’, ‘Will & Grace’, ‘Everybody Loves Raymond’. Generally, all upbeat and contained. But ‘Fraser’, for me had the better ending, as Dr. Crane leaves Seattle without finding true love, off to a new job in a strange place. Almost unsettling and sad, but, as performed by the great Kelsey Grammer, with a positive attitude; this is what life is like, bumpy and adventurous, and you have to be brave enough to meet that with some sort of grin and moxie. I thought it was fabulous.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4HRP10F_Rk
For both questions, my answer is “Babylon 5”.
Well, I didn’t realize this was a Mad Men symposium.
Sorry to intrude, but the end of Sports Night was bad. Not the ending, but its termination. Two great seasons, just 22 episodes. Great characters and storylines and writing, great pace, the gamut of emotions. Final episode kinda hurt.
And it was sacrificed on the altar of West Wing. Good God.
The final episode of M*A*S*H, too, notwithstanding its sharp turn to the Left post-Henry Blake. That moment when Hawkeye realized, well, no spoilers here. Just, that moment, man. Can still feel it now, 32 years later.
Breaking Bad. The sequence that had me weeping (most) was Jane Margolis’ death and the subsequent fallout. The end was more relief that Walt finally got to die on his own terms with a little bit of his soul left–and delight in seeing the tiny seed of the family stifling of Walt’s desire to die the way he saw fit coming to final fruition. Just realized that Walt, Jr. actually said “why don’t you just die” in the Granite State episode near the end after being a major butt about the thing in the beginning. Probably seeing it from atop a libertarian hobbyhorse–bad stuff happens to everybody when you try to keep someone from doing what they have a natural right to do–but that’s what works for me.
Never understood the affection for the TV Mash. Seems like it took everything that everything that was good or at least interesting about the movie (and that would not be the ending) and replaced it with the mawkish, sanctimonious, adolescent, sometimes mildly funny version. De gustibus…
It was in watching the reruns through more mature eyes that I came to hate BJ Hunnicutt. A visceral revulsion. That and Hawkeye’s devolution from a rake to a sensitive 70’s male. So now I don’t much care to revisit it either.
I just want to say AMC was a serious network when it actually showed classic American movies, uninterrupted by commercials. My mom watched it frequently, it was “relevant” to her.
Me too.
Yes it was, but that was before Turner Classic took over that niche with a better built-in library.
And let me tell you, the old AMC sans commercial interruptions was not cheap. I was in cable programming on the operator side, and AMC got an inordinate amount of money per subscriber. Only the upscale systems wanted it. In the ’80s believe it was $.70/month/per sub when most of the others went for between a nickel and a quarter. Subscribers had to pay that, it was included in the bill for all on any system which carried it. This was in the days of 36 channel systems.
Today on DirecTV as a $4.99 add-on, the HD Extra Pack (which I believe is being sampled free to D*TV subscribers this weekend) includes Sony, Universal, MGM, and HDNet movie channels, plus ShortsHD, Hallmark, Smithsonian, and Crime & Investigation. You get a pretty good selection of old movies. The World of Henry Orient looks great in HD!
But for the older B&W classics, beyond Warner’s pay web channel and whatever Netflix and VOD have got going in a given month, there’s still far too much off the shelf, non-digitized, and hard to find on DVD.
That show was an early innovator when it came to digital effects for scripted TV. The writer, Joe Straczynski, mentioned during the first season that he had the whole thing plotted out, all the way to the finish. I enjoyed the show.
There’s more on the meaning of the Mad Men finale in this Vanity Fair interview with Jon Hamm …
And someone who admits the truth…
http://www.vulture.com/2015/05/how-we-forced-mad-men-down-the-worlds-throat.html
Again, audience size does not always equal quality. The show survived to completion, and as art appears well on the way to standing the test of time. Four Emmys for Outstanding Dramatic Series signals enormous peer recognition for excellence. The scripts, the sets, the costumes, the props, the music, the cast, etc. have all been honored by people who do these things professionally.
That final scene where Don Draper makes peace with his identity as an advertising man was scorned many liberals, you know. “Embracing his inner huckster” whined The New York Times. Don Draper, capitalist tool. The show, which had once literally lanced an anti-advertising character (Peggy’s boyfriend Abe Drexler) into oblivion, concluded by sticking it to critics of Draper’s livelihood. The “show that has made the advertising executive an improbable object of adulation” The New Republic once groused.
In the end, with all its warts, advertising, the quintessential American industry, stood affirmed. That moment came with a nod to a product now detested by the politically correct: Coca-Cola. The man who grew up poor gets past the demons of lousy parenting, and wins out by following his creative instincts. That’s an important template for conservatives, who as a group too often shun the risks of career paths in arts industries.
Yes, Mad Men mostly avoided the life-and-death stakes which reliably drew high ratings to everything from ER to Murder, She Wrote. Business challenges formed its core. In an age of breathless action sequences, youthful fascination with the supernatural (perhaps a replacement for religious mythology), and cheap morbid thrills, Mad Men dramatized everyday challenges and struggles on a more human scale.
Any program which pivots on the formidable challenge of working your way from the bottom to the top in the business world ought to be catnip to those on our side of the aisle. If conservatives don’t respect the creative conventions of realistic, humanistic drama, how will they be onboard when culture washes downstream over politics?
Hmm.
http://www.showbiz411.com/2015/05/19/i-love-lucy-was-sunday-nights-number-1-scripted-show-nearly-twice-as-many-viewers-as-mad-men-finale
I have to admit I didn’t interpret the last scene the same way as everybody else intially. I thought Don was staying in California and ditching his NY life and name. There were numerous hints in the last two seasons that California was his refuge and goal, especially when he tried to open up a branch of McCann there as a last desperate roll of the dice to preserve the old Sterling-Cooper in some way. I also assumed he retained Depression-era dreams of finding wealth and paradise “out west” ala John Steinbeck.
But if I accept the notion that he dreamed up the CocaCola ad and returned to New York, then maybe he was bringing California with him. I read some of the cynical NYT-type reviews online as well. Somehow I can’t bring myself to resent Don or his profession as much as they would like, his uselessness as a father notwithstanding. I see good in him and like him. Reading some reviews it seems as though I’m not supposed to.
Matthew Weiner spoke about the finale last night at the New York Public Library. It’s a one hour interview.
http://livestream.com/theNYPL/Weiner/videos/87832716
As is his wont, Ross Douthat nails it, I think.
http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/05/22/the-three-dramas-of-mad-men/?_r=0
It’s Douthat’s wont to annoy me more than most “conservative” columnists.
His ambivalence about capitalism is probably why the Times pays his keep. That, combined with his social conservatism, explains why his Mad Men paradigm leaves the triumphs of Don Draper’s protege Peggy Olson on the periphery.
This piece is far from Douthat at his worst, but he’s a foe of both the animal spirits driving capitalism, and the sexual liberation which has given us more Peggy Olsons and fewer Betty Drapers.
I think Douthat’s point about the ridiculous caricature that Mad Men made of housewives in the form of Betty Draper is exactly true. While Weiner goes to great lengths to make Peggy a fully fleshed out and nuanced character, Betty is is a silly one note who only exists in the show to be a punching bag for everything Weiner thinks was wrong with the 50s.
My mother was an exact contemporary of Betty Draper. Neither my mother nor any of the other mothers I knew growing up looked or acted anything like Betty Draper. And while Peggy Olson is a success in many ways. I don’t know that you can call the tradeoffs she chose to make some triumph of progress. Women have lost more and been harmed more by the sexual liberation you cheer than they’ve gained or been helped.
I can think of some places in the world where people would agree with you on that, but I wouldn’t recommend a visit.
Betty was an accurate archetype. Lazy, entitled, beautiful women weren’t unusual, and the better looking ones often got to New York (or Hollywood) and met good looking, seemingly upwardly-mobile men. It was Don’s history which was out of the ordinary. Betty was a woman-child, prone to dependency. We can only hope Betty’s outcomes will spare daughter Sally from the Cinderella Syndrome.
We met these characters in 1960, a decade which put the values and characters of the 1950’s under pressure. Conflict creates drama. Peggy vs. her mother. Don vs. Betty. What writers call “the land of happy people” doesn’t work in TV drama. So the securely married, average-looking, ordinary, invisible people who came of age in the 1950’s tend to turn up on the periphery, or to have a good cry.
The 1960’s New York advertising community had rampant alcoholism, infidelity, seriously strained marriages, and a high divorce rate. Much research went into verifying this for Mad Men.
The post-finale interview I linked in #56 above goes into more about the women of Mad Men, including the choices and sacrifices Peggy and Joan made while pursuing their careers. I found it interesting that the decision Joan made in the abortion clinic waiting room was pushed for by a female member of the writing staff. Being true to the characters was always more important on Mad Men than fitting comfortably into any sociopolitical schema or agenda, and I think that’s a reason why thinking people like it so much.