Plasma Pool

This essay is part of “Point-Hyperpoint: Mad Men,” a rollicking series of posts devoted to discussing AMC’s drama series. Spoilers abound. To read the entire series, please visit this page. To see all of Plasma Pool’s “Point-Hyperpoint” discussions, please click here.

Do things have to happen on a TV show? What you’re bringing up, Eric, is a central question about the whole nature of narrative TV. In the past decade, a perceived rift has developed in how television tells stories. On one hand, you have the episodic series, typically procedurals involving ever-more-eccentric methods of crimesolving, where each new part tells a story complete in itself and you can essentially watch any episode without any prior knowledge of the show and get the point. This is The Mentalist, or CSI, or Law & Order. On the other hand, you have the serialized series, where each episode builds off what’s happened and paves the way for what’s coming and viewers are rewarded for encyclopedic nano-detailed knowledge of plot points five seasons in the past. This is Lost, or 24, or The Shield.

I’m using dramas as examples here, since we’re talking about Mad Men, but you could just as easily use sitcoms (Two and a Half Men, whose six seasons are all right there in the title, vs. How I Met Your Mother, with its series-spanning mystery and the relentless sideways time flashes), or reality shows (house-of-the-week Extreme Makeover: Home Edition vs. season-long chronicles of pop melodrama on American Idol), or even late-night TV (note how quickly Late Night with Jimmy Fallon became low-grade compelling after the proposed Saved By The Bell reunion became the show’s multimedia Ur-narrative.)

Mad Men frustrates this rift. It rewards close attention without particularly demanding it — it’s pretty cool if you know that the Belle Jolie executive who appears in “The Benefactor” is the same guy who made a pass at Salvatore in “The Hobo Code,” but your experience of the actual events of the show doesn’t really change if you don’t realize that (unlike on another serialized show, where if you could look very closely at a non sequitur photo on a desk your entire understanding of the whole path of the series could change).

I can’t imagine watching the show out of order, but I don’t know if, for the most part, the schematic layout of relationships on the show has changed very much since the first episode. The Draper marriage is complicated; Sterling Cooper is a small company trying to navigate in a burgeoning corporate world; working women have it tough.

You describe Mad Men as The Sopranos without the whacking. It’s interesting, because Matthew Weiner became an important influence in the later years of the show — beginning as a staff writer in Season 5 and becoming an executive producer in the second half of the final season. What’s interesting is that those seasons steadily moved the show into a more interior realm — more time was spent on the decline of Tony’s family, and less time was spent on the gangster stuff. In essence, The Sopranos became “The Sopranos without the whacking,” and I don’t think its a coincidence that some of the best episodes of those final two seasons have Weiner as a credited writer, like “Kennedy and Heidi,” where Tony weathers a family crisis by fleeing to a huge western America metropolis built on vice, greed, and attractive female guest stars — exactly like Don in “The Jet Set.”

David Chase’s genius with The Sopranos was that he grafted an essentially realist, even existential drama — the plight of the modern upper-middle class white suburban male — onto one of the most generic of genres, the gangster story. The two halves had the effect of supercharging each other: a moribund genre was brought back to life, and if it ever seemed like the show was getting too slow (usually right around the 3/4 mark of the season), guns would come out. If Death of a Salesman lasted 90 hours and the whole male cast had guns, it would basically be The Sopranos.

With Mad Men, Matthew Weiner has taken away the guns, but for some reason the thrills remain, and I think it will be interesting trying to figure out exactly how that’s possible. I think you could argue that the show’s historical nature is part of it, as it provides an overall narrative progression (Oh, now it’s Valentine’s Day! Oh, now it’s the 1960 election!) that grounds a show whose plot seems in danger of spinning around in carousels.

To me, though, the real heart of the show — the thing which makes Mad Men more than just one of the greatest TV shows ever and actually a kind of philosophical epic on par with The Unbearable Lightness of Being or Last Year at Marienbad — is its running fascination with the creative process, and how it’s able to dramatize into action the process of self-examination on the road to expression. Heavy stuff? Yes, but when the art you’re portraying is advertising, everything you’re trying to say about the creative process becomes vulgarized, simplified, and concretized into something so easy to understand that you almost start to forget you’re understanding something profound.

Let’s take a look back at the first episode, “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes.” The pilot so immediately establishes the ’60s setting, the zip-zap dialogue, and the whole atmospheric expansiveness of the show that it’s easy to miss how straightforward the plotline is. A naive newcomer is thrown into a fast-paced and confusing work environment (Peggy in Mad Men, Noah Wyle on ER); a wily alcoholic insider lays some wisdom on a young protege (Roger and Don are Sipowicz and every partner on NYPD Blue); a main character starts the episode in bed with a woman in New York City, then finishes the episode by going home to a twist-ending wife in the suburbs (the exact bookend to the first episode of Denis Leary’s forgotten classic The Job — I think he might even go into his kids’ room at the very end of the episode, but I might be making it up).

The important thing, though — the reason why, the single scene in which Mad Men instantly became so compelling — is the scene with the Lucky Strike executives, a meeting the whole episode has been building to. Don Draper walks into the boardroom without any idea of how to sell cigarettes, despite asking every person he’s come across why they like them. He walks out having created one of the most catchy catchphrases of all time, a proudly non sequitur (even absurdist) piece of tobacco company arcana that is now the entire reason for choosing Lucky Strike over Marlboro.

This moment of creation is almost unique in TV history — the way in which the entire episode has prepared you, in very minor details, for Don’s solution. Sometimes the show is a bit more obvious — Harry’s solution to making more money for his pregnant wife is to try to sell commercials for a show about abortion — and sometimes the creation point is epic (Peggy’s first bit of copy, “Mark Your Man,” seems to hint at a deep yearning in her guarded character, something she almost never lets the world see otherwise). In some ways, advertising keeps these people at a remove from the world, as much as the gangster life did in The Sopranos or the cop life does in The Wire. In some ways, it makes them almost too human: they seem to live too much of life, which is why the only real danger on the show is that they’ll drink themselves to an early grave or to forced retirement in pre-Betty Ford rehab.