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.

Boy, pop culture was awful back in the early 1960s! The most controversial show on TV was about lawyers who care, white women everywhere went orgasmic for the Twist, and the best thing Pepsi could rip off for the marketing of their new diet cola was a peppy teeny-bop Elvis/Our Town mash-up called Bye Bye, Birdie. I saw a high school performance of Birdie long ago, and the title theme was sung by a girl wearing a Statue of Liberty outfit who looked nothing at all like Ann-Margret, which probably means that girl will never be famous enough to spend her later years playing boozy variations of herself. (See also: Carl Weathers, William Shatner, David Carradine RIP.) PS, props to Ann-Margret for indirectly giving her best performance ever last night, playing herself playing a high schooler for the benefit of married men who could use a break from the wife every now and then. (Fun Fact! The only two Sterling Cooper supporting cast personnel who haven’t cheated on their SOs are Ken Cosgrove and Paul Kinsey. Place your bets now for Season 4!)

I digress, but is it me, or did this whole episode feel a bit digressive? About the only critique you can have about Matthew Weiner is that sometimes his writing is a bit too cleanly metaphorical – in particular, that the advertising plotlines are merely highbrow versions of the patient-of-the-week structure favored by Grey’s Anatomy and its ilk (every week, a new patient with a new unlikely illness that somehow touches obliquely on the doctors’ emotional troubles; when Meredith has her heart broken she works on a guy who needs a heart transplant, etc.) I’m not so sure how far this argument gets you – it’s a bit like complaining that Charlie Kaufman’s movies are always surreal, or that Miyazaki’s movies have way too much beautiful imagery – but this episode didn’t feel clean at all.

Let’s see. Peggy got upset about the Ann-Margret thing, though it wasn’t clear what was more offended: her female sensibilities or her artistic sensibilities. She seemed to think that a diet commercial could appeal to something less shallow in humanity than whatever Ann-Margret epitomizes, but let’s face it, she also got called a Fat Prude about two seconds into the episode by an adulterer and a closet queen (actually, two adulterers), so you’d understand if in ten seasons this lady is burning her bra and making out with Susan Sontag.

That was one line of the episode. The other main line focused on Don at home, at dinner, at drinks, and at work, though everything is kind of starting to run together. Him and Betty had a playdate with Mr. Price (I need to rewatch the first episode, but I’m unclear what his exact title is – is he just supposed to be an intermediary between the British overlords and Sterling-Cooper?), which went awkwardly in every way. “Do you know any schools in the city?” “No.” “I heard this company is making a move on that company.” “Let’s not talk business in front of the women.”

On the drive home, Betty informed Don that her family would be coming to visit. The Hofstadts occupy some faintly gothic post-Victorian mindscape where husbands and wives sleep in separate bunk beds and all Daddy wants is to get Grandpa’s big house. Oh, and Grandpa has the kind of Faulknerian dementia where he’s totally fine until he confuses female relatives with other female relatives. (Did you freak out when he sat down next to Sally? Somebody recently pointed out to me that Bobby is just about the right age to get drafted for Vietnam. Does that make Sally the right age for Vietnam protests?)

Don had another playdate with his old pal Roger (whose own earlier meeting with his family felt like a more tense version of the Potsdam conference), as they tried to use their charm (Roger) and brilliant rhetoric (Don) to win over the Madison Square Garden account after Paul Kinsey spoiled the whole thing with a Hard Sell routine that forgot to Sell. (I have a deep abiding love for Paul Kinsey – maybe it’s because the actor really does look like Orson Welles, or maybe it’s because the little dance between him and Joan after the Nixon/Kennedy drunkfest felt like one last note of grace before the world went mad – but if he’s got a character arc, it seems to be a slow steady spiral down the drain of mediocrity.)

To the extent that this episode had a structure, I think it was focused on Peggy and Don – they had a meeting right around the episode’s midpoint, which crackled with a weird energy. I keep on changing my mind about the exact nature of the character’s relationship. At times, Peggy seems a bit like an echo of the other Mrs. Draper, who provided Don with a kind of asexual maternal big-sister guidance. At other times, they both seem to instinctively recognize a certain hidden mutual certainty of not-belonging; Peggy hides her Brooklyn girl as surely as Don hides his farmboy. Then again, maybe Peggy is just a younger version of Don – meteoric rise, secrets kept from everyone around her, love affairs and one-night stands; a mix of artistic integrity, LCD American instincts, European morals with an Eisenhower worldview.

Then again, maybe Don just really likes hanging out with her. The final few shots of this frenetic, even awkward episode felt smooth and joyful, like everything was in its right place. Fresh from ogling a spiritually alluring schoolteacher at a Maypole celebration (what’s Don going to do when skirts ascend over kneecaps?), he walks back into the office. He stops by Peggy’s open door, and somehow she hears him and turns around. He keeps walking, but she follows him out – want to talk advertising? He welcomes her in, and wow if that last shot wasn’t a quiet stunner – Don lighting a cigarette and breathing out sultry tobacco (tragically, nothing looks as beautiful onscreen as cigarette smoke), Peggy sitting in front of him. There’s a calm quality to that little moment (the kind of final shot which seems more like David Milch than David Chase, cutting to black just a millisecond before someone says something), and I’m reminded of how closely the Don/Peggy interaction traces through the show’s history.

There’s a definite luxurious quality to the storytelling in these first two episodes which can only come from a TV showrunner who knows he’s got a few years to work with; Weiner spent last winter renegotiating his contract with AMC, so he’s a multi-millionaire, and the show gets more viewers with every passing week, so he’s a popular multi-millionaire. Weiner once said in an interview that, if he’d known that Mad Men would have a second season, he wouldn’t have revealed everything about Dick Whitman by the end of season one; as far as he was concerned, season one could be the whole story. Going into season 2, the show still wasn’t a popular success, and so there’s that same sense of cruel finality in the season finale; Betty and Don’s marriage almost crumbles, Peggy offers Pete her terrible revelation, and the United States and Russia come to the brink of nuclear war.

Now, Weiner can definitely look forward a few years, and so I wonder if this season isn’t going to feel… different. Not necessarily worse, but definitely different. Eric, you and I have spoken before about a certain divide in the particular narrative mechanics of great 2000s television, a divide which can best be described by contrasting David Simon’s The Wire, where everything connects to everything and every episode in a season builds brick-by-brick to a Greek tragedy conclusion, and David Milch’s Deadwood, which focuses essentially the same importance on the machinations of civilization-building as it does on the particular etiquette of being a frontier drunk as it does the lunatic hotel busboy who worships a pair of antlers. (Todd VanDerWerff at the AV Club is writing a brilliant series of posts which argue that Deadwood is mostly about the machinations of civilization-building, one of those brilliant show-theories which requires one to disregard whole swaths of narrative as inconsequential; kind of like my theory about how Gossip Girl is more about power dynamics than about high school, which always applies except for the 1/4 of a time that the show is really just about high school.)

This contrast goes a bit deeper than the serialized/episodic divide, and I think the tension between the two styles is particularly useful when examining a successful show in its third season, when things begin to hit a certain stride and many of the initial plot and thematic elements that went into the show are beginning to disappear or morph into something different. What do you think, Eric? Would you be happy with more episodes like this, which kind of circle around several different ideas without quite settling on one thing? Or did this feel kind of slapdash to you? I’m always hypertense watching the first couple episodes of a new season of a TV show I like (I almost suffered an aneurysm during the premiere of Lost Season 5, which took a few key missteps which took half a season to fix), and there was one moment in the episode where I got a Bizarro-world glimpse of what Mad Men would have looked like if AMC had actually gotten a different showrunner: Peggy singing “Bye Bye, Birdie” into the mirror, which started out as awkward, West-Wing-without-Aaron-Sorkin TV but then felt just graciously, embarrassingly true-life Matthew Weiner TV.