Aug 27, 2009
Mad Men: The Glen Bishop Variety Hour
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.
I’m not sure I want Mad Men to do more episodes like “Love Among the Ruins,” but I think it’s almost necessary for a show to become a little less focused in its third season. There’s a long line of excellent shows that have done this: The Sopranos brought in the Meadow/Jackie Jr. time-sink; Lost started doing episodes about Jack’s tattoos; Deadwood decided to feature the Earp brothers and a drama group for no clear reason; The Wire turned from cops and criminals to cops, criminals, and politics; Weeds became one of the stupidest series on television. In many ways, there are perfectly logical reasons for this trend. The third season is an odd period between initial success and the homestretch, a time when writers realize they don’t have to use all their best ideas in order to get renewed. I don’t mean to suggest that people only write well to ensure their show keeps getting picked up, but there’s a natural tendency to start stretching plots out a bit more once everyone realizes the show isn’t at risk of dying any minute.
Mad Men seems to be at that point right now. The essential themes and basic characters arcs are pretty well established at this point: everyone sleeps around or is unhappy and occasionally gets chance to find some small portion of peace or fulfillment, although they usually don’t take those opportunities and end up reverting to whatever old habits they harbor. (That’s reductive, of course, but hopefully it made sense to everyone.) There are a few ways to keep things fresh, and after two episodes the third season is using a few of them, including the revelation of secrets (Don realizing Sal is gay) and bigger roles for previously minor or new characters (Gene Hofstadt’s move into the Draper household). The side effect of a third-season lack of focus, though, is that you get a lot of episodes that feel like “Love Among the Ruins”: a lot of jumping around with a general lack of thematic cohesion between those elements.
That’s usually not an issue if you like the show — by the third season, most series have established everything enough that it’s fine just to hang out with the characters. But while I think Mad Men is the best drama on TV right now, it also relies on an aesthetic of control and thematic resonance from plotline to plotline, almost as if David Simon had decided to make a psychological drama instead of The Wire. As you said, Darren, the one criticism you can make about Matthew Weiner totally misses the point of what makes him so good in the first place — he doesn’t really waste scenes or plotlines or even seemingly small character moments.
So what should Mad Men do now that the show almost has to get a little less focused? My hope is that plotlines and themes will remain focused for a single episode while expanding their scope to now-minor characters such as Paul Kinsey, Ken Cosgrove, and Francine. (I also want a Glen Bishop spin-off, but that would be an entirely different kind of show.) This will likely mean that we’ll see less of Don and Peggy and Pete, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. One of the unfortunate things about foregrounding emotional moments in a long-running series is that plotlines begin to repeat themselves fairly early in the run — there are only so many times you can see Don think deep and hard about his relationship with Betty before you know he’s just going to sleep around some more, and maybe also do something really cosmic like put his hand through blades of grass. Don’t get me wrong, I still think Don’s a great character; I just wonder when the show is going to have to start pushing him to the background a bit more.
[...] week, I complained that Mad Men was entering into third-season doldrums where the show’s typically strong [...]
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