Nov 11, 2009
Mad Men: For What It’s Worth
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.
In retrospect, the third season of Mad Men was about people in the death throes of their old lives. In some way, everyone on the show had reached rock bottom: Don had to deal with a nightmare client, started an affair close to home, and was forced to expose his past to Betty; Betty started an affair, became increasingly awful to her children, and ultimately fell out of love with Don; Peggy became dissatisfied with a lack of attention at work and started fucking Duck Phillips (gross); Roger donned blackface and became useless at Sterling Cooper; Pete started to resent his job and ultimately decided not to go in anymore; Joan left the agency, had to suffer the shame of working at a department store, and hit her loser husband in the head with a vase.
Then, in the last two episodes (post-Kennedy, of course), everyone showed their best selves. Don, Roger, Bert, and Lane took control of their professional destinies; Betty stopped relying on others to make choices for her and forced Don to divorce her; Peggy demanded respect from Don; Pete took the job with the new agency and proved his worth; Joan … well, she never really stopped being fantastic — her issues were more about a change in location.
The show obviously looks very different now. The central emotional relationship between Betty and Don is dead. The Sterling Cooper corporate hierarchy and its attendant relationships will change forever. There will be new sets and locations. The series will undoubtedly change quite a bit in its fourth season.
It takes a lot of balls to do what Matthew Weiner did in the finale. People still love this show — it gets tons of media attention and won the Emmy for best dramatic series in its first two seasons (with a third likely coming next fall). He could have kept the status quo and showed more of the same in future seasons. But I think Weiner realized that you can only rehash the same plots so many times until it gets old. How much longer could he sustain Don sleeping around, Betty being cold but still staying with him against everyone’s better judgment, Peggy doing great work with no attention, Pete being mad, Roger saying funny things and loafing around, etc.? I enjoyed this season a lot, but it’s telling that most of my posts from the last few weeks have been about superficial pleasures like lived-in characters, plot twists, and other aesthetic concerns. At its best, this show is much more than those things.
There’s a risk of expecting too much from the fourth season — there are so many possibilities that whatever path Weiner ends up taking will be disappointing. I’ll leave the specific possibilities for later in the discussion. Right now, I just want to commend Matthew Weiner for taking the leap and recognizing that this show was in danger of becoming too static for its own good. It’s rare for a show to completely change the game in a finale — the only examples I can think of are Lost and The Wire, which both did it every damn season. But Mad Men is supposed to be restrained, not a genre-mixing mindfuck or a comprehensive view of a city, and it’s exactly that potential change in ethos that has me so excited.
I finally got around to seeing the finale tonight, and I must agree, the renewed excitement I felt about the direction of all the characters (except poor Kinsey) has me hanging as I suppose a true season finale should. I’m both satisfied with the wrapping up of loose ends and curious where this will take them – anecdotally, I think I said “Wow” and got goosebumps more in this episode than any other of Mad Men.