Plasma Pool

The fourth season of Mad Men opens with a question, posed by a writer for Advertising Age, that could be said to define the series as a whole: “Who is Don Draper?” For three seasons, the show has been driven by a gradual revelation — in theory, at least — of what makes this man tick.

We have not learned much. When Don answers this question, he does so with garden-variety obfuscation, asking what other people say and quickly mentioning that people from the Midwest don’t like to talk about themselves. He explains his famous ad campaigns in strict creative terms, and the interview ends. When the article comes out, it paints Don as an aloof jerk. It is a completely accurate assessment, given what we know about his character.

The fourth season wasn’t quite supposed to be this way. Season 3 ended on such an upswing — with Don and Betty ending their horrific marriage and the Sterling Cooper braintrust jumping ship to start the new agency Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce — that many expected Sunday’s season premiere to jump out of the gates with a fresh energy never seen before on the series. At times, we saw exactly that: the introduction to the new SCDP office is a thrilling “the gang’s all here” montage of all our favorite ad men (and women). The office is a totally new set with exciting quirks, more a labyrinth than the bullpen and surrounding offices of the old Sterling Cooper space. This new agency is a whole different type of business, and that becomes clear with every passing scene involving it.

There are other differences in the characters, mostly of the superficial variety. Don is even more of a superstar than before in the eyes of the clients and virtually everyone but himself, but he still seems generally unhappy and appears to have few prospects unrelated to his job (although his new, 25-year-old girl could change that, even if she seems like a potential Betty in the making). Betty is married to a new man but is possibly even a less attentive mother, which didn’t seem possible. Peggy has a new hairstyle and more confidence but still finds herself being chewed out by Don, her stern father figure. Pete has a new title and still can only use his expense account for whores. Joan has an office and quite possibly no new responsibilities. Etc.

In other words, everyone finds himself in a new situation, but with little indication that there has been substantive emotional change in their lives. As befits a show about advertising, the packaging is different, but it’s the same product.

This could be a problem for the show and its aesthetics. Part of what made the Season 3 finale so exciting is that the show had seemed to have done all it could with the plotlines and general situations of the first three seasons; you can only watch Don get ticked at Roger so many times before the show starts to feel like a sitcom using the same callback jokes with little desire to change. While Mad Men is still pretty clearly the best show on television, there’s a danger that it could ease into a pattern with its characters and not ask them to get out of it. Sure, Don will always work with new companies, but how often can we see him return home and drink while watching TV?

Then again, The Sopranos, the closest relative of Mad Men and the show on which Weiner served as a writer and supervising producer, had a similar structure, in which characters usually took the easy way out and returned to the comfortable status quo after indications that they might change. That show hit some rough spots, most notably in Season 4, but it worked even as characters never fulfilled extended arcs. It was a show of epiphanies in which those moments never amounted to anything.

Mad Men can do something similar, although its options seem more limited without the fallback position of standard mob murder shenanigans. Weiner doesn’t have to make his characters change, but he does have to find interesting situations to put them in where they may have to face their deepest issues and hang-ups. Given the restrictions of a show about the employees of an advertising company, that may be difficult.

But in the last stretch of the season premiere, it seems as if Weiner has found the way. After presenting a new campaign to a disingenuously prudish swimwear company, Don orders them out of his office and immediately schedules another meeting with a reporter, this time from The Wall Street Journal.

It’s a far more successful interview, almost entirely because Don plays the part of the hotshot, smooth-talking ad executive. He knows everyone thinks he’s hot shit and embraces it, telling stories about how he came up with a great idea for an agency and had his whole staff fired. It’s an impressive performance in all meanings of the term. This is not who we know Don to be, but he inhabits the role and for all intents and purposes appears to be a hotshot ad man.

In many ways, Mad Men has always been about characters playing roles created for them by society. When Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce was created last season, it seemed as if each characters casted off that role to embrace their true selves. As we see now, though, they were just taking on new roles. Again, the packaging is different, but it’s the same product. As long as the characters continue to try on new roles and experience them in interesting ways, the show can continue to be the best program on television by a wide margin.

What remains unclear — and what has been one of the most prominent questions of the whole series — is how much that role comes to define a person, or if a “true self” even exists. If Don plays a role in public and remains a hooker-slapped cypher at home, who’s to say which is more true to his nature? Perhaps performance — or, to put it in other terms, a public face — defines our lives more than we wish to admit. Does a quality ad campaign reveal a product for what it is at its core or simply obscure what the product really does?