“Mad Men” — The Wheel
The first season of AMC’s brilliant new drama Mad Men wrapped this past Thursday. While my personal viewing schedule is now significantly lighter it’s a shame I won’t be able to sit through new episodes until next summer (assuming a writer’s strike doesn’t push things back even further). There is currently no other series on television (outside of The Wire) that is attempting to do what Mad Men has done over these past thirteen weeks. There’s a lot of great, highly entertaining television these days, but few series are able to tell their stories with the same degree of sociological and political resonance. I suppose I should also give props to Damages, but that series is much more a triumph of technical bravado. When all is said and done it ends up being an expertly crafter murder mystery. Mad Man seems destined to ask bigger questions about humanity and the course we’ve made for ourselves over the past half-century. More after the jump…
Let’s get the not-so-good out of the way first. Peggy’s unexpected pregnancy — unexpected not in getting pregnant, but in actually having the child. Of everything on the show, this move seemed to be the most “television.” Personally the idea that she was gaining weight as a defense mechanism against the office vultures seemed a far more rational decision within this universe than the actual cause. A friend and I were arguing as to how one could carry a baby to term and not realize it. He seemed to think it would be nearly impossible. I tend to think it not only could happen, but probably happened way more than any of us would otherwise think. To borrow a line from David Cross, “This is a time when people were even stupider than we are today.” It felt like the one aspect of the episode that didn’t seem to gel with everything else around it, though there certainly was a “loss of innocence” (or a desire to return to more innocent times) theme that could fit. Even still, the sequence stuck out like… well, a pregnancy.
Either way, given Peggy’s performance early on in the recording booth (and the cutthroat way she fired the actress from the role) it felt like her character had completed a sizable arc over the course of the season. I suppose we’ll see what repercussions there are in the second season (though I suspect she won’t end up keeping the child).
Much more in tune with the series tone this week was Betty’s revelation that Don has been cheating on her, a revelation that was much more about snapping herself out of the childlike haze she has been in than any real sort of “gotcha” moment between her and Don. After all, the whole thing with the phone bill illustrated not that he was placing calls to a Manhattan lover but to her therapist. This led to her character’s biggest breakthrough moment of using the therapy sessions and the knowledge that the news will be related back to Don to unload a lot of baggage she wouldn’t have been able to otherwise.
Perhaps more telling was that creepy run in with Glenn, the divorcées young boy who took a liking to Betty in ways that were… curious… to say the least. That she felt more comfortable baring her soul to him in a freezing car speaks highly about just how stunted she is in her current place in the world. Of all the characters who I look forward to seeing in the second season, Betty is at the top of the list. Everyone has their problems, but she seems to have the most to gain. It’ll be interesting to see if she can ultimately break through and develop her own personality, as she’s been playing the part of housewife in a role that doesn’t seem it will ever end. There is, of course, the possibility that she simply doesn’t want to be self sufficient.
Of course what Don has done to her (or rather what he hasn’t done) certainly stoked the situation. His pitch to the Kodak people about the built-in nostalgia surrounding their new slide projector was not only top-notch in its ability to get Sterling-Cooper the account, but even sold Don himself on the idea of a happy family life that he never really experienced (here with Betty or as a young Dick Whitman), ultimately causing him to race home to visions of his wife and children greeting him at the door. Instead, he came back to an empty house because, like everything in his life, he pushed them away. The closing frames were poetic in their loneliness and yet just in that Don has done little to deserve (or even show interest in) a real family. He likes the idea. The notion of happiness, but even he would be the first to admit that that happiness is nothing more than a construct he built in order to sell a product.
As for the rest of the guys at work, there wasn’t a lot of extra screen time to go around, though Pete continued to cement his position firmly in the middle by both landing the company a brand new account, but also by having to feel the added pressure of his father-in-law, who got him the deal.
Initially, word was that series creator Matthew Weiner was going to jump the story ahead two years with each season (so a five season run would take the show all the way through the sixties), but that might not still be the case as he points out toward the end of an interview with Chicago Tribune’s Maureen Ryan. Honestly, I could go either way. I like the idea of the series completing its run as this epic look at the post-industrialization of America, but I’m equally engaged with the more immediate consequences of everyone’s actions. Either way, John Slattery is slated to come back. So we’ve got that going for us.
