A Belated Word on Mad Men

I’m not adding anything new to the discussion about the Mad Men finale. It was fine.

A confession: I originally quit every show I eventually grew to love. I did not like the Sopranos pilot because of Christopher Moltisanti. I quit The Wire because of Season 1's pace. I passed on Mad Men because the fans, at the time, spoke of fedoras and cigarettes as if they were the emperor’s new clothes.

Take away the set and costume design — is there anything left?

Much like my belief of the existence of WMD’s in Iraq, I was wrong about all of these shows.

If you watch Mad Men because you want to be like Don Draper — you must have hated the last two seasons and the second half of Goodfellas. Don Draper isn’t even Don Draper. Don Draper is dead in Korea.

Matt Weiner made fedora-wearing men look like LARPers.

You think Ned Stark losing his dome was a surprise? Pete Campbell gets the girl in the end.

As much as I enjoyed it, I am not going to miss Mad Men. I will miss Roger Sterling, but I am not going to miss Mad Men. The show was, for me, not always an easy watch. Behaviors than men and women often proudly display are shown to their ultimate conclusion. Watch Don walking into an empty apartment and it can change your understanding of ambition. A television show can do this.

This might be bullshit but I think Breaking Bad and Mad Men can be read as companion stories. I think where Gilligan went wrong is he started writing (at best) for posterity or (at worst)for fans, though he seems to have tempered this a little in Better Call Saul. Men climb Everest to say they have not to stay there. Be it advertising to methamphetamine, no one is breathing at the top.

There should be t-shirts of Tony Soprano hiding in a safehouse with a gun, of Walter White hunched over behind a column conversing with his estranged wife, and of Don Draper nearly catatonic beneath a payphone. These are cautionary tales.

Be Meadow. Be Flynn. Be Pete?