Growing up and growing out of ‘Mad Men’

“Mad Men was the beginning of great television!” He says it with no irony, his eyes bright as he greets a friend. I lock eyes with my own, and we both understand: This is where all the talk has come to.

I have the good fortune to be a USC alumnus, in that fellow USC alumnus and Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner gave a copy of the series finale to our cinema school for a theatrical screening close to live time. Projected on the big screen went the show’s loose ends: Pete and Trudy boarding a Lear jet and looking like the filthy rich royalty they’ve always wanted to be; Joan running her own business and finding, finally, that her work-life balance was never as big of a question as society sought to make it for her; Peggy and Stan on the road to becoming man and wife, not just in the office; Roger back where he started and as quippy as ever (just now in French); Betty settling into the end as Sally picks up the flag; and Don, blissing out in Big Sur and gathering imagery he’ll tap into for the future. It was all we could’ve imagined, and everything the show has, more or less, been promising us for seven seasons.

It was also a sock in the gut, to see an auditorium filled with people falling over themselves to one-up their praise of the show, both before (as with the opening statement) and after the screening. I screamed, gasped, and cried along with them, but as I surveyed the post-screening crowd, I felt more alone than ever, connecting neither with Don’s smile nor the commercialized hand-in-hand of that Coca-Cola ad, but instead feeling the acute pain of watching your best friends embark on a fundamental experience without, and despite, you.

Unlike most of the critical TV reviewing population, I started watching Mad Men the summer after my sophomore year of high school, during a time when my TV diet was, in the time of The Sopranos and The Wire and Six Feet Under, an amalgam of “serious” news and sitcom re-runs, mixed in with bouts of, whenever my parents felt like paying for cable, HGTV and Discovery Channel specials. In my previous life (aka middle school), I’d encountered subversive writing and heart-clenching character narratives through Japanese animation, but hadn’t found anything that piqued my interest nearly as much in Western television.

Enter: Mad Men. I first heard about the show via its Pushing Daisies-level vibrant Entertainment Weekly cover, and, based on that alone, I caught up with season one and watched along with season two. At the time, I didn’t feel too strongly about the show as a cultural phenomena, mostly because I didn’t know I was supposed to feel strongly about it; I liked its focus on advertising, and I identified with the new girl secretary, Peggy Olson. Despite the gaps between me and the show’s characters or with its sense and timeline of historic Americana, early Mad Men was still the most entertaining American show I’d ever watched, though it kept company with many other shows that sought to change the conversation surrounding TV.

None of them influenced the way I viewed Mad Men. For me, it was a fascinating look for me at a life I could still only dream about: money, style, and creativity all coming together in a time when I lacked all three. I was chubby, acne-scarred, not white and just barely aware of it, and struggling to study for my chemistry tests; in short, no stranger to fantasies, and Mad Men was one long, painstakingly styled escapist fever dream. I would create “my” high school stories the way that Don played with his identity, and struggled to cover my tracks for much pettier reasons than the adoption of the life of a dead man. The smoking, the drinking, the decidedly “adult” content all reflected what I wanted from my own life, and I gravitated toward this story of deception and creation. Watching Mad Men became a weird coping mechanism, used to justify what I was doing and how I wanted to live. And of course, most of all, it was fun, to watch this show that had nothing to do with me and which reflected desires and aspirations I could still barely comprehend. The joy came from not thinking too much — and then grappling with the ideas and imagery I couldn’t forget.

I first blogged about Mad Men at it entered into its fourth season: my caption of the show’s poster reads only “SO. PSYCHED.” Follow-up posts from around this time are generally focused on the show’s surface trappings: on Joan’s dresses, on Peggy’s greatly improved hair, on Jon Hamm’s constant smolder. What did the time period, the events surrounding the characters, mean to me? My parents weren’t even in the States at that time the show takes place — so what I knew about the history and “significance” of Mad Men came from reviewers, who relentlessly parsed its spoken and visual texts for meanings and references.

But the longer I followed Mad Men, the more I shied away from the effusion of words people devote to the show. Now, the irony isn’t lost on me here — and, I too tried my hand at writing Mad Men recaps for a while. But Mad Men is, in many ways, most beloved by the people who have the most in common with it — white, of some affluence, who believe that not only are they special, but the nuances of their lives can be mined for small dramas. Don is an avatar of Matthew (which isn’t a secret, but is worthy of scrutiny, as New Yorker TV critic Emily Nussbaum and Grantland writer Molly Lambert discuss on Twitter, especially in the wake of his post-series interviews), a man struggling with his creative legacy and seeking validation in success as monumental cultural contribution. In the context of the socioeconomic traumas that rip the world apart, this all seems inconsequential; but the through line that weaves between characters and seasons and time, Mad Men’s wordless player, all contribute to a larger feeling of sentimentality and stasis: as human beings working, and always working, toward something, for someone, and where they falter most, for themselves.

And that feeling does have meaning, but only among the people most inclined to believe that message in the first place: of capitalism as the Thing to be wrangled into submission or at least warily accepted; of social changes rippling into effect rather than touching at the very heart of your existence; of love and work through an optimistic but critical eye — will this be The One? Designer Janie Bryant paid very careful attention to the nuances of those goals via her sartorial expressions (just look at Peggy’s costuming through the season), though frat boys will still throw on an ill-fitting suit and consider themselves Don. (In reality, they’re almost all Harry.) And really, if you only paid attention to the show through its most visible iconography and the discussion that swirled around it, well, it reads rather like a parody of itself — media consuming media in an upper creative class ouroboros loop, or like a copy chief running laps on roller skates in an empty office in the Time & Life building.

For all its memorable flourishes, Mad Men depicts aftershocks rather than big events, preferring simmering drama drawn out as an essence of whatever Weiner and co. delivers. And though he very clearly obsesses over every detail of the show, it’s the messier big picture that draws anyone in at all, the sweep of social changes and grudge-bearing crows coming home to roost; the details are obvious only to the ones who have the most at stake to find meaning in them. That the critical work around the show has become so exclusive is, perhaps, inevitable, but as we mull over its final body of work, it’s worth reflecting on not the narrative ending, but the conversation it’s created around creative perfection and critical success.

That Mad Men is gone, and had unspooled its narrative so methodically and in such measured doses, were things that were inevitable from its creation — this is Weiner’s perfect pitch in action, the neat bow on top of his tender endeavor. But the more the show is either broadly characterized or intensely probed, the show falls apart, becomes not the sum of its parts but a series of Andre Leon Talley-like “moments” (e.g. the final ad) and the stretches in between. Mad Men is a fully realized fiction in the way many “prestige TV” shows are, but even Breaking Bad was far removed enough from most peoples’ reality to serve as a distant metaphor for greater discontent. Mad Men isn’t metaphor, but rather is composed of them, and ones that no longer hold much truth for me. Which doesn’t make it better, or worse, in any measure — only strange, to love the core of an experience but not its end result.