Mad Men After 10 Years: Still Timeless

Thomas Culliver
Jul 21, 2017 · 6 min read

I should start this article by first addressing the very arbitrariness of it. Who gives a shit what the greatest television show of all time is? The answer is Alan Sepinwall and a select few others, who are usually a few beers deep at the pub and quickly forget what they were arguing about. There will never be a conclusive answer to the question, so it’s probably best reserved for bar talk. But, much like art history textbooks, articles like these attempt to create a pantheon; acting as the weighty bouncers shaking their heads as you try to approach the VIP section at the club, Don might just raise his glass to you as you’re escorted away. There is little debate as to Mad Men’s greatness, and so I will not attempt to debate anyone or anything. I will however spell out to you exactly why I think Mad Men, a show about good looking white people with problems (not exactly an original or progressive premise), not only deserves to be in the pantheon, but to be the king of it.

Much like Don Draper says about love, television was invented by guys like him to sell nylons. It was transformed by HBO and other forbearers such as, Homicide: Life On The Streets, Hillstreet Blues and the original master Rod Serling, into a medium of art. But before our current gluttony of entertainment, art, and works in between, television was populated with soap operas and glitzy, but substance-less, variety shows. If you want to look at a modern example, turn on your television (you’ll have to buy one first, you cord-cutting millennial) in the middle of the day, or just watch Jimmy Fallon bop around. There was no art, because art doesn’t sell soup unless you’re Warhol. The drama was about attractive people’s social lives; affairs, marriages, sexy young things, hidden children. Mad Men is a mirror to the abyss of this original television content.

A complaint about many great television shows these days is that if they had been made in 1990, they would be independent films. This could be said of most anything on Netflix, most content on Amazon, and in another world Game of Thrones may have been Peter Jackson’s next trilogy. Mad Men however, had to have been a television series for it to be great. Tied to this, is the core complaint about Mad Men; it’s too slow. Where soap operas titillated their viewers with sex and scandal crammed into 22 minutes, Mad Men used these same tools to examine the human soul and along with it, the vapid consumerism which its very format was founded upon. Think of our central plot elements detached from the lingering eye and thematic depth Weiner gives them; a man takes another’s identity! A family man has an affair! A couple gets pregnant from their affair and gives the child up! These are storylines ripped from The Young & The Restless, but when expanded to length and given the gaze of an artist they are seen for what they are; a perfectly human lack of honesty.

The value of being true to one’s self-ideals and values is something that will be timely as long as there are people who urge conformity, and nowhere did this conflict emerge more violently than the 1960s — it was the birth of the very concept of self-acceptance. Weiner is both criticizing and elevating the 1960s by using its very own media, soap operas, to reflect upon itself. He is at once reflecting an era, and a format, by making a long television show about people trying to transform into their honest selves and out of the caricatures that society would like them to be. This makes Mad Men the most pure television show in history. If it were made in any other format, it would completely lose its effect.

Matthew Weiner once stated that the show was never going to be about the people who were a part of the historic moments of the sixties, but rather the people who were there to witness them. These two ideas, of intense change, along with the relative stasis of spirit is brought to life both in the repeated motif of characters watching television and of course our central workplace. To make a show about advertising is to make a show about television, the fact that Weiner made that show really about people connecting is remarkable. For him, consumerism — and therefore television — is a pleasurable fantasy that keeps us from connecting truly. That Mad Men would show you plainly the vacuous soul of people who would use true human suffering and emotion, spin it into an advertisement for Heinz Spaghetti just as the show cuts to a contemporary commercial break, proves to you that the show is in on the joke. He knows that he’s participating in this consumerist behemoth, and he wants you to know that it’s funny. But he also knows that the television is something in your home, and he wields it as a tool to connect rather than deceive, like his characters would have done.

Don Draper is the man you want to be. He’s James Bond but he works in an office. You probably know him, he’s probably your father. He’s perfectly manicured, his tone and voice feel so godlike that they have to be an act. He’s so effortlessly charming and talented that you feel cheated. What’s more is that in a time of sweeping change, he is the one man who doesn’t. Patriarchal, masculine, cold, cruel, and yet you want him to change. By the end he does change, if only for a moment. He is Narcissus, seeing himself drowning yet every attempt to save himself only pulls death closer. But beneath the perfect being is the most imperfect man; one who doesn’t love his children, and connects momentarily only to women that resemble the one who raped him. Appearances being deceiving and the dishonesty at the core of American life — the stories we tell ourselves and each other to rest easy — are laid bare in Mad Men. The fact that I can wax lyrical about a man who occupies an office and not a strip club or a meth lab speaks to the feat that Matthew Weiner pulled off. Breaking Bad is an epic of greed, Sopranos an epic of decay, The Wire an epic of a city, and Mad Men is an epic of the interior.

He is the self-made man, a piece of white trash who sacrificed himself in a quite literal sense to become someone more successful. If a Rand-ian Republican watched Mad Men, would they not cheer him on? Mad Men was never about socio-political affairs, yet they lurked in the shadows, much like our own lives. The show isn’t about power like other shows in the pantheon, nor is it about oppression. It portrayed a transition from 1950s conformity into a world without pretense (or for cynics, more varied pretensions). It’s about the cages we make for others and ourselves by sticking to a narrative, rather than being our flawed selves in the light of day.

Weiner’s finale, Person To Person, featured a man telling a story about being on a shelf in the refrigerator. When it would open he would see people laughing, and for a moment would embrace happiness. But then the refrigerator would close again, and he would be left cold and in the dark. If only someone would open the door for him, he might join the party. Don embraces him, because he sees a reflection of himself within. If only Don would call out for someone to open the door, if only he would step out into the party with everyone else, then maybe he’d be happy. This is a television show made for the 21st century by looking back at the birth of televised entertainment and elevating that original medium to a transcendent level. The vapid jingle of the soap opera was turned into a soulful hymn. It made art out of trash by asking us to look closer at the perfect people occupying the party, and in its way opened the door for you to come join them.

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Thomas Culliver

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Australian-born writer of stories and puff pieces.

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