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Closing the book on 'Mad Men' (w/video)

 
The characters on Mad Men have captured an era, and sold us a story. 
From left are Kiernan Shipka as Sally Draper, January Jones as Betty Francis, Jessica Pare as Megan Draper and Jon Hamm as Don Draper.
The characters on Mad Men have captured an era, and sold us a story. From left are Kiernan Shipka as Sally Draper, January Jones as Betty Francis, Jessica Pare as Megan Draper and Jon Hamm as Don Draper.
Published April 3, 2015

Could the great American novel be a TV series? • If we can define the great American novel as one that illuminates the culture and concerns of an era in our history in a compelling and well-wrought narrative, Mad Men might well count. • The first episode of the second half of Season 7, the final season of Mad Men, premieres April 5, and viewing it brought that comparison to mind for me, not for the first time. • Since Mad Men premiered on July 19, 2007, its average audience has never topped 3 million viewers, but its cultural influence has been outsized. It won glowing critical acclaim and scored 15 Emmys. It inspired fashion and decor and an ocean of craft cocktails, and it made stars of its cast, almost all of whom were unknowns. (When the show premiered, the best-known actor in the cast was Robert Morse, who played Bert Cooper until he soft-shoed off to the afterlife during the first half of the last season.) • What made Mad Men different from a thousand other series? Lots of things, but I'd argue that one of the most important is that writer-director-producer Matthew Weiner has created it as if it were a novel, shaping and deepening it in ways that few TV series can match. • Actual books have regularly appeared on screen in Mad Men — something of a rarity on TV — playing a role in the series' meticulous period authenticity and often telling us something about the people reading them. We've seen main character Don Draper reading everything from Frank O'Hara's Meditations in an Emergency to Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint. Tonight's episode gives us a mysterious character engrossed in John Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy, which is, among other things, an epic critique of the capitalism the characters thrive upon.

American reinvention

But Mad Men is also itself novelistic, far more so than most television series. Its narrative line is continuous rather than episodic, building on characters and themes over time, rich in symbolism and metaphor.

Spanning the decade of the 1960s, Mad Men has put its characters right in the middle of an era of seismic changes in American culture — in gender roles and sexual behavior, in the family and the workplace, in politics and racial attitudes.

(Mad Men has been dinged for not dealing forthrightly with the civil rights movement and for having few characters of color, but go back and look at its very first scene in Season 1, Episode 1. At a bar, Don begins quizzing a black waiter about his smoking habits. He's interrupted by a white waiter, who asks Don, "Is he bothering you?" It's dreadful that the show's characters live in a world of insular white privilege they rarely question, but it's also historically accurate.)

As played by the brilliant Jon Hamm, Don Draper is a letter-perfect specimen of the American antihero, a character who is deeply flawed and morally ambiguous but nevertheless (or maybe for those very reasons) fascinating and, at least some of the time, sympathetic.

Draper embodies one of the series' essential themes, a theme that practically defines American literature: reinventing the self. From The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Great Gatsby to John Updike's Rabbit quartet and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay, characters in American novels are constantly sloughing off their old identities and creating new ones, lighting out for the territory in search of better lives, even when it means leaving disaster in their wake.

Draper, with his purloined name and carefully constructed persona, epitomizes that theme, but it applies to other characters in the series as well, especially the woman who is arguably the show's other main character. Peggy Olson, played by Elisabeth Moss, has transformed herself from an eager young secretary hewing to traditional gender roles to a steely executive whose personal life is almost as big a hash as Don's.

Reinvention — rebranding — is the essence of advertising, after all. If you're good enough at it, you can fool all of the people all of the time, and Mad Men's characters take that to heart in their personal lives as well as at the office. Remember what Don said to Peggy back in Season 2, after she had given birth to Pete's baby? He advised her to tell no one and get back to work: "This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened."

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If that's all there is

The preview DVD of tonight's Mad Men episode, "Severance," arrived with the usual Weiner admonitions about spoilers, specifically asking reviewers not to give away certain things such as when the season takes place. Okay, but viewers know the first half of Season 7 ended in July 1969; the most obvious indication tonight of the passage of time is Roger's ginormous mustache.

I'm also not supposed to say anything about Don's sex life. Wait, what else am I going to talk about?

The episode opens with what looks like a slice of that sex life: a leggy woman in a fur coat and little else preening in front of a mirror as Don gives her instructions, all as Peggy Lee's bittersweet voice croons Is That All There Is?

We get a shot of Don's compulsion for reinvention soon after. Remember Season 6, when he broke down during the Hershey presentation and started rambling tearfully about growing up in a brothel (leading to his forced leave of absence from his job), then took his kids to show them the brothel?

Both seemed to point to a breakdown of the Don Draper facade, a revelation of the inner Dick Whitman. But in tonight's episode Don has reassembled himself. While at a diner with Roger and three young women, he reshapes the searing story of his childhood into a slickly Dickensian sales tool — selling, of course, himself, although his recounting of the story is as impersonal as any ad.

But there are, as always, signs of Don's inner turmoil. For one thing, Bert Cooper's song and dance isn't the last time Don sees dead people. Also, although I'm not supposed to tell you anything about his sex life, I will tell you it's in high gear but doesn't seem very satisfying. Don might occasionally mentor a female employee, but in general he is utterly, cluelessly unreconstructed about gender roles.

He's not the only one. This episode gives us a hair-raising, and entirely true to the times, example of workplace male chauvinist piggery when Joan (Christina Hendricks) and Peggy make a pitch to three crass male executives at another ad agency. The women are well prepared and professional. The men, snorting and giggling, do nothing but make crude jokes about Joan's breasts. It's a painful scene to watch, and the aftermath, as Joan and Peggy turn on each other, is worse.

Peggy gets almost as much screen time as Don in this episode (which is work-focused; Don's family never appears), and although the above scenes are uncomfortable, it's fun to see her go out on a blind date that actually works out. She almost, but not quite, runs off to Paris — but she does end up with a happy, hopeful glow we haven't seen her with in a long time.

Not Don. The episode ends with him back in that diner, looking for all the world like a lonesome figure in an Edward Hopper painting, as Peggy Lee croons the final verses of that song we began with, the singer speaking from her deathbed:

Is that all there is?

Is that all there is?

If that's all there is my friends

Then let's keep dancing

Let's break out the booze and have a ball

If that's all there is.

One more sign that Mad Men might be a great American novel: When I draw close to the end of a really great book, I'm torn between wanting to know what happens and how it all ends — and not wanting it to end. Turn the pages, or save the last chapters to stretch it out for one more day? With only seven chapters of Mad Men left, that's just how I feel.

Contact Colette Bancroft at cbancroft@tampabay.com or (727) 893-8435. Follow @colettemb.