Is Mad Men Falling Apart This Season?
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Slate's TV Club is having great fun dissecting Mad Men, praising the show more than not. But my friend Matt Labash, a writer at The Weekly Standard, sent me a dissenting rant this morning. Matt is semi-horrified that I asked to publish his email, but I wonder what all you fans think? Is Matt right that Mad Men is losing its way this season? His guest post:
Gosh-damnit, what’s a brother gotta do to get Roger Sterling involved in the show again? The thing’s falling apart dramatically. And I haven’t quite been able to put my finger on why, because it’s still better than most things on television. But there are two problems, the way I see it (you will probably disagree).
1) It’s getting all message-y. An inevitability as we ebb further into the '60s. But it feels broad and ham-handed: Women and blacks are people, too? Really? No shit! Even the sexism and racism are vanilla and clumsy and predictable. Rather unlike Mad Men, Season One. And if I wanted my effing consciousness raised, I wouldn’t watch Mad Men. I’d watch every other preachy, politically correct show on television. The time-capsule element is the appeal—even for people whose politics are diametrically opposed. Good drama involves ambiguity—solving riddles—and the writers are taking it in directions where we all know the proper preapproved outcome. We don’t catch up to the characters, they catch up to us. No fun.
2. But a much bigger problem is no Roger Sterling, played brilliantly by John Slattery. They walk him on for three lines per episode, and invariably, these are the best lines per episode. If I’m creator Matthew Weiner, here’s my simple two-step recipe for continued success: Hand Slattery scenery, watch him chew it. Easy. Every show is 30 percent better straight away, maybe more. Enough with little Sally and gramps and all the other extraneous BS we don’t care about. The only ray of hope as I see it is Sally’s teacher. We already know Draper is going to shtup her, and I hope he gets to it soon, quite frankly. Cause he hasn’t shtupped any women this season, including his wife. Which is why I hate baby storylines. In real life, kids = happiness. In television, babies = stillborn story arcs. Some of the best scenes in Mad Men ever were the early Greenwich Village scenes with Don’s boho paramour and all her artsy friends. There were some great culture clashes there, where the suit and pocket square, for a change, was the good guy, even as he was essentially raging against his own obsolescence. Now that was knotty and interesting and unpredictable. I’m just surprised they didn’t make January Jones (Don’s wife, Betty) have the baby in a stuck elevator, like every other dumbass show on television. That’s the way it’s going this year. Enough! More Roger. Less "evolving." And to think, we still have the Kennedy assassination ahead of us. Good God. I don’t even want to think what that looks like.
Emily Bazelon is a founding editor of Double X, and a writer and editor at Slate.
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A good rule of thumb is to be wary of anyone ranting about 'political correctness.' Particularly one who uses terms like "preapproved."
Strictly speaking there is something to be said for his ideas about good fiction being a puzzle that you have to figure out, rather than something plodding towards an ending or 'twist' you saw coming from a mile away. This is all very true. But to tie this into the phantom of "political correctness" tells me more about Mr. Labash's right wing victim complex than the programme itself.
As Mad Men develops there will be a greater visibility of racism and sexism, and perhaps some "preachiness" yes- which mirrors what happened in the 1960s. Perhaps Mr. Labash forgets, but much of the racist backlash against that growing awareness of institutional bigotry in society *was* ham handed and predictable. That was the reality of it. The world changed in the 1960s and to not even begin to acknowledge why, just so nostalgists might not be discomfited, would do much more damage to the show.
It will be interesting to see what happens late in the series, if it gets that far, and if it will portray these people in the twilight of an era that is mercifully behind us, desperately trying to hold onto it; the eponymous mad men clinging feverishly to something slipping away from them while projecting a fake aura of calm. That could make for some very good drama, certainly.
Though I suspect it is a feeling with which Mr. Labash may already be intimately acquainted.
Or Not
By: remarking | Mon, 09/14/2009 - 22:17
It is too funny (given his institutional affiliation) that Labash was being more enamored of the early seasons of _Mad Men_, with their greater focus on the existential crisis faced by professional white men in the 1960s. I found those seasons both unintentionally funny and tremendously derivative, a cobbling together of aspects of Yates, Cheever, Updike (maybe with bits of Heller's _Something Happened_ thrown in). The notion that the first two seasons weren't message-y (given Labash's loose use of the term) with their nostalgia for the poor poor men of Sterling Cooper, men not only on the wrong side of 60s history in general but even of 1960s _advertising_ history (about to be blindsided by the folks at DDB and Greys) is absurd. Like Labash, I enjoyed the early Village stuff with Rosemarie Dewitt as Midge, but unlike Labash I was never surprised when Draper won his arguments with the bohoes because I thought showing the Pyrrhic victory (an elegy for a generation "raging against [its] own obsolescence") was the point.
Incidentally, I suggest Labash's use of "message-y" is loose because I think he's referring to _Mad Men_ referring to actual historical events as "message-y". And yet the show has _always_ been constrained by "pre-approved" events. Did he find the Nixon storyline message-y, too? What about winking scenes involving drinking and smoking around children and by pregnant women? Or how about Don throwing all the picnic trash down the hill, a lovely image that is surely meant as (at least a partial) nod to the current state of American ecology. A running theme of the show is that Sterling Cooper is (almost comically) on the wrong side of a host of issues -- and if Labash finds the Burning Monk and Medger Evers' too message-y, well, that's how history played out (often on TV sets that none of the adults on _Mad Men_ is watching closely at all).
What has been intriguing this season on _Mad Men_ is not an increasing message-iness, but the deepening of old-fashioned soap storylines which feel earned because of the time we've spent with the characters. What happens when a senile parent comes to stay? How does the inability to conceive slowly reshape a marriage? What happens when your mother disapproves of you moving from the (working class) burroughs to the (high class and, um "rape-y") city? What comes from overzealously pursuing a rebound affair (and midlife crisis remarriage)? What happens when you sacrifice for your surgeon husband and it turns out he isn't going to make chief of surgery? _Mad Men_ isn't playing these storylines for laughs, but acknowledging that these bread and butter interpersonal issues, laced with period detail that acknowledges the realities of class and gender imbalances (and to a much lesser extent race), can make for compelling drama.
I for one am happy to get away from the endless Draper shtupping -- at this point the intimation that any and every women will throw herself at Don (stewardess, schoolteacher, etc.) plays like a parody of Jon Hamm's _30 Rock_ guest, with Don Draper living in the beautiful person bubble. I recognize that Hamm's square-jawed good looks make the scenarios plausible (unlike, say, on _Rescue Me_, which does the same thing with its lead), but seriously, it is time to give it a rest. Hamm can do much more. (At least he has finally escaped the boring "What is the mystery of Don Draper?" storylines that plagued the first two seasons.)
And so can Slattery. Here too I agree with Labash, but not on the details. I don't want to see Slattery free-floating around chewing scenery. He's not Kenneth the Page. I want to see him with a worthy foil, like perhaps his TV ex-wife (but real life wife) Mona/Talia Balsam or with an also mis-married Joan/Christina Hendricks. The show has planted its most dynamic characters and dead-end storylines for thematic reasons, I suppose, but it is time to start letting them escape.
I recognize that perhaps these views perhaps put me in a minority -- I have no idea what the ratings have been like this season -- but I'm more intrigued by more of this season's plots than either of the first two seasons. Much will depend on the follow through -- more Pete Campbell dancing, more Joan Holloway in general -- but I have high hopes.
The Mad Men lurch
By: wahn | Mon, 09/14/2009 - 21:43
Mad Men has always lurched from one plot point to another. It's minimal use of dialogue makes for many awkward silences leading us to believe the 60s were about people who didn't quite know how to behave among their kind. While each episode has a thread running through it, each scene dangles until we're thrown into the next one.
More Roger Indeed
By: jonathan | Mon, 09/14/2009 - 18:48
I think the problem with the show now is that the writer(s) sped too quickly through time....maybe they weren't planning on more than 2 seasons? Why the rush right? The whole point is to see this slice of life and time...not to get through it...I wish we were still with Don, pre-Palm Springs. That was the height of the show...I think its still entertaining...just not to the point it was, which was amazing. I'm sad though. I wish they would have keep the characters as is longer.
how uncreative
By: jonwcollins | Mon, 09/14/2009 - 17:43
so, in other words, "Don't do anything new. Please cover the same ground you covered in previous seasons." Boring! I think it's far more interesting now than in the previous seasons; I can practically feel the tension as everyone's world is about to crack open because of the changes that are hurtling their direction. In a way, we all know what's going to happen, it's the how that's got me hooked. Mad Men has already covered the ground well it covered in the first two seasons. I love Mac n Cheese too, but must Mad Men turn into comfort food as well?