The Fainting Couch for Best Supporting Actor

Click here to see a slide show of Betty Draper's Mad Men redecoration.

When Mad Men isn’t praised for its staggeringly meticulous set and costume design, it’s accused of being too attractive for its own good. Earlier this month, in Slate’s TV Club, Patrick Radden Keefe wondered whether the AMC hit is nothing but a guilty pleasure, “a delicious but ultimately meaningless immersion in style over substance.” Last fall, in an essay for the London Book Review, Mark Grief even went so far as to suggest that “the low sofas and Eames chairs, the gunmetal desks and geometric ceiling tiles” are shiny decoys distracting us from the plot’s inadequacies. Period-specific details—from clocks to consoles to carpets—may be laudable showmanship, the critique seems to go, but they don’t really count.

Sunday night’s episode was Matt Weiner’s jujitsu-like retort: Our furniture, he said, via the cunning deployment of a few chairs and lamps, really matters. The tutorial begins the moment Don walks into his newly redecorated living room to see what Betty and her decorator have cooked up and is subtly underscored with odd moments of object-fetish (Peggy caressing the Hermes scarf from Duck, Henry fondling the silver matchbox that tumbles out of Betty’s purse at the coffee shop, Conrad Hilton’s dismay at Don’s lack of desktop accessories).

Watch the staff of DoubleX spend a day drinking like Mad Women.

Then, just in case we missed the point, the theme is hammered into our skulls when Betty impulse-buys a Victorian fainting couch and positions the monstrosity directly in front of the fireplace. (“That’s your hearth, darling, that’s the soul of your home,” her decorator had explained in the first scene. “People gather around a fire even if there isn’t one.”) In a show obsessed with sets, that chaise longue is the first piece of furniture to have its own cameo.

Keep in mind: The Draper surname is a nod to the famed decorator of the era, Dorothy Draper. And what Weiner is saying with his impeccable sets is that all of these seemingly superficial material things—the god-awful antiques we inexplicably fall for, the “tasteful” end tables and sofas selected for us by paid experts—are legitimate expressions of who we are. Used correctly—that is to say, digging beneath the notions of what we collectively remember or imagine or wish the 1960s looked like to uncover what was actually available and common at the time, then entering into the minds of the characters to really figure out which choices they, personally, would make—set design is just as revealing as any line of dialogue, visually describing not only individual personalities and their relationships to one another but societal truths, too.

Weiner has been telling us this all along, but never so blatantly as last night. Until now, he’s been content to let the delectable tension between the show’s two primary settings—the offices of Sterling, Cooper, and Don and Betty Draper’s home—do all the talking. That sleek, masculine workplace is our idealization of the 1960s, the way we want to remember our best selves; Betty’s feminine, conservative décor (it’s all her doing, of course) is the everyday reality we’d rather forget. Every time Don strides manfully through the back door and into his knotty pine-paneled, plaid-wallpapered kitchen we’re meant to feel this incongruity. Doesn’t this sharp specimen call for a Saarinen table? Where are the Herman Miller chairs?*