You Won’t Get What You Want From Mad Men’s Final Season
We’ve got high hopes. But will they be satisfied?
Tonight will begin the first chunk of the final season of Mad Men, which – much like Breaking Bad – will be split into two parts by a ten-month gap.
With the heightened attention the last few years have paid to television on a week-to-week basis, there are higher expectations than ever on how a beloved show might come to an end. Way back in season four, the ever-savvy consumer strategist Faye Miller boiled down the advertising game to this little bon mot: the question of “what I want versus what is expected of me”. For any show entering its last laps in this Twitter, op-ed and recap crazed culture, it’s a question worth asking.
Fans expect character arcs to come to a close and plot points to be tied with bows. But the show’s creators may have a completely different story that they want to tell – a story that may have drifted from its starting point and evolved over the years, disrupted by production contracts and actor’s pregnancies and public reactions to break-out characters. One can imagine the internal tug-of-war each storyteller faces: give the people what they think they want, or show them what you think they need. Actually, forget imagining it – just go back and watch every pitch meeting Don or Peggy has ever been in.
“What I want versus what is expected of me.” It’s a question that has driven the identity and evolution of the central characters from the show’s very pilot, and Mad Men’s mid-century, cloistered-cubicle-and-big-city setting has made it especially relevant for the women.
Joan, who knows exactly what is expected of her, delivers it with a sassy va-va-voom confidence to rival all. But is she ever particularly good at voicing what she wants? Joan’s jump ahead in the job world last year came from discovering that she wanted real work satisfaction, and her own playing pieces on the board. She juggled all that by doing what was least expected of her: she put herself before the company and claimed an account of her own.
Joan is unflappable in a crisis and anticipates needs like Don anticipates an airplane drinks trolley. If she keeps accruing clients in this final run, she’s going to make Pete and Roger look like schmucks.
Peggy, on the other hand, has rarely had issue making it known what she wants — and her inability to understand what’s expected of her has only assisted her corporate ascension. Peggy’s a blurter in the boardroom and the bedroom — a trait that’s saved her from getting stuck with a few dud dudes, too. Her creative abilities were hardly on show last season, I guess because she was busy flirting with Ted and stabbing Abe and buying a cat. That’s a full dance card.
Let’s hope that in Don and Ted’s absence, Peggy has reconnected to whatever childhood Catholic guilt/second wave feminism gusto pushes her forward, and nailed a doozy of a campaign.
The story of What Don Wants has been the story of the show. He built himself a life where every want he had could be fulfilled, a reaction to his childhood of unfulfilled needs (and let’s please assume that we’ve now had our fill of Don’s childhood. No more brothel flashbacks, thanks). From idyllic picket fences and 2.5 in the ‘burbs to an urbane power coupling, corporate and creative success, and every bit of sly on the side, Draper has notched up damn near every man’s dreams.
And then the sticking point for Don (and many a viewer): he still wasn’t happy. There’s nothing fun about watching someone with everything continue to whine into the night, unless they’re Pete Campbell and their whining is punctuated by a pratfall down the stairs or a sock to the mouth. Don’s curdled whiskey hole of a stifled sob last season wasn’t fun to watch – too many repeated moves and lines, too many desperate stares and pleas pinched from earlier arcs. But the final splashdown was great: a cathartic gear change towards some semblance of internal honesty in a man who’s been selling himself his own campaign for decades. No one expects anything of Don at this point – he’s a screw-up and a lush. Watching him rise from the ashes of his self-started inferno should make for triumphant viewing.
Although, of course, he might just take that terminal topple down Madison Avenue. What does showrunner Matthew Weiner want, versus what is expected of him? We expect a television finale to deliver unambiguous resolution for the characters and the central premise. Viewers felt cheated by The Sopranos’ sudden cut to black and fans were outraged that the narrative within How I Met Your Mother might extend beyond its titular intentions. We don’t know what happened to Tony and we don’t like what happened to Ted. So we cry.
Mad Men has never been about giving us what we want: the writers seem pretty uninterested in common storytelling rhythms and pay-offs unless they are subverting them. Perhaps they could re-train our TV expectations. We now anticipate twists, and demand interwoven deep reads that only the collective conscious of the World Wide Web can deliver. Remember only a month back, when we were upset that those True Detectives solved a crime rather than the puzzle that is time and space? Remember last season when we thought Bob Benson was a time traveller, and Megan was a ghost? Mad Men’s twists aren’t about long cons and intricacies; they’re about lawn mower accidents and impromptu corporate mergers, so good luck trying to guess what might occur. If we’re going to predict what’s coming for Mad Men, let’s forget what we expect of TV all together.
What does Matthew Weiner want? Critical adulation? Emotional truth in fiction? A spin-off series for his increasingly hirsute son? If “Who is Don Draper?” has been the show’s mantra from the beginning, “What does Matt Weiner want?” is going to be our only guide as we approach the end.
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The season premiere of Mad Men is fast-tracked from the US at 4.30pm this afternoon, with an 8.30pm encore on showcase.
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Matt Roden is 2SER’s resident TV critic — each Tuesday morning at 8.20am; he works at Sydney Story Factory, and his illustration and design work can be seen here.