Mad Men — Season 2

The first season of Mad Men proved to be a surprise success: for a show with barely any driving plot and deliberately offensive, period-appropriate dialogue, it was an irresistible snapshot of American decadence in the era of postwar greed. Its lack of a solid story arc outside of character development moved the season with all the speed of molasses, but I couldn't help but love the immersive experience. Still, I hoped that the second season addressed this problem and gave us something to keep the episodes moving.


For the first half to 2/3 of the season, I didn't get my wish. The second season of Mad Men inherited a great deal of intrigue and loose ends from the previous season finale, which it must labor through despite the two-year advance in the timeline. Don is still struggling with his marriage, Peggy secretly carried Pete's baby to term when she couldn't get an abortion, and the rest of Sterling Cooper crawls toward the impending tumult of the decade.

As with the last season, focusing on the characters yields far more interesting rewards than keeping track of its lethargic story arc. Don worked in the first season because his past was shrouded in mystery, and I was slightly concerned how Weiner and the writers would handle him now that we knew enough about him to strip away the audience's perceived need to learn about his secrets. However, I found Don more captivating than ever, because he evolves from a mysterious ad king into the perfect symbol of the typical American man as he changed throughout the '60s.

The illegitimate child of an impoverished, abusive farmer, Don was born Dick Whitman and assumed his current identity when he stole it from his dead comrade in Korea. His postwar reinvention matches America's own (albeit with different wars defining them), and his lack of a traceable past makes him the ideal candidate for change. Don wavers between the traditional values of gray flannel suit America with a hint of progressiveness. Notice that the women he chases are all proto-feminists: last season, he engaged in affairs with a Jewish store-runner and a pot-smoking beatnik. He lost both of them by the season finale, and now he pursues the ambitious, business-oriented wife of an obnoxious comedian Sterling Cooper hires for an Utz Potato Chip campaign.

Don cares for these women more than he does his complacent Stepford wife, but he also cannot fully commit to any one of them. He admires, perhaps fetishizes their independence, but he also wants them ultimately to answer to him. When he begged Menken to run away with him, she knowingly saw through his desperation, saying that he didn't want to run away with her, he "just wanted to run away." Don was simply too busy placing these women on pedestals to realize how much he wanted them to conform to the standards of the day. Slowly uncovering her husband's infidelity, Betty begins to assert a certain independence, to Don's horror. He clearly loves his wife and children, but he'd grown bored with the complacency of suburban life. Now, he experiences the sting of an independent woman, and it nearly destroys him.

Betty's growing dominance dramatically alters Don's life views, but he must also weather disillusionment with the men in his life. Roger Sterling and Bertram Cooper represent the noble older generation to which Don aspires, and they both move in directions that challenge Don's notions of the greatest generation. Roger gets wind of Don's marital strife and his projected indifference over it and decides to divorce his own wife. After confronting his wife with papers, he declares his love for new secretary Jane (am annoying character created solely for this plot point). The old generation stuck to marriage until death, and for Sterling to throw it away on an adolescent fling with a woman half his age scratches the veneer we place on our elders.


Compounding Don's growing resentment of these older men is their decision to hire a new executive to increase revenue. Duck (Mark Moses), an abrasive alcoholic, cares only for business and sees ads as nothing more than avenues to more profit. "This place has more failed artists and intellectuals than the Third Reich," Don once joked, but his words contained a surprising truth: the ad men on Madison Avenue were, at the start of the decade at least, pop artists years before Andy Warhol lent this work a bizarre credibility. Compare Don's brilliant, genuinely moving speech about the possibilities of the Kodak Carousel in the previous season's finale with Duck's behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing; Duck is the dismal future of heartless advertising, while Don's view of semi-artistic endeavors already seem nostalgic. Personally, I see Don and his old team working toward the same goal, but Duck serves as a sort of Michael Corleone to Don's more endearing Vito.

As always, though, the women prove to be the real focal point of the show. The three main women of the series -- Betty, Peggy and Joan -- held my attention as much as Don did when I sat down with the first season, and they are even more interesting this time around. Betty gradually imploded under the pressure of domesticity, and she appeared well on her way to some murderous rampage when the discovery of her psychiatrist's collusion with her husband only steeled her. Now, she readies herself for the crumbling of her marriage, and a slow fire builds in those eyes. Betty only grows stronger as she converses with a new neighbor, a divorced woman, who informs her that the hardest part of confronting your husband is "realizing you're in charge."

Where Betty's arc reflects the growing changes in home life for women, Peggy Olson must struggle in the workplace. To the chagrin, even outrage, of the men at Sterling Cooper, she continues to climb the corporate ladder. Her aptitude in marketing to women (and men) makes her an invaluable asset as women like Betty begin to make their own decisions. However, her pregnancy threatened to ruin all of that, so she managed to hide it and gave the baby to her sister, who suffered a miscarriage. Peggy strikes up a friendship with a young priest, whom she helps with fliers for church dances and such. Their relationship sours, however, when Peggy's sister tells the priest about her illegitimate child out of spite. Peggy's arc remains the most interesting on the show to me, because her advancement demonstrates a woman coming into her own subconsciously; she does not actively seek to break the glass ceiling, but her ingenuity and resourcefulness cannot be ignored, even by the chauvinists who run the agency.


I must say, however, that Christina Hendricks walks away with the season. We saw her Joan as a fiery temptress in the first season, a woman who, unlike Peggy, knew exactly what she wanted out of her career but resigned herself to the barriers placed on women. So, she exploited her -- shall we say, talents --- and bent the rules around her voluptuous frame. Here, though, we see a woman more constricted than any other, caged on one side by a woman who actually does advance the ranks (Peggy), and on the other by the repercussions of her sexual strategies. When Roger pursues the new secretary, he abandons Joan as much as his wife for a younger woman. As a result, she flees into the arms of a doctor who's threatened by her sexual knowledge and compensates by establishing a cruel dominance over her. She catches a small break when Harry creates a television department for Sterling Cooper that will monitor shows and films to ensure that ads do not clash with the preceding programming. He asks her to help him read the scripts, a job she takes to with vigor. Then he brings in a man to take the job full-time, and Hendricks deserves an award just for her single moment of completely concealed yet plain-as-day pain.

The season kicks into high gear in its second half, when the marital strife between Don and Betty forms a solid storyline that propels both characters as well as shaking things up at Sterling Cooper a bit. Combined with the uncertainty these people feel as the Cuban Missile Crisis looms overhead, Mad Men attains a level of tension it never had in the first season. The finale leaves a number of interesting threads to explore with the new season, and it cements the series as the best show on television. This is must-see TV, people.

Mad Men — Season 1

It's rare enough to get a show with natural character development, but even they are fueled ultimately by plots. After all, what would Buffy be without her vampires to slay? If President Bartlet's administration ran smoothly and without incident, we'd still have wonderful characters, but would we care so deeply about them? Mad Men takes a bold new step; it is, quite possibly, the most slowly paced drama in television history. This, of course, could have heralded a disaster, a turgid piece of self-involved pablum that promoted its aimlessness as "art."


Instead, it might just be the best show on television in the massive wake of The Wire. A meticulously and gorgeously crafted recreation of 1960s America, Mad Men not only commits to the look of the era but depicts the sexism, racism, nationalism and rampant capitalist greed with frank honesty. The creator, former Sopranos writer and producer Matthew Weiner, does not inject an anachronistic character who reflects the P.C. views of today to let the audience know that he doesn't believe what these chauvinist men are saying. He's secure enough not to taint his art with numerous pleas that insult the audience's intelligence. (Then again, Joss Whedon's Dollhouse came under fire as misogynist for not clearly taking a side against the organization, even though anyone with half a brain could tell you that the Dollhouse is full of villains, albeit villains with redeeming characteristics. Stop make our head goo overhot, Joss!)

The title derives from the self-professed nicknames of the advertisers who worked on New York's Madison Avenue throughout the decade. Set in the fictional company of Sterling Cooper, it charts the lives of the company's employees through the '60s. This first season starts in 1960, and Weiner says that he will advance the timeline two years each season for a planned five seasons. If this season is any indicator, a major historical event will factor into the story; the Nixon/Kennedy race forms the closest thing to a recurring, purely narrative plot in the entire 13-episode run.

Central to the show is Don Draper (Jon Hamm), a ruggedly handsome, deep-voiced, high-ranking executive at Sterling Cooper. He knows just what buttons to push to get potential clients on-board, and he can find a way to market just about any product to the masses. Rarely does he lose an account, but his ratio of success to failure ensures that he never gets too down about it. At home, he has the perfect postwar wife, Betty (January Jones), and two adorable little family units. The only way life could be any better is if he climbed that last rung on the corporate ladder to the top.

Yet he is anything but happy. His interactions with his family appear stiff and insecure, far removed from his relaxed, commanding demeanor in the workplace. It's not that he doesn't love his wife and children, but he looks as though his only experience with dealing with a family comes from magazines and movies, as if he watched a training film before some unseen entity handed him his very own collection of people. Eventually, we're given shards of a dark past that he's spent the last decade or so burying from everyone.


Complementing Draper is a rich cast of characters that make Sterling Cooper a microcosm for the social climate of 1960 America. Draper is at a position where he still has something to strive for without having to push himself constantly. Providing him with a nice foil is Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheister), an up-and-comer who sets his sights on Draper's job from day one. Whereas Draper destroyed his past and made himself on his own (even when we see snippets of his background, they show a poor upbringing), Campbell exploits his family's wealthy ties to get his job; heck, if it weren't for their ties to some big clients, Campbell would have been quickly almost as soon as he joined. Kartheiser, who of course most know as the insufferable Connor in Angel, is marvelous as this oily snake in the grass; he spends all of his time trying to conquer Draper (not to mention any of the secretaries in the office), but underneath he's insecure about both his family and his new wife's wealth, and he wants to make his own way without living off of their "charity."

Most interesting, however, are the women. Caged in by a glass ceiling so low they practically must crouch to get around, most of the ladies of this world consider finding a well-off husband as their primary job, with the only promotion being a doting wife and mother. The secretaries are sexually harassed in such an open manner it'll turn your head, but they know how to play the game. In a world of gray flanneled suits, the women wear garishly bright colors, and it drives the fellas crazy.

Three women in particular showcase the narrow yet subtly shifting confines of the decade. Betty does all of the household chores, but she, like Don, is slowly unraveling. The pressure of turning a blind eye to Don's own issues and her inability to do anything in life other than clean and cook are taking a toll, and early in the season she begs her husband to let her see a psychiatrist. Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks) rules over the den of secretaries and instructs them in the ways of flirtation. If Betty is boxed in by all the constraints, Joan knows how to play the game and bend those prison bars enough to get what she wants.


Most importantly, however, is new secretary Peggy Olsen (Elizabeth Moss). Introduced as a plain, timid, assumed virgin, Peggy falls under Pete's spell and enter in an on/off relationship dictated by Pete's sense of guilt over cheating on his wife. Joan gets her to buy nicer clothes, and she has a breakthrough when she suggests an idea for marketing lipstick to a group of men who can sell something to anyone in America, as long as it's not the 50 percent who are female. She finds herself placed in a position of importance no woman at Sterling Cooper has ever held, making her the character to watch as the show progresses through the '60s.

If I've neglected to discuss plot by this point, it's because I can't find one. This is a show entirely about character, in which the only major developments are insights or status changes. This makes the show move like molasses, but that only makes it all the more interesting. Watching character arcs form not only the heart of the show but the brain makes for television that rewards multiple viewings.

Everything about this show seems to be just right. The perfectly recreated sets, dapper suits and flashy dresses pop off the screen, especially on Blu-Ray. The falsity of American confidence in Draper's mannerisms make for an interesting allegory for the tumult that was about to explode in the country, while Peggy's slight social mobility also hints at what's in store for these blind chauvinists. While it could do with a bit of speeding up and some plot to move the episodes, Mad Men sets a new standard for period television, and I can't think of a show still on the air that can compete with it.