'Mad Men' Returns: 'When People Die, Everything Gets Mixed Up'
Warning: This recap contains storyline and character spoilers from Sunday’s Mad Men premiere.
Ahhh, it’s back. With its old, irony-curdled pop songs (Peggy Lee sighing “Is That All There Is?”). With its use of facial hair as follicular semaphores for the passage of time. (How many newly sprouted mustaches did you have to see before you guessed the year? Was it before or after Nixon was seen on TV announcing he’d withdrawn troops from Vietnam?) With its employment of TV cult stars (Hey, it’s Brian Krakow from My So-Called Life, blind-dating Peggy!). Yes, Mad Men is back, for its final seven episodes, and Sunday night’s edition, titled “Severance,” did little to prepare us to sever our ties to the series.
Instead, the hour went over much the same ground as any random hour of Mad Men has done for the past 8 years. In a beautifully shot, languidly paced, every-gesture-fraught-with-meaning manner, of course.
There was a scene in which Peggy and Joan were subjected to casually cruel sexism in a business meeting. There was a scene in which Don Draper entered his posh apartment to find that the only thing awaiting him was an empty bed upon which to throw his exhausted soul. There was a fuzzy dream sequence in which Don remembered someone from his past only to be jarred back into his present, where the fantasies that trouble him can be numbed with alcohol, nicotine, and sex. Characters literally wore their cultural signifiers, to give English majors and TV critics across the land something to nod at and murmur over. (Ooooh: That copy of John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. tucked in the waitress’s apron — so significant!)
“Severance,” written by series creator Matthew Weiner, was like a fully detailed outline of everything a new staff writer on the Mad Men staff might be handed, to demonstrate how one is supposed to build a Mad Man episode. The business decision to split the final season of Mad Men in half, extending an often-distended series, does not do this show any favors. When Mad Men premiered in 2007, it was something new: a show with an interest in the old, deploying the past as a meditation on how we came to live in the now.
In early 2015, however, in our Netflixed, Amazoned, Yahoo Screened, post-Breaking Bad, Brave New Empire TV World, Mad Men’s novel gestures have become repetitive, its deep-dish philosophizing usurped and watered-down in many other TV forms.
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As always, this episode of Mad Men had entertaining moments. Who doesn’t like seeing Ken, his pirate patch at a jauntier angle than ever, get some revenge upon his condescending employers? Who doesn’t like to chuckle at the boorish crassness of the clients our advertising agency heroes have to put up with? We’re regularly put in the position of being smugly superior to many people onscreen, because we know what happened to various products that cause these folks such puzzlement. Thus, this week, we got to snicker when the down-market stocking peddlers scoffed at L’Eggs, the super-selling low-priced stockings with the novel packaging. Happy Easter, everybody!
Me, I’m tired of being asked to feel too superior to half the people in this show — my smugness just isn’t in it anymore. However, I continue to admire the way Jon Hamm has wrung more changes out of world-weary despair than any TV actor since Jerry Van Dyke in My Mother the Car. Don’s grief over the death of Rachel was played beautifully by Hamm, and marred only by what followed: The grungy, let’s-screw-in-the-alley moment with Elizabeth Reaser’s waitress Diana, followed by Diana’s lecture to Don: “I want you to think very carefully about when you really had that dream because when people die, everything gets mixed up… you just want to make sense of it, but you can’t.”
You’re telling me, sister. Reaser is a fine actor and she pulled off this speech, but does anyone think a character would come equipped with the perfect psychoanalytic guff for Don the Eternally Lost Soul? Was there a copy of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams stuffed in a hidden pocket of that apron?
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Weiner sometimes seems to want to quash even the small pleasures of the show. There was a time when the entrance of Roger Sterling into a scene meant the arrival of a sharp-tongued, often funny critique of all the gloom Mad Men was giving off. This week, Roger’s joshing and ridicule just seemed tired and over-done — schtick.
Which, of course, was on purpose: Weiner wants you to realize that, over time, a wiseguy like Roger inevitably becomes insufferable. The problem is, removing such fun from Mad Men only makes the overall experience of watching Mad Men more joyless.
In the end, the camera pulled back to leave Don alone in the midst of people in an Edward Hopper-lit diner — he was one depressed nighthawk. Waitress, can I get a refill on this coffee, and hold the philosophy?
Mad Men airs Sundays at 10 p.m. on AMC.
