If you are watching “Mad Men” in the future, I envy you. You’re free, free, I tell you! You’re probably surfing the waves of pure story, like some happy beach bum. No buzz. No backlash. You’re not concerned about the finale, although you’ve already heard that, way back when it aired, the concluding episode was very divisive. You have no feelings about Matt Weiner, one way or the other. Kiernan Shipka is probably a major movie star by now, so perhaps you’re watching the series as part of her lovable juvenilia.
Of course, if you are currently binge-watching “Mad Men” in 2030, you are almost certainly not also reading this day-after recap, a blog post that is definitely part of the problem. The “Mad Men” industrial complex—of which I’ve been a card-carrying member for the full seven years of the series—has made us all into neurotic little freaks, working over the show like a Saturday Times crossword. There are essays about how the series is overrated; there are other essays about how the essays about how the show is overrated are overrated. Myself, I wrote a mixed take last season, in which I praised “Mad Men” in general but cavilled, at length, about how Don had become an anvil of a character, to the point that he weighed the series down. Then, the very next week, Peggy stabbed Abe. And soon thereafter, Sally walked in on her father and the neighbor; Bob Benson spoke Spanish; and Ken Cosgrove got shot in the eye. Miraculously, by the time the season ended, I was solidly back in the pro-“Mad Men” camp, and even back in the pro-Don camp, whatever my issues with those mid-season, high-Freudian brothel-trauma flashbacks. Too late to write anything new, though! Oh well.
Anyway, for this season opener, here’s a quick summary: It’s a few months after last season ended. In the wake of blowing up his career with that Hershey pitch, Don Draper remains on the outs at his old firm. He’s getting paid, but he’s killing time; in his spare periods, he’s feeding freelance pitches to Freddie Rumsen, so that Freddie can pass them on to Peggy, and Peggy can tweak them, and then pass them to her unforgiving new boss, Lou Avery, who will swat at them like flies. Meanwhile, Megan is living in California, a Lady of the Canyon, making coq au vin and looking good in her trademark sherbet orange. Her TV career is on the rise and the Drapers’ long-distance marriage is in a delicate state. (“We don’t have time to fight,” she tells him, sanely, during his weekend visit.) Don may not be cheating on her, but he’s still keeping her in the dark: he’s pretending that he’s still an active adman, the sort who can buy his wife a massive TV console. When, on his flight home, he gets into a classic Don Draper flirtation with a classic Don Draper brunette (Neve Campbell), he cuts it short with the same lie—he says he needs to go into the office.
Meanwhile, Peggy is in a miserable state. With Ted Chaough in California, she’s an underling all over again, humiliated despite her hard work and brassy attempts to lean in (“I guess I’m immune to your charms,” her boss tells her). She’s exhausted by her side gig as a landlord and still stinging from the cruel end of her affair with Ted. Joan is equally beaten down, and is being berated by Ken Cosgrove, of all people, even when she uses every bit of wit, charm, and business savvy to keep a client from leaving. The only two people who are not in a miserable state are that silver fox Roger Sterling, his bedroom in a state of perpetual orgy, and that cheerful dope Pete, who is living it up in his La Brea Tar Pits bachelor pad, with a whole new round of bad hair. Unaccounted for: Betty, Sally, whichever Bobby Draper we’re up to, Harry, Trudy, and poor lost Sal, who I hope is off having a drink at the about-to-explode Stonewall.
A few years ago, I came to the realization that most of the TV shows I was interested in that particular season were either very fast shows, like “Scandal,” or very slow ones, like “Top of the Lake.” We all know what category “Mad Men” falls in, and it’s easy to take for granted how revolutionary that slowness has been for the entire medium. The show’s strength is still the way it relishes lingering and withholding, pausing and fetishizing, forcing the audience to gaze at endlessly interpretable images, like that final one of Don caught in the prison bars of his own broken sliding door. Yet, for all its languorous pacing, it’s surprisingly hard to predict. Still, this episode did follow one “Mad Men” tradition, the formula that originated with its pilot. In that opening episode, Don’s marriage was revealed only in the final scene; in last year’s opening episode, set in Hawaii, Don’s affair was the jack-in-the-box that got exposed in the end. In last night’s episode, the reveal was that he’d been doing secret account work for Freddie, which I suppose makes his advertising brainstorms into his latest secret life. And who would Don Draper be without a secret life?
In any case, I ate this episode up, from the realistically tender state of Don’s marriage onward. (The past incidents of their relationship—the spilled milkshake, “Bisou Bisou,” that horrifying chase through the apartment—feel so oddly like real memories.) I swallowed whole the stagey speech that Neve Campbell gave Don on the flight, the one about her dead husband’s alcoholism (“He died of thirst”). And I felt, as if it were happening to me, poor Peggy’s final fall to her knees, and her isolation, which is by now as deep as Don’s. It’s enough that I’m almost excited for the roar of debate and analysis to start back up again. This show may be a timepiece. But it’s also, for better or worse, a conversation piece.
