The central and most defining feature of Mad Men — not just as a show in itself, but as a transformative and highly important program in the history of American television — is that it is complicated. Everything about Mad Men is complicated… even the aspects of the show which are obvious.
One familiar complaint about many Mad Men episodes over the years is that Matthew Weiner is all too willing to point to a metaphorical signal with the directorial equivalent of bright neon lights. THIS SCENE IS AN EXAMPLE OF SYMBOLISM! THIS OBJECT IS A REPRESENTATION OF DON’S LIFE STRUGGLE! THERE’S A LINKAGE BETWEEN THE PHYSICAL AND THE EMOTIONAL! GET IT HERE AT HOWARD JOHNSON’S RESTAURANT!
Naturally, Mad Men makes certain tensions obvious on the surface, but isn’t that part of the point? The show doesn’t want its viewers to wonder what the tensions are so much as it wants them to wrestle with those tensions, to wrestle with wanting Don to find happiness… or with the equally-felt desire to punch him in the face after he does something horrible.
By showing that an object or scene is METAPHOR 101, WHOOP, WHOOP, WHOOP!, Matthew Weiner frees the audience from onerous guesswork and enables viewers to engage in the much deeper struggle of picking apart the words between characters… and the silences between those words. The visuals of the 1960s (and now, the early 1970s) pull in many TV watchers, but viewers stick with Mad Men for the writing, the textual dimensions of the show, the ways in which human beings interact with each other amidst the glowing-white metaphors pointed to by the camera.
*
It is only fitting, then, that as Mad Men prepares for its final seven episodes, a lot of people (including the critics) are wondering if the show has overstayed its welcome. Raising the question is certainly legitimate, and moreover, answering in the affirmative is just as reasonable. However, let’s not allow a Mad Men issue to be given a verdict without at least noting that the reality of the situation is complicated.
This question simply does not have an easy answer — certainly not for a show which has generally refused to give viewers easy answers since the summer of 2007, when it first made its way onto an AMC time slot.
The best place to start in this discussion is a terrific (and terrifically expansive) article by Lacey Rose and Michael O’Connell of The Hollywood Reporter, detailing the long and winding road of the show’s history, a drive more difficult than anything Pete Campbell watched on film in the MM episode, “Signal 30.”
The first thing to mention in a discussion of whether Mad Men has overstayed its welcome is that the show took an unplanned year off in 2011 due to Matt Weiner’s contentious negotiations with AMC. That lost year took quite a lot of steam out of the show in the eyes of the general public. The fact that the show aired in springtime when it returned in 2012 represented another curveball, underscoring how outside forces already set the table for the show in an unpleasant way. (This is all reminiscent of how Betty Draper must have felt when she realized her dinner in “A Night To Remember” was in service of Don’s courting of Heineken.)
With that having been said, there is clearly one very strong and convincing reason for thinking that Mad Men has remained with us too long. There should be very little doubt at this point that the decision to split the seventh season into two seven-episode halves was not a stroke of wisdom.
Breaking Bad — with a much more plot-driven story arc and a series of dramatic crescendos Vince Gilligan always knew he would be able to create — very smoothly constructed a “half-season” which brought viewers to the thrilling precipice of knowing that Hank Schrader finally knew Walter White was Heisenberg. Then, the second half-season unspooled the final few miles in the road for Hank, Walt, and everyone else left in the drama. It was perfect. It worked. The key was that there was a specific plot resolution for viewers to follow.
Mad Men, of course, is nothing like that. There’s no clear “ending event” for the show. The main pieces of guesswork for fans and critics have boiled down to:
A) Will the final scenes of the final episode reveal the central characters (chiefly Don) in a happy, miserable, or in-between emotional-spiritual state?
and
B) What moment in history (the late 1960s or, now much more likely, the early 1970s), if anything, will be the backdrop for the final scene?
There is no clear endpoint for the show, and that’s why one continuous seventh season — as opposed to what Breaking Bad did — would have served viewers a lot better. That specific point seems very hard to refute… even for a Mad Men apologist. (Confession: I am one.)
If the 2011 absence from America’s TV sets took away momentum from the show, it stands to reason that Mad Men should not have dragged out its final season, instead giving viewers the fluid 13-episode run they had come to expect over the first six seasons. This point, in microcosm, stands on solid ground.
Yet, this being a Mad Men discussion, there has to be a plot complication, right?
*
If one wants to claim that Mad Men has been on the air too long, the answer becomes enormously complex when trying to come to grips with the first half of this seventh season. If it is so nakedly apparent that the seventh season never should have been split into two installments over two years, one also has to realize that for all of the misguided dimensions of that decision, the reality of a split seventh season did make the final two episodes of the first half of season seven two of the best episodes in the show’s history.
“The Strategy” (S-7, episode 6) and “Waterloo” (S-7, E-7) will always be remembered by devoted Mad Men fans for many reasons, but they will endure in the larger consciousness of television viewers for their most central scenes. “Waterloo” — the first-half finale — will remain fixed in the mind’s eye because of Robert Morse’s lovely Broadway send-off as Bert Cooper, a charming grace note created by Weiner. His message to Don — “The Best Things In Life Are Free” — is delivered in a sing-songy fashion, but the seriousness of the message cannot be missed.
(Again, METAPHOR 101! THEME WARNING! It’s not the obviousness of the message, but the importance of the obvious message, which matters.)
It won’t cost Don Draper anything to give himself the best things in life… starting with self-love and affirmation, the things he’s denied himself for so long, the things which prevent himself from being the best person he can possibly be. This message from Bert to Don made “Waterloo” an episode worthy of being the MM series finale.
“The Strategy,” though, was even more worthy of being the last Mad Men episode of them all.
While Bert’s sung words to Don created a powerful verbal message, the show’s most poignant moment might have emerged one episode earlier: Don and Peggy made peace with each other and cast aside years of accumulated baggage, listening to Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.” In that moment, they both knew they could still find the path to a deep and lasting contentment in the future. Speaking as a Mad Men fan, it is hard for me to imagine a better ending to the show.
The instructive point to make, then, is that if season seven had not been split in two, we might not have gained that moment, which will always be a gift to the show’s most loyal fans… and to people who appreciate great television.
Has Mad Men overstayed its welcome? Narrowly, yes — the drawn-out nature of the past few seasons, exacerbated by the absence from the airwaves in 2011, has caused a lot of viewers to lose the sense of intimacy they had with the show. It feels like an extra appendage now — more than a few Americans are wondering, “Wait, this show is still going?” That’s not the way a show as good as Mad Men should make viewers feel.
Yet, Mad Men has always been a comparatively unique taste, not broadly popular the way AMC’s The Walking Dead has been and continues to be. Its slow pacing and lack of slam-bang action have always placed it in a different category. For all the obviousness with which Matt Weiner points to metaphors and symbolism, a rich (and very telling) irony can be found in the reality that the show has not been embraced by large numbers of Americans. AMC made the show accessible in ways HBO never could have, but the flip side of that point is that Americans would much rather access shows with zombies and action sequences. Those kinds of TV products are more “accessible” than a series about bored and conflicted people quietly wrestling with their problems in 1960s threads.
In many ways, Mad Men has overstayed its welcome only for those who were on the fence about the show’s existence — and whether or not they wanted to care about the characters — from the beginning. These next seven episodes — the second half of the final season — might be disappointments, and if so, we’ll all know about it in much the same way that the season four finale (“Tomorrowland”) left a very bad taste in my mouth. (Such a forced ending, by far the least satisfying season finale in MM history. Only the first half of season six was worse.)
Yet, let’s say the next seven episodes don’t live up to the rest of the show’s run. We’ll still have Robert Morse singing. More importantly, we’ll still have Don and Peggy and the Chairman Of The Board. We’ll still have unforgettable television moments to point to, and a show that has made a lot of lives far richer for having loved it.
Mad Men can certainly stay for seven more episodes. Then we can put this show in the past tense… and begin to appreciate it in a fuller and more satisfying way.
