Show review: Mad Men - sold

The Mad Men make a final pitch that is impossible to resist.

Lately a notion has been making the rounds that TV is slowly but surely becoming better than cinema. It’s that ‘cool’ thing to say when you’re at a party, right after you have confessed your love for Game of Thrones or the great Hannibal. Frankly, the comparison between the two is unjust, because for every mediocre film out there, there’s a trashy reality programme that makes the comparison seem inane. And then there are also period dramas like AMC’s Mad Men, which completely transcend this debate.

The show, set in the ‘60s, depicts an ad agency and the life of its mysterious and sophisticated executive, Don Draper (Jon Hamm), who has consistently entertained us for seven years. Right from the first scene in which Don tries to get an African-American waiter to change a pack of cigarettes and serve his client’s brand in a New York City bar, up until the latest episode of season seven in which a recently deceased co-worker appears before him in a hallucinatory musical sequence, reminding him that money isn’t everything, Mad Men is in a league of its own.

Last Sunday marked the half-season finale of Mad Men. The final season of the show has been split into two halves, and the remaining seven episodes will be aired in 2015. With this being the penultimate screen outing, several character arcs were explored and teased out, dancing around themes of perdition, retribution and sudden recoveries.

While the title refers to the agency’s male employees, Mad Men has had an interesting shift in gender, as well as office politics, and the show’s women have emerged as equally important. Three of the four main women in Don Draper’s life are independent working women, but it’s nice to see his stay-at-home ex-wife Betty Draper given more screen time this time around. A rendezvous, resolution or some sort of closure between them is vaguely hinted at — especially now that Don’s current marriage to actress Megan Draper is clearly going nowhere, smothered in a single, unsensational phone call.

Peggy Olson, who delivers a fantastic ad pitch in the last episode, is unquestionably the female counterpart of Don. Their interactions throughout the years and dynamic, almost sibling-like relationship has been fascinating from the beginning. Theirs is a rollercoaster ride, and since it’s a highlight whenever the two are on screen together, there’s a feeling that this might not end well. Both of them respect each other a lot, and this complex intimacy feels inevitably doomed. We’ve seen glimpses of that whenever Don, a man who knows everything, has to work under Peggy, a woman he taught everything.

Creator Matthew Weiner, who served as a writer on HBO’s The Sopranos, made sure that Mad Men’s world is designed minutely and authentically. The production design is top-notch and after six and a half seasons, every single prop feels like a well-thought out character. There’s the smoking and drinking of course, all part of the ‘60s office politics which now seem outdated, and yet there’s so much relevance in the way the characters act against each other. It’s not for the first time that a character has been stricken by literal madness, and it works well as comic relief when Michael Ginsberg (Ben Feldman) cuts off his nipple because he’s afraid of that new ‘thing’ in the office — a computer (too creepy and alien for some in 1969). We laugh at him, but it’s affecting how such a substantial part of our everyday life was perceived by some back in the day.

What makes the show particularly delicious is the acting across the board. Even the child actors, such as Kiernan Shipka playing Don’s daughter Sally, are bundles of talent. Hamm himself is unquestionably ideal for the main role. After we learn mostly everything about the character’s upbringing at the end of season six, he plays a man, whose world has been pulled from under him, with compelling, albeit stoic, intensity. It’s a fine portrait of a broken man who has to learn the ropes in a field where he used to braid all the ropes himself. Oftentimes he excels in the quieter moments — when it’s his face doing all the talking. He plays an understated, unworried drunken man with equal aplomb as he does a guy who’d try to get his job back at any cost.

It will be a tough wait for the final episodes of the final season next year. But that’s how great shows work — they test all your patience when they are off-air and attention when on. The hope is that Mad Men would stay focussed as a narrative and not upset the momentum built up so masterfully since season six. It would be interesting to see how Weiner will weave everything together eventually, perhaps in a ’70s setting. A change of decade would be very interesting, but only time will tell how the characters would fare in the end.

Rating: 5/5   

Schayan Riaz is a writer based in Germany. He tweets @schayanriaz

Published in The Express Tribune, Sunday Magazine, June 8^th, 2014.