Mad Men: It’s an Anthology, Stupid
This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened.
Mad Men may be the Whitest show ever created. Even when it turns its jazzy eye to Black characters or the Civil Rights Movement, it somehow finds ways to center the narrative on a White character and their concerns—which, you could argue makes sense, since that’s the lens the show has chosen to tell its stories. And that is true enough, but still: The show is blindingly White1.
But I did not come here to bury Mad Men’s White ass; I came to praise it. It’s usually ranked in the Top Five of all-time best television programs, and is often credited with launching the era of “prestige television.” And it accomplished all this despite being saddled with a truly hoary and ill-advised subplot that would have ruined a lesser show pretty aggressively. A refresher: Mad Men opens in 1960 and focuses on the work and home life of the fine folks who work in advertising in New York City, particularly Don Draper. Draper is a handsome, rising star in the pilot, but in his mid-30s he’s uncomfortably straddling the world that was and the world that’s coming2. He’s also not really Don Draper; he’s a formerly dirt poor oaf named Dick Whitman who stole Draper’s identity after Draper died in the Korean War3.
Yeah, that part is dumb. Like, dumb. Prestige television, my ass. But creator Matthew Weiner makes hay with it, mining a truly awful story idea for some nuggets of real drama and interest. You can tell that he had to add this “twist” in order to sell the show, because the suits in charge couldn’t comprehend that people might just be interested in the “story” and “characters.”4
But! I did not come here to shit all over Matt Weiner and his no-good straight-out-of-soap-operas fake identity plotline. I came here to talk about how people always get Mad Men wrong because they want it to be a novel, when it’s really a collection of short stories5.
Campbell’s Gun
At the height of Mad Men’s hold on the thinking world, there was fierce discussion centered on the hunting rifle that Peter Campbell acquires in Episode 7 of Season 1 (“Red in the Face”). These discussions almost always referenced Chekov’s Gun, the famous literary “rule” that if you introduce a gun in Act I of your story, it must be fired in the next act—otherwise omit the gun. Some folks have edited this so the gun must be fired before the end, but the principle is the same. It’s a kind of “law of conservation of plot elements” that requires every detail to mean something or else it’s a waste of our time.
That’s horseshit, of course, but people love to talk about it, hence Pete’s gun. Up until the bitter end, fans of Mad Men wanted to see how the rifle would come back into the story. Would Pete commit suicide? Murder? Would someone else steal the gun and commit suicide/murder? The one thing everyone was certain of was that the rifle would factor in, somehow, before the end.
It didn’t.
For some, this was an inexcusable loose thread, an infuriating oversight6. There was a lot of frustration with Mad Men for similar examples of forgotten plot points (whatever happened to Sal after he was outed/fired, anyway?) and ambiguities (did Don actually create that final Coke commercial?), but that frustration stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of the show7. It was series television, but we’re conditioned to consider serial narratives to be akin to novels, with each episode a chapter that moves the larger story along. But Mad Men isn’t a novel. It’s a collection.
Every Episode a Doorway
More specifically, it’s a story-cycle. There’s a narrative throughline, a cohesive sense of theme, and consistency of characters and accumulated events. But the maddening way the show would seem to reinvent itself every episode is by design—every episode was its own little story.
It’s important to note that if Mad Men is a bunch of short stories, it’s a collection, not an anthology, meaning that every story (episode) has a similar feel and a consistency of story and character. It’s not a bunch of disparate stories linked by a theme, it’s a loose narrative told in a cycle.
This is why Don Draper repeats the cycles of his existence over and over again, with frustratingly little self-awareness. A full-on character arc that would see Don mature and grow would be the goal of a more cohesive, more traditional narrative. But with Don the infinite hero of an infinite number of stories—Don spends a week in California with wealthy drifter trash! Don spends an evening talking shop with the proprietor of a brothel! Don verbally abuses an employee for hours to escape the pain of a loved one’s passing!8—the point isn’t the evolution of the character. In fact, with Draper the lack of evolution is a feature, not a bug. Like any character who appears in multiple stories linked by a loose narrative, it’s best if his evolution is slight and slow9.
And Don’s evolution is glacial on the show. If you believe Don ends the show’s run much different than how he began it, you’re sadly mistaken. In his final story, what does Don do? He takes an unannounced, unauthorized leave of absence from his job (notably not resigning), wanders around on a bit of a bender, has an emotional breakdown or two, and then it’s implied that ... he goes back to work and nails the big ad campaign with a genius, left-of-center idea. That’s not significant character growth, that’s Don Draper wearing a slightly wider necktie and cutting a deep rut in the carpet as he loops back to repeat his larger patterns.
Because Draper’s character evolution or the larger story of 1960s advertising or the other characters isn’t the point of this show. The point is the mini-dramas that spin out in each episode, near-perfect little fictions that use the larger Mad Men universe as background, as a source of detail and thematic meaning. It’s actually against the show’s interests for the Draper character to change too much, so his evolution, if you can call it that, is subtle. He has mini-epiphanies when the story they’re telling that week has an interest in a mini-epiphany. He might sober up if the story wants to explore that. But by the end of the show Don Draper is still Drapering all over the place.
Of course, the world is divided into two kinds of people: Those who can talk for three hours and write 1000-word essays about Mad Men and those who squint, mystified, at the screen whenever someone insists they watch it. Which am I? I’ll never tell.
Next week: The video game that can teach you about “show don’t tell.”
And since I myself am blindingly White, I know whereof I speak.
Not to mention a coronary. The most ridiculous aspect of the show is that Don Draper drinks and smokes and eats nothing but red meat but somehow still looked like Jon Hamm when he’s 40+ years old. If I glance at a cigarette I go into cardiac arrest.
There is something aggressively meanspirited about naming your character Dick Whitman.
Seriously, there’s a rejected SNL sketch where an increasingly desperate writer keeps pitching increasingly terrible plot twists and the worse they are the more the suits love them, until finally they pitch Dick Whitman stole a man’s identity and went into … advertising.
Just like people keep expecting me to be a human being, and instead I turn out to be a sentient skin of whiskey.
It’s a tribute to the writing that a significant portion of Mad Men’s fan base desperately wanted to see Pete shout “NOT GREAT, BOB!” right before pushing that rifle into his mouth.
Similarly, complaints that my own fiction ‘makes no sense’ or ‘appears to have been cobbled together from unrelated Wikipedia pages’ stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of my work.
Which of course can all be summarized as “Don makes the life of a high-functioning alcoholic look glamorous!”
Coincidentally, ‘Slight and Slow’ is my nickname in literary circles.
Great article, thanks!