Last Sunday, I watched the premiere of the seventh and final season of "Mad Men." As a two-career person and a grandfather (with another one on the way, G-d willing), my life is busy enough that I watch very little television on a regular basis. "Mad Men" is and has been one of the very few exceptions to that rule. I've watched, with one exception, every episode as soon as it was telecast, and have waited with impatience for the beginning of each 13-episode season. The seventh season of 14 episodes will be shown over a two-year period (seven episodes this year, and seven in 2015), so my patience will be even more severely tested. But I've always found it to be rewarded, so I know it will be worth it. If anything, the limited number of episodes have allowed the show's creators to focus on quality, which they have done without flagging.
Beyond the fate of Don Draper/Dick Whitman and the other series regulars, what will we have learned after 92 episodes? A few things, which I'll attempt to list and discuss here.
Size doesn't matter. Audience size, that is. "Mad Men" has never had a large audience, even by the diminished standards of what constitutes a "large" audience in the cable/Internet age of TV. Despite that, it has had a cultural impact in reverse proportion to its size. It has been the object of all forms of media coverage, from gossip magazines to Op-Ed pieces in the New York Times. It has led to a revival of period fashions in everything from clothes to cocktails. It has found fans in all areas of society, including one in the White House. By doing of of this, "Mad Men" has reinforced a truth about television that has been evident ever since "Star Trek" went from being a network flop to a syndicated hit: success doesn't depend on a large audience, but on an intensely loyal one. That type of loyalty is what attracts the interest of advertisers and journalists. Which leads to my next observation:
Networks don't matter. As AMC's first original series, "Mad Men" has transformed AMC and, to a large extent, cable television, by showing that cable can be a showcase for high-quality series as well as feature-length films. But, while networks still have a place in production, they are no longer the great arms of distribution. No longer do networks dictate when we watch TV, or even whether we watch TV on a given evening. Technology, in the form of DVRs and Internet streaming, allow us to watch a show whenever we want, and while it may make the audience harder to measure, it may have the effect of expanding the total audience for a show, thereby making it most cost-effective to produce a series with the quality of "Mad Men."
Period doesn't matter. Much has been made out of the fact that "Mad Men" is set in the 1960s, a decade that reshaped, and continues to shape, our political and cultural life. This has allowed some people to dismiss the show's popularity as merely an exercise in nostalgia. This has also conned a few producers into thinking that piggybacking on the show's popularity is easy enough to do, which led to short-lived exercises in '60s nostalgia called "The Playboy Club" and "Pan Am." I did not watch the former and, given that it only lasted for three episodes, I don't think many other people did, either. As for "Pan Am," it too was short-lived, although I did watch most of its episodes. It was a show that had the potential to be another "Mad Men," and its four leading actresses did a good job with what they were given to work with. But the writing never equaled the quality of the show's premise, particularly failing to give any of the characters much in the way of depth. Which leads to my final observation:
Character matters. For four years, AMC's tag line was "Story Matters Here," until it replaced it with "Something More." As I like to tell people in my capacity as a reader for the Baltimore Playwrights' Festival, story is ultimately a function of character. And there is no better aspect of "Mad Men" than its development of character over its past six seasons. We have seen lives changed, yet fundamentally remain the same. We have been surprised at times and yet, on reflection, the surprises have the feeling of inevitability. And all of this has unfolded as much through the action as it has the dialogue. In the process, the show's creator, Matthew Weiner, has told a Gatsby-like American fable of the virtues and limits of personal re-invention. And he has done it against the background of the advertising industry, a world of image re-invention. He has effectively written his great American novel.
Thank you for doing so, Mr. Weiner. Good luck to you, and your talented cast and crew. And may the lessons your show has taught be learned, and re-learned, by those that come after you.
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