- The following article contains spoilers.
It’s a matter of opinion, of course, but in mine, there are two shows that reinvented television - Sopranos and Mad Men.
Both sent us nuts over television’s ability to slowly unfurl a story, live with more real than real characters and drip feed it to us in an unending movie. But of the two, it's Mad Men that charted how far we’ve evolved since the 1960s - and in the starkest of ways, how far we’ve yet to go.
There’s not a truly likeable character in the entire show, other than a few incidental cameos. Yet even with the most unlikeable of them all, Don Draper, the schmoozing, boozing Madison Avenue ad man, we can feel sympathy – even empathy – for the self-loathing, the indulgences and most critically the confusion as the 60s inch forward.
Creator Matthew Weiner’s magic is to let us feast on the lives of people who, whether they like it or not, change with the times. In a deliciously stylish, beautifully crafted, story-laden series, he rarely failed to deliver some recognizable truth about the cost of life’s secrets, compromises and isolation.
With its bullet bras, flouncy skirts, copious smoking, unending drinking and affairs at every turn, Mad Men’s characters are us, only back then and looking in the mirror is as uncomfortable as retrospection can get.
There’s nothing comfortable about Betty, Don’s wife for three seasons who was born to believe her life calling was to remain beautiful for her husband. Yet although Weiner convinced us throughout that despite the odd act of rebellion, Betty had succumbed to the cruel limitations of gender in the 60s, in the end Betty lives – and begins to die – on her own terms.
Peggy, the highly prized copywriter absorbs Don’s advice to consign all obstacles, painful and otherwise in to the “It never happened” box. Every sexist slight and every knock down, even an “illegitimate” child conveniently disappears. Until one day, cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth, dark sunglasses hiding drunken eyes, she strolls defiantly through the office. It was her glorious “I don’t give a hoot what you think” moment.
Joan, the authoritarian overseer of the secretary’s pool, used her natural endowments to stay afloat in a man’s world. But talent and ambition triumphed. She may have walked away from the advertising world financially ripped off, but she finally slapped down the sexism she’d endured from episode one, throwing off the need to keep a man for the need to have a career – and on her own terms.
And there’s Roger Sterling, hopeless, charismatic, sex driven and born to privilege, who throughout seven seasons never finds a way to value add to the business he was bequeathed. As the 60s grinds on to embrace “negros” in the white collar workplace and confront the assassination of JFK and Martin Luther King, whiskey- swilling Roger’s slow realisation he is no more than a skirt chasing, unenlightened rich dude peaks when he settled on a woman his own age.
But of course Mad Men is really about Don Draper, the man who is a lie. Born Dick Whitman, he assumed Draper’s identity - although the mistake that nearly broke him was thinking he could forget Dick.
He couldn’t - and when Dick niggled at him, he purged him with trips to California, where Don could be the real Dick with the real Don’s widow. In the end, he too stops living his uncomfortable and inauthentic life, or so we are left to suppose, awakened at a California retreat where all he had in common with the hippies on board was that he had no idea who he really was, until he did. He was an ad man.
For those who happen to be over the age of 50, the series tickled the nostalgia nerve, misplaced though any sentimentality is. After all, how can we be nostalgic for a time when women were merely enablers to misogynistic men and pregnant women smoked? When backyard abortions were still a thing and when wanting to take the pill came with a truckload of judgment? A time when open discrimination based on colour and gender was the way it was?
Sound familiar?
Perhaps Matthew Weiner called it quits because having lived through the 70s, he understood that though life had changed, so much remained the same.
Monica Attard is a Sydney based freelance journalist and former ABC foreign correspondent and senior broadcaster.
