AMC’s flagship show nearing end of slick, influential run
The very first scene in Mad Men’s first episode “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” signaled something special. The camera glided through a smoke-filled bar filled with suited, clean-cut businessmen only to settle on the soon-to-be coolest man on television, Don Draper. He struggled to come up with pitches for an ad campaign for Lucky Strike cigarettes after a recent Reader’s Digest article declared a definitive link between cigarettes and lung cancer. He attempted to strike up a conversation with an African-American server at the bar only to get immediately asked by a supervisor if the “chatty” employee, who had not yet uttered a syllable in response to Draper’s questions, was bothering him. In the next scene, Draper visited the home of a beautiful woman and stayed the night. In the next, three employees at Draper’s advertising firm openly sexually harassed a new female employee, followed by a line of dismissal, “You’ve got to show them what kind of guy you are; that way they’ll know what kind of man to be.”
Right off the bat, the show hits all the notes that would make it such a hit the first few seasons. The hard-partying, womanizing, line-spouting Mad Men (referring to Madison Avenue where most of them work) all show off a ’60s glamor recalling something out of From Russia With Love. Heck, Draper even looked the part with his slick suit and handsome confidence (John Hamm is so handsome that his character on 30 Rock is a man that never learned how to do anything because everything was handed to him for being so good looking). But the show’s appeal was not all ’60s style; it also dove right in to handle issues of the era such as racism, women’s rights and even smoking. Showrunner Matthew Weiner’s brainchild was really unlike anything that had been seen before.
The show was an immediate critical success, winning Emmys for Outstanding Drama Series in each of its first four seasons. Everyone involved in the show’s creation looked as brilliant as Don Draper after an especially moving sales pitch. It wasn’t, however, always such a sure thing. AMC, now the home of mega-shows like The Walking Dead and Breaking Bad, was a small cable network without a flagship show back in 2007. The idea of betting big on a period drama about an ad firm seemed crazy to some at the time. Weiner wrote the script for the pilot back in 2000 and tried to sell it to HBO and Showtime, but was turned down. When the show was picked up by AMC and was immediately a hit, people quickly forgot how much of an underdog the series was as it was starting out. That gamble was huge, and if it had not paid off, the TV landscape might look very different now. If AMC had bet on a different first show, or if it had given less control to Weiner and had much less success right off the bat, then it might have been discouraged to give a green light to Breaking Bad a year later or The Walking Dead in 2010. It may have not even stayed in the drama series game if it had failed right on such an ambitious gamble.
A huge amount of credit for that gamble paying off has to go to Weiner. He was a huge part of the show’s immediate success. The notoriously detail-oriented writer’s fingerprints are all over the series. Having served an important role as a writer on The Sopranos, he was familiar with dominating showrunners thanks to his partnership with David Chase, but Weiner took things to another level. Part of the show’s appeal sprouted from its obsessive attention to chronological accuracy. Every bowl, every lampshade that appears on the screen was vetted to make sure that it was available at the time that was being shown. Every episode is peppered with cultural and political references, large and small, from that point in time. Characters off-handedly mentioned long-forgotten comedy routines and purchase long-discontinued candy bars. The show looks and feels like a time capsule because it is the closest approximation to a recreation of the period that was feasibly possible. If there was any way for the things being shown to be more authentic, Weiner would have sniffed it out and enacted it. Tim Hunter, one of the first season directors, encapsulated Weiner’s style on the DVD commentary from the first season.
“They have a lot of production meetings during pre-production,” he said. “The day the script comes in we all meet for a first page turn, and Matt starts telling us how he envisions it. Then there’s a “tone” meeting a few days later where Matt tells us how he envisions it. And then there’s a final full crew production meeting where Matt again tells us how he envisions it.”
Weiner’s controlling approach, however, was not all fun and games. His exacting demands put a strain on AMC, and through that, put a strain on AMC’s other shows. Weiner’s precise vision led to skyrocketing production costs, including $250,000 for the license to use “Tomorrow Never Knows” by the Beatles at the end of one episode. The song mostly plays over the credits. These costs, and the firm stance Weiner took on them, bullied AMC into squeezing the budgets of Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead when they came along. Some in the business wondered if The Walking Dead’s first showrunner Frank Darabont left due to the monetary restrictions caused by Mad Men’s needs.
Weiner’s abrasive style was dismissed for the first few seasons of the show, as it led to Mad Men shining so brightly. As Breaking Bad emerged from Mad Men’s shadow circa 2011, however, the perception of Mad Men, and Weiner with it, changed somewhat. As the seasons went on, the show became decidedly darker. While Breaking Bad crescendoed to unprecendented popularity in its final half-season, Mad Men has turned into a slow burn. In keeping with his brand of realism, Draper’s prolific drinking and womanizing has caught up with him. Mad Men depicts a somewhat more realistic depiction of the arc of someone who lives life a la James Bond (turns out the likeliest result is not 50-years-and-counting of maintaining the same lifestyle).
As the glossy sheen from the first few seasons came off, some were turned off by the muck that the show now explored. The arrival of a fantasy-action juggernaut in Game of Thrones on the same Sunday slate did not help things. People don’t want to take a mirror to their personal failings when the alternative is dragons, swordfights and sex. Those who have stuck with Mad Men, however, have been treated to an excellent last few seasons. The darkness is not new; it was present from the first episode and grew organically. Weiner’s antics might have taken on a worse light and Med Men’s prestige might have suffered in the last few years, but this show is marching determinedly towards what will probably be an impressive finale, helmed by Weiner.
Daniel Grzywacz is a senior majoring in anthropology and neuroscience. He is also the lifestyle editor at the Daily Trojan. His column, “The Showbiz Must Go On,” runs Mondays.