Mad Men vs. Game of Thrones (part II of) Part 2

Life is a state of Mad Men, with Game of Thrones always creeping in. Mad Men, recreating an era of ersatz American perfection which turned out to be a prison from which America had to escape, and doing so with its own claustrophobic perfection.

Endings are tricky, they're much easier to do well when the show was flawed, because the show can then be about the ending itself. Was there any truly great TV show, or great novel, that landed its ending on a level as estimable as the rest of it? Any story longer than the story itself is not about capturing the story, but the passing of life itself. The passing of life and time can't simply end (unless it's The Sopranos), it has to wind down and show that life still goes on even if we don't see it. 

Mad Men was a victim of its own achievements. It was, in my firm opinion, the greatest TV Drama that ever there was, or ever there could be. But subjecting that level of examination to life as it happens, to 'lifeness', can never be sustained forever. Just as life seems to, the story can go on forever, even if we're not around for it. But in the real world, every story has to end, and it's almost a given that a story that so deeply questions what pure life experience is made of will have no idea how to correctly land its ending, because no person has seen their end and lived to tell us what it's like. There was only one appropriate ending for Mad Men, and it was already used by The Sopranos. 

The final half-season of Mad Men was perhaps its weakest. It did not end with a bang, it simply wound down to an ending that is completely in keeping with the tone of the show itself, yet it felt completely wrong at the same time. To see the shock of Don Draper becoming a fervent follower of an Ashram is so banal, so petty in comparison to the mythic man he once was, that it diminishes this larger-than-life figure to smallness. It leaves a horrible taste in our mouths that we've been following ten years in the life of a man we thought was of mythic dimension, only for him to confess his sins and in his first moment of true vulnerability, show that he's just a human as gullible as the next person. And yet, in keeping with history, in keeping with the tone of the show, it's still absolutely perfect. 

Mad Men is a study in the glories, and the limitations, of perfection. It is as flawless a work of art as has ever been created, but its flawlessness is its flaw. It's a prison from which the only escape is to ignore it. By Season 5, their best in my humble opinion, the world no longer cared about Mad Men. It had moved on to Game of Thrones. Mad Men is about trying to grasp the mysteries of human personality, Game of Thrones is about showing us how cheap human life is. Mad Men is a work whose creator is a single authority who allowed no compromise to his vision and no telegraph as to what was in store. Game of Thrones is a work defined by collaboration, whose plot is developed in concert with the original novelist whose work half the audience already knew from the books before it's shown on TV, and whose work may further be developed by suggestions from the audience. Mad Men is meant as a work of Art with a capital A, Game of Thrones is a work of awful magnificence, but like so many works of great art, it is primarily intended as entertainment. Mad Men is a micro snapshot of our world and history, Game of Thrones is a macro panoramic view of an historical world that isn't even our own. Mad Men deals in perfection, Game of Thrones deals in the infinite. 

Perfection is a prison from which the life force which is nature has to escape. The classical age of TV is over. Mad Men is our Mozart, our Leonardo, our young Shakespeare, our Tolstoy, our Jean Renoir. The elegance, the naturalism, the formal perfection, is so finely honed that the only way forward is to smash the rules it sets out into a million pieces. In the control which the showrunner has, Mad Men recalls the Hollywood's Golden Age of the Director, when Coppola and Scorsese and Altman could fulfil a genuine artistic vision. But in its achievement, perhaps Mad Men goes even past Coppola and Scorsese, with their concessions to potboilerdom, and is an achievement to rival great figures from the Golden Age of World Cinema - Renoir, Ozu, Ray, DeSica, Bergman and others of similarly gilded eminence to the World of Great Art. Except perhaps for Altman and Bogdanovich, no director from America's Golden Age mined the problems of real people so deeply.  

But maybe great art needs that potboiler aspect to it. We are as much dust as divinity, and without the ability to be entertained, who will pay attention? Even I can admit that Mad Men had its dull, even wooden moments that didn't ring true at all. Perfection is an enclosed space from which by definition, you can't reach higher than its limitations. But when the White Walkers come spilling into Hardhome like latter day devils making their first inroads into Elysium, when Ned Stark is senselessly beheaded in front of his family, when Daenerys Targaryen emerges alive like a goddess from the fire - completely nude with baby dragons on her shoulders, when a condemned Tyrion Lannister curses the entire audience of the showtrial his father convened to have him killed, when Oberyn Martell's head smashes like a falling melon, when half the remaining Starks are butchered when they finally recover from the loss of their patriarch, when Stannis Baratheon - TV's Macbeth, or King Saul - literally sacrifices his daughter to fire as a last desperate attempt to fulfill his ambition, you realize that you're dealing with a different, wholly more potent and terrible, kind of sublimity. Mad Men merely hints at this horrific, warnographic sublimity in its 2nd to last episode when an Oklahoma WWII veteran alludes to his brief dalliance with cannibalism on the Western Front. Game of Thrones stands, perhaps lesserly, but still very much present, in the tradition of Beethoven, Michelangelo, older Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, or Orson Welles. It grasps at the infinite, and goes higher and further into the sublime than Mad Men ever could. It's strong evidence, like Dostoevsky and Shakespeare at his worst, that only works that sink so low can rise so high. No amount of absurd, bad, or trashy scenes can take away the horrific and disgusting greatness Game of Thrones has achieved. 

Mad Men vs. Game of Thrones (Part 1 of) Part II

There was a few weeks when I thought I'd made my peace with Game of Thrones. No matter how much sadism is served to us, no matter how many rapes, how much torture, how many grisly ways to mutilate bodies, how much undeserved death, it is still true to itself, and true to what we as the audience require from it. Here is a TV show, a work of art, of operatic, epic, Shakespearean, near-Biblical ambition; with more characters, more plotting, more set pieces, more sheer scope, than anything ever seen on a screen, either large or small; served to us in brilliantly disturbing bits, but with a surfeit of wit and panache to help us through the grimmest of passages. Last week, the White Walkers appeared, in a battle scene (or a massacre) whose filmmaking stands with the most extraordinary passages in Spielberg.

Then Stannis Baratheon sacrificed his daughter to the Lord of Light by burning her on a pyre, and we the audience are compelled to listen to this sweet little girl, more intelligent than anyone around her and who never got anything but suffering from this show, as she screams in agony while her mother is held back by soldiers after she tries to rescue her. There has never yet been horror quite like this so graphically rendered on a screen. And make no mistake, this is horror rendered as it is. It's the kind that haunts our nightmares for years because we're made to care about these characters in a way that slasher movies throwing fake blood at a camera never could. With slasher movies, taking their cue as they do from Alfred Hitchcock, there is almost always a wink that tells us this is all in good fun - you can disengage from your nightmares being exploited at any moment. But Game of Thrones never gives us that wink. We're carried along, horror after horror, with our critical faculties long since obliterated. The sensory assault continues week after week, battering us into craving ever greater levels of gruesomeness. What horror can possibly be in store after this?

I predicted that this would happen weeks ago, my mother can attest to it. And yet I honestly thought they would spare us the horror, just this once, because it's just too horrible. Perhaps she'd be led into a room with Melisandre, and it would tastefully happen offscreen. But no, it happens in real time, in front of a cast of thousands. Fortunately, we're spared watching the burning girl, but we hear everything, and short of actually seeing something like that, what could possibly be more horrifying?

Game of Thrones is in a terrible bind. In order to keep us watching, they have to create ever more horrifying levels of violence. Yes, war is war, today as much as in the Middle Ages, and people far more real than anybody on Game of Thrones get raped, tortured, mutilated, and murdered; but to show it so often makes violence the entire point of the show. At this point, Game of Thrones belongs to that unholy class of art that's both great art and horrific exploitation. 

Yes, I can hear the protests of the half-dozen of you who've read this far. It's the same protest my mother pointed out to me. There are so many other things in Game of Thrones - complex characters portrayed by great actors, amazing filmmaking of stupefyingly complex plots, and intrigue on a level The Wire can only dream of. But that's ultimately the problem with the fantasy genre. It can literally do anything, and because it can, it must do everything in order to be compelling. Reality may have moved past magic and medieval superstition, but our minds have not. Our psyches still boil with reptile fascination for the ability to destroy, and the more we gaze into the that power to destroy, the more likely society is to embrace destruction.  

Art is a societal seismograph, and when millions of people are reading and watching scenes of horrific violence, with every taboo broken of what society once held sacred, history stands to reason that horrific violence is none too far away. Like the Ring Cycle before it, like The Brothers Karamazov, like even Candide, Game of Thrones exists in the world of the psyche and its archetypes. It speaks to its society because it gives voice to all the unmentionables that are already in the air. 

Westeros is America. The phenomenon of Game of Thrones was created by a country with 350 million privately held guns, with nearly 20 trillion dollars in government debt and nearly another 40 trillion in personal debt (household, small business, unfunded liabilities) , with temperatures and sea levels rising (summer is coming...), thousands of nuclear weapons not protected, 1 in 10-20 people controlling half the country's wealth, and a threat from a country known for its dragons just beyond the horizon. Game of Thrones speaks, very loudly, to the unmentionable, almost unconscious, fears of what lies in a future all too close at hand. Some works of art exist to console us, others exist to drive us mad. 

The world has always relied on fantasy to give us the most stupendous bursts of sublimity. Religion is impossible without fantasy literature, so is all the human progress that comes in the wake of epic tales that awoke parts of our imagination we never knew existed. How many worlds of thought were opened by the Bible? By Homer? By Shakespeare? All of them traffic in a mental world where even the most miraculous things are possible. But the sublimity that makes them possible also drives men crazy with the idea that all things are possible so long as we make them happen. 

There is not a shred of verifiable evidence to show that art makes us better people, but it is a mark of civilization that we can recognize our baser selves through art, but great art puts us in touch with the fundamental truths of what lies within our natures, almost like a 'warning and reassurance' system to our psyches as to what we're capable of. We shouldn't necessarily like what we see, and we shouldn't necessarily believe what great art tells us - nowhere moreso these days than on Game of Thrones. 

Game of Thrones was an inevitable show. If it weren't Game of Thrones which shows us the deep darkness of human nature, it might have been a still more violent show. But while we grew incredibly accustomed to violence long before Game of Thrones appeared, it's beyond debate that Game of Thrones has desensitized us to the idea of that those we are close to will be murdered.

800 Words: In Praise of Betty Draper

The Golden Age of TV was not kind to women. We hate ourselves for loving Tony Soprano, Walter White, Jimmy McNulty, Don Draper, and yet, to a man, we love to hate their spouses.

No spouse was more hated than Skyler White, and the actress who played her: Anna Gunn, was rewarded for how faithfully she executed Vince Gilligan's requests to be the shrewish counterpart to Walter's evil with death threats. But at least Breaking Bad granted Skyler her own personhood. Betty Draper/Francis spent Mad Men longing for a liberation from her husbands Don and Henry. In Breaking Bad, it was Walter who longed for liberation, and Breaking Bad granted him more liberation than Walter could ever imagine. But the whole point of Betty's character was that her liberation would never happen. To their dying days, women like Betty Draper are  designed to stuff their humanity into a two-dimensional beauty that is clearly less than human casing.

Nobody ever likes Betty Draper - whatever small bits of personality she exhibited was as shockingly unattractive as the figure from which it issued was beautiful. It is a mirror opposite of Shakespeare's Richard III, whose ugliness has turned his soul ugly. Betty's beauty has, in a sense, wilted her soul. She is personally unattractive because being disliked is the only way that her human qualities could even be noticed.

I vividly remember a G-chat status by a friend of mine - a guy of course - who was a few seasons behind on Mad Men from me. He wrote in all caps: "BETTY DRAPER IS HITLER!!!" I knew exactly which episode of Season 2 he'd just watched. But assuming Betty Draper is Hitler assumes that she has personality enough to have an unattractive personality. Unlike the male fantasies which exist in so many works of art, not merely a person, like Vertigo's Judy Barton, she is barely more than a chimera, a person designed to capture men's imaginations. But, if anything, Matthew Weiner's rendering if this beauty myth is at very least a degree more artful than Hitchcock's. Whereas Judy Barton (or Madeleine Ferguson) is coached to ensnare men to so that a movie plot can be set into motion, Betty Draper is coached by an invisible society of time and place which only exists in our imaginations and the social mores of people who soon will be deceased.

Rewatching the early episodes of Mad Men is always instructive when you realize just how important Betty Draper used to be in the show, and equally instructive when you realize that January Jones's acting has been grotesquely maligned. No one will confuse January Jones for a master thespian, but no one was confusing Kim Novak or Janet Leigh either. These were movie stars, not actresses, who had a very specific part to play and were cast at least as much for how they looked on camera as how they acted. The only difference between Betty Draper and Marion Crane was that in the intervening half-century between their creations, the plight of women like them gained sympathy, and therefore a voice.

But did Marilyn Monroe ever seem more at ease with her onscreen role? Did your elderly but well dressed female cousin who got a divorce in the days when divorce was a scandal? Betty Draper is, in many ways, the truest to life, fully realized, character in the entire Mad Men universe because there is so little life to realize in her. She is barely human because that is all she is allowed from her life. And when the show ends, she will disappear into memory, as so many women have, because the memories of men is all to which they were allowed to appeal.

800 Words: For James Gandolfini (1961-2013)

Look above to view one of the most darkly hilarious scenes in TV history, and it just got a lot darker. The death of James Gandolfini is yet another blow to the world's fat hedonists. One by one, all my favorite fat actors die before they reach their dotages - no more John Candy, no more Chris Farley, no more Richard Griffiths, no more James Gandolfini, can John Goodman be far behind?

The first thing that should be said about James Gandolfini is this - he gave the definitive TV performance. No show has ever asked so many nuances from an actor as this show which barely made it to television asked from a former bartender and truck driver who was the son of a bricklayer and fell into acting almost by accident. David Chase, showrunner of The Sopranos, compared him to Mozart. I can't imagine that acting on television is as hard as composing, but if it is, then there was something about Gandolfini that was truly extraordinary.  



I did not come to The Sopranos on its original run. My parents didn't have cable, and my college kept picking up and dropping HBO. But there was a bigger reason, the show simply seemed too intense and violent. It seemed to ask viewers to squirm in their seats until the next character was whacked, and that was just too much for me to take. Furthermore, there was a subset of dedicated Sopranos viewers - fratboys, bros, fake thugs -  who made the show seem truly ugly. To them, Tony Soprano was no different than Tony Montana - a simple badass who was 'hardcore' because he made people spurt blood.  

I only started watching the show around 2007 - perhaps not coincidentally, the year which Mad Men began. Even then, I could barely take the intensity of the violence. This wasn't the cartoon violence of genre movies, this was real violence with human cost and real world dimensions. I could only keep going because I wikipedia'd every character to see if and when they'd be killed, and I still haven't been able to watch the last half-season. Am I lazy, or am I really afraid of what's going to happen? I can only imagine what it must have been like to see this show when it first ran, the suspense between the sudden violent escalations must have unbearable.


(spoiler alert...)

Imagine my surprise, however, when I discovered that the show was not in fact about violence. The violence was merely a tool for the show to ask its questions - questions about morality, about self-delusion, about the capacity for violence, and most importantly, about our own complicity in violence. Did even Scorsese or Coppola use their violence to such depth of  effect? Has any writer since Kafka or Dostoevsky used violence to ask larger questions than The Sopranos did? 

The Sopranos does not mark a beginning, it marks an end. In The Sopranos we see the end of America’s fascination with organized crime, the end of America’s white immigrant working class, the end of trust in the nuclear family, and the end of America’s illusions about the price of success.   It is, in every way, a show about deaths. It does not glorify the importance of death, a la Six Feet Under, but it does accept death as life’s natural end. It does not glorify violent people as misunderstood, a la The Godfather, but it allows us to see violent people as humans who have redeeming qualities weighted against their brutality. But whatever else The Sopranos is, it‘s above all a moral parable about humanity’s desire to convince itself that we act in good faith in spite of all evidence to the contrary. We invariably slump into our seats a little as Tony is ‘forced’ to kill friend after friend, Paulie turns violent after the slightest insults, Carmela finds an infinite number of excuses to maintain her lifestyle by staying with Tony, Christopher puts off his desire to find something better than mob-life, and hundreds of peripheral characters who are drawn to the danger of criminals like flies to shit. Like Westerns before them, images about the mafia are embedded in the American DNA. At their beginning both Westerns and Mafia movies glamorized outlaws by portraying them as taking what more privileged people refused to give. As time went on, both gradually exposed the rot behind that myth, until finally a work came along that exploded our illusions finally and forever. In Westerns, it was late John Wayne’s movies like The Searchers or True Grit which showed the hatred and bigotry that motivated the Old West. In mafia movies, we went from the paean to organized crime that was The Godfather to the pathos of Godfather II, to the uneasiness of Goodfellas. And finally, here was a piece that made us realize how dangerous it is to view criminals as heroes even as we became ever more drawn to them. With every season, we became more complicit in the evil perpetrated on the screen. And by exposing the rot at the core of our desire to see glory in violence, The Sopranos both became an elegy for an enormous chunk of the American Dream, and a Premium Cable Requiem for the dominance of a medium that made us feel the American Dream so intensely.  



Some great works languor in obscurity until the world is ready for them. Some are embraced right away, and clearly The Sopranos was one of the latter. The Sopranos was the perfect show for the Bush years. It tapped into that deep-seated, almost unmentionable anxiety of its era; that all of our prosperity, all of our comfort, and all of the joy it gives us, was bought in blood. If American money is blood money, then perhaps we all deserved to die like Adriana crawling on her hands and knees in the woods, or like Cantor Fitzgerald workers in the Twin Towers, or like the millions of Vietnamese war dead. 

Many young men took to The Sopranos because of its violence. But an older generation took to The Sopranos because of its anxiety - an anxiety born of familiarity. Ostensibly, the subject of The Sopranos is mobsters and their lives. But like all great literary works, the real subject is us. People with similarities to Tony Soprano are his contemporaries in every suburb of America. They were born into the Golden Age of American prosperity, and their childhoods are tinged with memories of an older, pre-1970's era when cities were places of innocence and excitement. But crime rates went up, and every family with enough money moved out to the suburbs, where they accumulated wealth and prosperity beyond the dreams of their grandparents. Like Tony, these contemporaries fought with their parents constantly, who told them that they were spoiled and knew nothing about life's hardships. Like Carmela, these contemporaries use every excuse to maintain their upper class lifestyle at the expense both of those beneath them and of themselves. And as the children of these contemporaries grow up, some of them, like Meadow, use their still greater privileges to achieve things beyond even their parents dreams, while others, like AJ, languish in upper-class loafer misery. 



The Sopranos is not a show for young people, it's a show for the old. David Chase was already in his mid-50's when The Sopranos began, and before that he was a mid-level TV writer with a long history of depression. At a period when The Movies' influence was waning upon American life, David Chase was an obsessive cinefile who devoured everything from Fellini to silent pictures to b-movie matinees. His life was movies, and he spent thirty years trying to break into an industry that simply wasn't interested. What David Chase did with The Sopranos was not simply to create a grand summation of everything he learned from movies, he also defeated the movie industry who spurned him.

Most of the best TV shows of today (make your own list), are not simply great television. They have completely replaced the movies - giving us a new excellent 1 hour movie every week, and telling stories with a depth and maturity which American movies on their best days now seem barely capable. While moviemakers struggle to make anything that isn't a mega-blockbuster or a barely funded independent project, television becomes ever more baroque, ever freer in its content, and ever more daring - a daring which reached its apogee with The Sopranos. 



For me, The Sopranos and Mad Men stand at the top of the pyramid - no TV drama since I, Claudius has had as powerful an effect on me. But if I, Claudius had reached the achievement of the other two, it would have to have seven times as many episodes with no drop-off in quality. Mad Men is The Sopranos' true successor, not only because Matthew Weiner was a producer on The Sopranos, but because it asks the next logical question that evolves from The Sopranos. If The Sopranos asks (and documents) if America is falling from grace, then Mad Men asks why the fall from grace had to happen. If a historian from the future travelled back in time and asked me what it was like to grow up in America, all I could do is take him to the video store. We'd take out lots of DVD's and watch The Simpsons, Seinfeld, The Sopranos, and Mad Men. But we'd probably start with The Sopranos.




....Maybe The Simpsons.....

800 Words: Why Mad Men Matters

He sits blankly at his desk against the wall in his cathedral of an office, with a cloud of smoke as thick as incense permeating the room's every corner; his face as illegible as an icon, the blankness of his visage absorbing every emotion simultaneously. His eminence is adorned by apparel as central to his image as birds to Francis and lambs to Agnes; a suit tailored so immaculately as to look like organic tissue, hair gelled to seem at one with a face sculpted out of marble, and a nicotine bass that seems to emit minerals. He does not tailor his appearance, he is his appearance. It is a figure as familiar to us as our parents, welcoming us to our dreams and haunting us in our nightmares. He is the very image of America, repelling us with every gesture even as we're seduced – not a man who wants to be liked, but a vengeful god to be worshiped. 

This is Don Draper, creative director of the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce Advertising Agency of the 1960's - a man paid to convince people that their dreams exist; a man without qualities or quality, his two definable characteristics being his ability to understand what we desire, and to make us believe it attainable. He is more paradigm than character, everything Americans are told to aspire to from birth, yet unknowable either to other characters or to his audience. 

Don Draper is not a person, he is America itself – precisely the image all America wants to present to each other: self-made, independent, competent in everything he touches, and tough as iron. Don Draper, the bastard son of a dead whore and an abusive farmer, became the King of Madison Avenue. Like everyone else in our country, he aspired to the American Dream. Unlike everybody else, he had the willpower it took to achieve it, and can't understand why other people don't have the same. Like all Americans from Jay Gatsby down to Willy Loman, Don is first and foremost a salesman – and we believe everything he sells us because we want to believe it’s possible, and he is his own best evidence. But few if any of us are as tough as Don, and if Don is America, then Mad Men is the story of how the world came to reject Don Draper’s sales pitch.

The beguiling layers of echoes and enigmas which surround Don Draper are only possible because the world around him is so immaculately recreated exactly as it should be - perhaps not as it was, but precisely as we remember it - a world created by advertising, full of the promise of the 'American Pastoral' in which cigarettes, alcohol, misogyny and high cholesterol were mere venal sins. It was a world which ran on the Faustian bargain of being a White Male: who accepted the world on a plate in exchange for the anonymity which conformity brings, and who surrounded himself with an invisible underclass of all who are unable to be a part of the same pact. 

Indeed, the seduction of this show comes from the almost imperceptibly slow realization of each of its major characters that their lives are changing, inexorably and forever. But it is not a metamorphosis that happens in the twinkling of an eye, it happens so slowly that only we know what will happen. With our 50 years of hindsight, we know exactly what people like the cast of this show turned into, but what makes the show so watchable is that they have no idea. 

It never ceases to amaze that Mad Men's detractors claim there is nothing behind the show's immaculately conceived veneer. Time and again, people hear and read the same contradictory views: 

To half Mad Men's critics the show is pornographic nostalgia - presenting a past bereft of half-a-century's liberal guilt during which America was free to be its truest self: an era in which American superiority had no reason to be questioned and the 'American Way' was the world's. To these critics, Mad Men presents to us nothing but our innate longing to recapture a paradise lost, an era that can never again be and perhaps never was. These critics allege that the show looks upon the suppression of the rest of the world to a tiny coterie of white males with nostalgia, perhaps even approval. 

To the other half of its critics, perhaps the more vocal half, the show is a nightmare vision of the past - presenting an era so backward in its view of the world that we from the present can bask in a cozy blanket of self-congratulation. To these critics, Mad Men presents to us nothing but our innate arrogance in assuming that we of the Obama era are far superior in our enlightenment to those who preceded us. These critics allege that the show looks upon the vices of the sixties with such holier-than-thou self-satisfaction that it turns a blind eye to to the virtues of that era, and even moreso to the vices of our own.

It is no blight upon the greatness of the show to concede that there is something to both interpretations. Who can look at the workplace camaraderie on display and deny that something important was lost in the intervening years? But just the same, who can look at the workers blatantly casual mistreatment of one another and deny that something at least as important was gained?

No, Mad Men is not a show that presents the sixties exactly as it was. No television show could. Those who claim that Mad Men is nothing more than surface rendered immaculate give the show far too much credit. Whole websites exist to document its errors of period style. The show is great not because it presents the sixties exactly as it was, it is great because it presents the sixties exactly as we remember it. 

It was Emerson who said that "[A man] dismisses without notice his own thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a sort of alienated majesty." The genius of Mad Men is that it displays America's memories of the sixties with complete fidelity to our present view of it. It's all there: the infidelities, the smoking, the drinking, the racism, the sexism, the pride and the prejudice, displayed with neither guile nor guilt. It takes no side and seeks nothing more than to present this era to us without judgment or inhibition. The fact that people have such divergent reactions to it speaks to that it does so with all the clarity of a balance sheet. Mad Men is not a show like The Sopranos that achieves greatness by giving us visceral thrills. It is a show that presents us a vision of an era that’s supposedly distant, and we respond because it is still an era very much like our own.

Like The Sopranos, Mad Men holds a mirror up to us, but what their mirrors display are very different. In The Sopranos’ mirror is a society of murderers and thieves from America’s present; we’re supposed to be repelled by their acts, yet we see that in so much of their lives they live exactly as we do – and we have to wonder, how different are we really from these thugs? In Mad Men, the mirror shows us an American society fifty years in the past in which the upper class is utterly indifferent to those around them – and we can supposedly congratulate ourselves on being different. Yet how much has really changed? Supposedly, we’re a less racist and misogynist society, more inclusive, more aware of our faults. But the poor of America is a larger group of people than ever, and probably poorer too. Is our country any more aware, any more concerned for their welfare than ever before?

As we wrapped up the fifth season, the show became ever truer to our memories. Those who once disliked have grown to hate it. For a number of years, the show seemed to be 'about' less and less with each passing episode. Just as history seemed to take a break from America in the late 50’s and early 60’s, the show opening seasons set a glacial pace, perfectly reflecting how light were the burdens of a white upper-middle class that had everything, yet was miserably unhappy. Nothing of consequence happened to them, and so they felt utterly without purpose. By the middle of season three, it's became difficult to remember if there was any linear plot to the show at all.

But since the end of season three, the momentum of plot development has grown as exponentially as an avalanche. Mad Men was once nothing more a smoky hall of mirrors with which the viewers could interact in any way they saw fit, but the mirror has long since shattered to reveal a funeral pyre. In season 5, probably the best yet, nearly every episode revealed a new development more shocking than the last. World events are catching up to these people, and the turbulence is getting closer and closer until the talons finally draw upon their necks.  

This show is about nothing less the dawn of the era that is still with us and now draws to its close. By 1968, the springtime romance of American power drew to its end, and in its place came the black comedy of a superpower grown fat on its over-privilege. Don’t expect that any of these people will be at the vanguard of the 60’s, it isn’t that kind of show. Mad Men is not a show about underclass people, it’s a show about the overclass’s reaction to the underclass – it’s a show about spoiled people who go through life blithely unaware that there are people whose entire existence is bound up in serving them, and these people are suffering. It never occurs to Pete or Roger that these people whose lives exist at their whims might want more, and if they’re not given it as a gift, they may take it.

I hate to disappoint people, but Mad Men will not end with the Storming of the Bastille. The Pete Campbells and Roger Sterlings of America still control this country, and the more people bristle at their authority, the tighter their grip grows. It’s 2012, and the story of Mad Men has still not finished, and the true rebellion against the partners of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce has not happened yet. I shudder to think of the magnitude of the explosion Mad Men foretells when it does.