The fourth season of Mad Men ended last week, and at last we have seen Don Draper in a moment of weakness: smiling stupidly at the thought of being in love. Spoiler alert: it has been subtly foreshadowed throughout the season, but I don’t think any of us actually expected Don to spontaneously propose to Megan, his sweet, nonchalant, French-Canadian secretary.
But that’s one of the many great things about Mad Men. It’s unpredictable, but not unrealistic. The show about a Madison Avenue advertising agency in the 1960s has managed, even in its fourth season, to continue to wow audiences and garner fans with its thematic and stylistic genius. Though I can’t speak personally to what life was like in the 1960s, I can say that from both reading about and hearing many personal accounts of the era, Mad Men brilliantly captures the zeitgeist of 1960s America while still managing to create TV drama at its best.
One of the most brilliant aspects of the show’s recreation of ‘60s fashion, banter, and social mores, is the way in which it slowly moves from staid, late-Eisenhower America to the progressive Kennedy/Johnson ‘60s. Although the upper-class white men of SCDP (Sterling-Cooper-Draper-Price) are hardly evidence of progress, marginal figures creep into the episodes to demonstrate the changing mood. Most notably, Peggy, a once mousy secretary, has become a powerful copywriter by season four, slowly immersing herself in beatnik counterculture. She even gives self-proclaimed hippies a run for their money, when, locked in a hotel room with artistic director Stan and chided for being “prude,” she strips naked and goads him to “get liberated.” And then there’s Don’s ex-mistress, Midge, who, absent since season one, returns to convince Don to buy one of her paintings, as she—an archetypal bohemian—has become a heroin addict.
As the ‘60s came with promises of a more “permissive” society, it also struggled to let go of some of the traditional mores of the recent past, most notably in regard to female roles. Dr. Faye, a new add-on in season four, and also Don’s girlfriend (that is, until he proposes to Megan), concludes in her surveys that all women ultimately want is to get married. Meanwhile, Joan is given a “promotion” in the season finale, but with no pay increase in sight, she aptly responds, “It’s almost an honour.” Another poignant moment of the season occurs when Peggy, outraged by one male copywriter’s remarks to Joan, decides to fire him. Although Peggy intended to defend Joan, Joan’s response is telling: “All you’ve done is prove to them that I’m a meaningless secretary and you’re another humourless bitch.” In the relatively new world of women in the workplace, power dynamics and the question of whether to bank on or give up entirely one’s feminine wiles are still being worked out.
However, as some of the show’s women are struggling to move forward into the future, others, like Betty Draper, are stuck in the past. While Don’s blonde, beautiful ex-wife began the series as a sympathetic suburban housewife, condemned to middle-class ennui, by the fourth season she has become embittered and an abusive mother. Now remarried to political advisor Henry Frances, the effects that Betty’s selfish tirades have had on her children are becoming more pronounced, as eight-year-old Sally is caught “touching herself” at a slumber party, hacking off her long locks, and later, hopping on a train to run away to Don’s house.
In the midst of exploring and re-creating life in mid-1960s New York, this season has delved further into the series’ overarching question: “Who is Don Draper?” In the first episode, we see Don with a call girl. He asks her to “do it,” and then we find out that what he wanted was for her to slap him across the face. So Don Draper is a masochist. Interesting. We go further into the archive still when Roger Sterling, in the midst of writing—or dictating to a ghost writer—his memoir, first discovers an eager Don as a fur salesman, looking to enter the world of advertising.
Amid Jersey Shore, Glee, Gossip Girl, Grey’s Anatomy, How I Met Your Mother, and the rest of the endless list of crap people watch, Mad Men has saved television from becoming a cultural wasteland. Although the show was initially rejected by HBO—generally, the only source of artistically merited television—it’s AMC that had the last laugh.
