“Mad Men” protagonist Don Draper (Jon Hamm, “Landman”) appears to be the single coolest guy ever: creative, handsome and seductive. He’s who all women want and all men want to be. He’s the James Bond of 1960s New York. But his entire identity is a lie. Don Draper was born Dick Whitman to a sex worker in rural Illinois. After an explosion during his service in the Korean War, Dick took the dog tags of his commanding officer, the real Donald Draper (Troy Ruptash, “General Hospital”), and assumed his identity.
I’ve never loved this plotline of “Mad Men.” Don’s backstory — his early childhood, young life and eventual identity change — felt less interesting than any of Don’s relationships at the advertising agency Sterling Cooper (or any of the other relationships on the show, for that matter). I loved “Mad Men” for its sense of character, time and place and its exceptionally written relationships. “Mad Men” understood that for TV to be great in the canonical sense, it must be good in the traditional sense first.
In a show full of great characters and sharp writing, Don’s identity switch feels clumsy. Other characters have demons — Roger Sterling (John Slattery, “Desperate Housewives”) is an alcoholic adulterer, and Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser, “Titans”) is an insecure jerk — but the show manages to tell those stories without resorting to angsty childhood flashbacks. Yet whenever I say this to people, I get eyerolls. “That is the show, that’s what it’s about,” they will inevitably say to me. This thinking has tainted my views on “Mad Men,” one of my favorite shows. If these people are right (and given the amount of time the Dick Whitman plot is granted in the show, they just might be), then do I love one of my favorite shows in spite of itself? Do I love it for the breezy and gossipy window dressing around its weighty, Great American Novel-esque premise? Am I watching “Mad Men” wrong?
Thinking about this, I was reminded of “The Sopranos” showrunner David Chase’s distaste for those who thoughtlessly viewed his show as a collection of ironic one-liners rather than a defining piece of art about early 21st-century American life. Was I the “Mad Men” equivalent of one of those morons who thought “The Sopranos” was about gabagool and sex workers? I drank an old-fashioned and smoked a Lucky Strike after finishing “Mad Men.” Am I a moron? Does “Mad Men” showrunner Matthew Weiner hate me? I hope not.
While I can’t speak to whether Matthew Weiner hates me (I’ve never corresponded with him, so I’d be kind of honored if he did), “Mad Men” is not split between its good (as in fun) and great (as in self-important) qualities the way I used to think it was. Its breezy, gossipy fun is not separate from its ambition. Although “Mad Men” contains the Dick Whitman plotline, the show is not just about Dick Whitman. Rather, Dick Whitman embodies the show’s central theme: reinvention. To what extent can anything — a man, a television show or a country — become new again? “Mad Men” is obsessed with this concept, and it’s what makes the series not only a rich text about identity and the very nature of being, but a thrilling, fresh and exciting show.
In its plot, “Mad Men” seems to be about creativity — about invention. In the pilot, Don has a creative breakthrough in the middle of a meeting with the tobacco executives at Lucky Strike, who are anxious because the Surgeon General has just outlawed advertising that smoking is healthy. As the suits are about to leave, Don gets up and says “This is the greatest advertising opportunity since the invention of cereal. We have six identical companies making six identical products. We can say anything we want.” He pitches a new slogan for Lucky Strike — “It’s Toasted” — and the men eat it up. He presents it as a creative revelation, but inherently it’s not. What Don has done is change the playing field. He has seen what others cannot. He hasn’t invented a new product, but he has reshaped the way the world sees it. His breakthrough is not the creation of a consumable, but a brilliant act of reinvention.
Reinvention is not just a motif of the plot. “Mad Men” works for a variety of reasons, but none more than for its willingness to reinvent itself. As great as TV is at tracking characters’ lives over time, many shows eventually become complacent, sticking with the same cast of characters and finding little new to say. “Mad Men” was radically unwilling to be complacent. No arc makes this more glaringly apparent than the mutiny from advertising agency Sterling Cooper. The Sterling Cooper partners realize that the company is being bought out, and that their entire careers are at risk. Don, Bert Cooper (Robert Morse, “The People vs. OJ Simpson: American Crime Story”), Roger Sterling and Lane Pryce (Jared Harris, “Foundation”) vote in Don’s office to secede and form a new agency — and they do. The agency gets a new name and office, and the show gets a whole new life.
The real kicker doesn’t happen until the next episode, the season four premiere “Modern Love.” Don is interviewed for a Wall Street Journal article, and he says, “Last year, our agency was being swallowed whole. I realized I had two choices. I could die of boredom, or I could holster up my guns. So I walked into Lane Pryce’s office, and I said ‘fire us’.” This is “Mad Men’s” statement of purpose: You can never stop lying. You can always become something new. You are only what you can become. My fundamental understanding of the show changed upon reexamining this moment. “Mad Men” is dizzyingly thematically and narratively unified. Don Draper is not the center of a “complicated man” drama that is otherwise populated by philandering ad execs, old fashioneds and cigarette smoke. He is, instead, a symptom of the theme the show is pursuing. For the show to make sense as a piece about reinvention, he must himself be a reinvention.
I don’t know if I was watching “Mad Men” wrong this whole time, because I don’t think there’s a right way to watch it. I enjoy a lot of fun media that doesn’t feel the need to make its importance known, and I always find that digging is more rewarding than being fed meaning. The Dick Whitman plotline isn’t any more interesting to me. When “Mad Men” cuts to young Dick Whitman in rural Illinois, my eyes still glaze over. So why do I love “Mad Men” so much? Is it for the joy of gossip, of “Who slept with which secretary” and “How is Don going to publicly unravel this time?” I don’t think so. There is depth in the show’s writing that extends so far beyond the sexy veneer of its Jay Gatsby-esque centerpiece of a leading man. Because hiding in the show’s Jell-O salads, suits, cigarettes and Canadian Club whiskey, in all of its old, there is always something new.
Daily Arts Contributor Jack Connolly can be reached at jconno@umich.edu.
