{"id":845,"date":"2025-04-12T18:43:08","date_gmt":"2025-04-12T18:43:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/2025\/04\/12\/mad-men-is-about-so-much-more-than-don-draper\/"},"modified":"2025-04-12T18:43:13","modified_gmt":"2025-04-12T18:43:13","slug":"mad-men-is-about-so-much-more-than-don-draper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/2025\/04\/12\/mad-men-is-about-so-much-more-than-don-draper\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Mad Men\u2019 is about so much more than Don Draper"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<div>\n<p>\u201cMad Men\u201d protagonist Don Draper (Jon Hamm, \u201cLandman\u201d) appears to be the single coolest guy ever: creative, handsome and seductive. He\u2019s who all women want and all men want to be. He\u2019s 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, \u201cGeneral Hospital\u201d), and assumed his identity.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve never loved this plotline of \u201cMad Men.\u201d Don\u2019s backstory \u2014 his early childhood, young life and eventual identity change \u2014 felt less interesting than any of Don\u2019s relationships at the advertising agency Sterling Cooper (or any of the other relationships on the show, for that matter). I loved \u201cMad Men\u201d for its sense of character, time and place and its exceptionally written relationships. \u201cMad Men\u201d understood that for TV to be great in the canonical sense, it must be good in the traditional sense first.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>In a show full of great characters and sharp writing, Don\u2019s identity switch feels clumsy. Other characters have demons \u2014 Roger Sterling (John Slattery, \u201cDesperate Housewives\u201d) is an alcoholic adulterer, and Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser, \u201cTitans\u201d) is an insecure jerk \u2014 but the show manages to tell those stories without resorting to angsty childhood flashbacks. Yet whenever I say this to people, I get eyerolls. \u201cThat <em>is <\/em>the show, that\u2019s what it\u2019s about,\u201d they will inevitably say to me. This thinking has tainted my views on \u201cMad Men,\u201d 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 \u201cMad Men\u201d wrong?\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Thinking about this, I was reminded of \u201cThe Sopranos\u201d showrunner David Chase\u2019s 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 \u201cMad Men\u201d equivalent of one of those morons who thought \u201cThe Sopranos\u201d was about gabagool and sex workers? I drank an old-fashioned and smoked a Lucky Strike after finishing \u201cMad Men.\u201d Am I a moron? Does \u201cMad Men\u201d showrunner Matthew Weiner hate me? I hope not.\u00a0<\/p>\n<aside class=\"scaip scaip-1    \">\n\t\t<\/aside>\n<p>While I can\u2019t speak to whether Matthew Weiner hates me (I\u2019ve never corresponded with him, so I\u2019d be kind of honored if he did), \u201cMad Men\u201d 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 \u201cMad Men\u201d contains the Dick Whitman plotline, the show is not just about Dick Whitman. Rather, Dick Whitman embodies the show\u2019s central theme: reinvention. To what extent can anything \u2014 a man, a television show or a country \u2014 become new again? \u201cMad Men\u201d is obsessed with this concept, and it\u2019s what makes the series not only a rich text about identity and the very nature of being, but a thrilling, fresh and exciting show.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>In its plot, \u201cMad Men\u201d seems to be about creativity \u2014 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 \u201cThis 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.\u201d He pitches a new slogan for Lucky Strike \u2014 \u201cIt\u2019s Toasted\u201d \u2014 and the men eat it up. He presents it as a creative revelation, but inherently it\u2019s not. What Don has done is change the playing field. He has seen what others cannot. He hasn\u2019t 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Reinvention is not just a motif of the plot. \u201cMad Men\u201d works for a variety of reasons, but none more than for its willingness to reinvent itself. As great as TV is at tracking characters\u2019 lives over time, many shows eventually become complacent, sticking with the same cast of characters and finding little new to say. \u201cMad Men\u201d 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, \u201cThe People vs. OJ Simpson: American Crime Story\u201d), Roger Sterling and Lane Pryce (Jared Harris, \u201cFoundation\u201d) vote in Don\u2019s office to secede and form a new agency \u2014 and they do. The agency gets a new name and office, and the show gets a whole new life.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The real kicker doesn\u2019t happen until the next episode, the season four premiere \u201cModern Love.\u201d Don is interviewed for a Wall Street Journal article, and he says, \u201cLast 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\u2019s office, and I said \u2018fire us\u2019.\u201d This is \u201cMad Men\u2019s\u201d 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. \u201cMad Men\u201d is dizzyingly thematically and narratively unified. Don Draper is not the center of a \u201ccomplicated man\u201d 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.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>I don\u2019t know if I was watching \u201cMad Men\u201d wrong this whole time, because I don\u2019t think there\u2019s a right way to watch it. I enjoy a lot of fun media that doesn\u2019t 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\u2019t any more interesting to me. When \u201cMad Men\u201d cuts to young Dick Whitman in rural Illinois, my eyes still glaze over. So why do I love \u201cMad Men\u201d so much? Is it for the joy of gossip, of \u201cWho slept with which secretary\u201d and \u201cHow is Don going to publicly unravel this time?\u201d I don\u2019t think so. There is depth in the show\u2019s writing that extends so far beyond the sexy veneer of its Jay Gatsby-esque centerpiece of a leading man. Because hiding in the show\u2019s Jell-O salads, suits, cigarettes and Canadian Club whiskey, in all of its old, there is always something new.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<aside class=\"scaip scaip-2    \">\n\t\t<\/aside>\n<p><em>Daily Arts Contributor Jack Connolly can be reached at <a href=\"https:\/\/www.michigandaily.com\/arts\/tv\/mad-men-was-never-about-don-draper\/mailto:jconno@umich.edu\">jconno@umich.edu<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<aside>\n\t\t<\/aside>\n<p><h3 class=\"jp-relatedposts-headline\"><em>Related articles<\/em><\/h3>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cMad Men\u201d protagonist Don Draper (Jon Hamm, \u201cLandman\u201d) appears to be the single coolest guy ever: creative, handsome and seductive. He\u2019s who all women want and all men want to be. He\u2019s the James Bond of 1960s New York. But his entire identity is a lie. Don Draper was born Dick Whitman to a sex [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":846,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[125,914,912,913],"class_list":{"0":"post-845","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-don","9":"tag-draper","10":"tag-mad","11":"tag-men"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=845"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/845\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":847,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/845\/revisions\/847"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/846"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}