Truly, Madly, Deeply: Mad Men

Posted by Jennine Lanouette on Monday, April 19th, 2010

I haven’t been to the movies much lately cause I’ve been busy watching the third season of Mad Men now that its out on DVD. Last night, Ed and I holed up with disc number four and finished off the season. And today, like Don Draper showing up at the apartment of his latest sexual conquest in the middle of the night to tell her that he can’t stop thinking about her, so I am showing up here to tell my readers I can’t stop thinking about the show.

Not that I have been completely immune to romantic obsession with TV dramas before this. I was ever-faithful to Deadwood for its short but brilliant life. With The Sopranos it was an on-again-off-again sort of thing, but I did finally make a commitment in its last couple of seasons. And I had an early affair with The Wire, but then broke things off for reasons I can’t explain (maybe cause it asked for too much commitment). But now, I’m madly in love with Mad Men.

This could turn into a problem. I’m hoping if I draw upon my objective, analytic capabilities to write something about it, I can get enough distance to assuage my longing for season four (which started production only last week) and once again focus on my other work.

The great thing about dramatic series television these days is that its busting open our preconceptions of how stories should be structured. In all four of these shows, each episode is a walk through the wilds, seeming to follow no maps or charts, that nonetheless arrives, finally, at a sufficiently satisfying destination. Mad Men is especially so, with very slowly developing plot lines and frequent scenes that seem to have no point at all. Yet we are fully drawn in, hanging on every gesture and remark.

Why do we hang in for all this apparent meandering? I think one reason is that the show is heavily character-driven. We have been brought into such a thorough engagement with the characters, there is a degree to which we are happy to just be with them. But that can only go so far. We still have to have some sort of structure to each episode, some sort of guiding principle.

A couple of months ago, I wrote a short analysis of television structure in an e-mail to my students in answer to a question from one of them. For expediency’s sake, I’m going to repeat some of that here (apologies to my students reading this).

The original television sitcom model was a kind of cheesy moralistic character transformation in the Father Knows Best/Leave it to Beaver vein in which someone learns some kind of lesson that also reassuringly restores the balance of family and society. (For more on this, check out “Honey, I’m Home!” by Gerard Jones) This model was first challenged in the late 80s by Married . . . with Children and The Simpsons and then in 1989 Seinfeld came along and made a giant leap forward.

The radical departure of Seinfeld was in two inviolable rules the writers gave themselves (and the only two rules): No hugging. No learning. This meant no character transformation, whether cheesy and moralistic or authentic and meaningful, which opened the way to explore human nature in all its most self-serving impulses. The best of those episodes have three or four plot threads going simultaneously in which the characters dig themselves in deeper and deeper to a ridiculous but all too human predicament, and then, most of the time, despite all their efforts, lose anyhow. As we laugh at them, we are also laughing at our own selfish impulses and failures being acted out in exaggerated form.

In the same way that the sitcom was the arena of character transformation, the series drama was the realm of plot triumph. In the old Man from Uncle/Hawaii Five-O type shows, you could always be sure the good guys would win in the end, and the balance of society would be restored. Now, in shows like Deadwood and The Wire, maybe the good guys win, maybe not. In The Sopranos, it’s true that Tony Soprano always lands on his feet, but the moral underpinning of that show is so inverted to begin with, it’s hard to know if that’s a triumph. In a way, you could say the breakthrough that The Sopranos gave us was to put the “No hugging/No learning” rule on steroids. And we are similarly relieved to see our even more selfish impulses and even greater failures acknowledged. The bad guy is not a cardboard abstraction. He sees a therapist, struggles in his marriage and is disappointed in his teenage children, just like us.

So the question is — having removed character transformation and plot triumph as a basis for creating a structure, what do you then base your structure on? The short answer is you can base it on anything as long as that “anything” is a fully contained system in an of itself. Watching the season two DVDs of Mad Men a few months ago, I listened to the commentary track for episode four and was interested to hear the writers talk about how they structured the entire (television) hour around three consecutive Sundays leading up to Easter. The dramas that play out in that episode are just the same dramas the writers have been developing all season. But the three Sundays structure gives them an organizing principle from which to create a sense of pacing and keep the viewer oriented.

This illustrates my view that, at its most fundamental, the purpose of story structure — whatever form it takes — is simply to give us an organizing principle, both to guide the writer in the writing process and to help the viewer feel secure in a system that ultimately will make some kind of sense (even if only unconsciously).

I’m not going to go any deeper into a specific structural analysis of Mad Men right at this point. That’s too much work for a blog post I’m trying to toss off in a short time. But hopefully the points already made provide a guideline for anyone wanting to engage in such analysis on their own. In summary: let go of the old models you may have internalized and instead simply look for a self-contained system unique to that particular episode or season. The best way to do that is to simply look for a pattern, which can be external, like a series of Sundays, or can be more abstract and thematic, like the episode in Season Three which seemed to be all built around the different characters having to prostitute themselves in different ways.

There’s lots more that fascinates me about the innovations we’re seeing in series television drama these days, all of which I hope to eventually explore. But in the interests of keeping my posts to a manageable length (I know I got a little carried away in my Inglourious Basterds analysis), I’m going to leave it at this for now.

Besides, I think I have gotten my infatuated feet sufficiently back on the ground by now so that I can get to work on some other things.

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You can watch Mad Men on the following Video On Demand websites:

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