Why Watching Don Draper Makes You a Better Man

Advertising is everywhere today. On our phones, which we carry in our pockets without thinking of living any other way. On our websites where we can send letters, memos, questions, even large written files and pictures to people across the country in a few seconds.

Our favorite athletes wear advertisements, maybe as their shoes or their sweatbands. Or in another sense, their jerseys are ads for the branded sports paraphernalia that makes up a good chunk of franchise income. Our favorite actors wear advertisements in the form of clothing labels both in their movies and in their off-screen lives, or drive advertisements in the form of auto sponsorships. As the foremost consumer country in the world, America is THE place to advertise your products. We’re the culture that perfected the terms “shop-aholic” and “buyer’s remorse”. A place where we purchase things we hardly use, where our lives revolve around massive air-conditioned malls where we can buy any and everything in convenient packages. Now we're increasingly shopping on the internet, reducing the time we have to interact with other human beings; reducing consumerism to pure, unadulterated commerce.

How did this happen? How did Americans become the people who buy any and everything? Who often associate “happiness” with possessions, who have to keep up with the joneses and will ruin themselves financially to own more and more things that rarely live up to the hype that had built up in their heads before the purchase. There are a lot of theories and a lot of places where you can trace the roots of such concepts as consumer psychology, branding, logos, taglines, all that fun stuff but there’s a much better way to rewind to the birth of our modern age of super-consumerism: watch MAD MEN.

This Sunday begins the 5^th and final season of the Emmy / Golden Globe Award winning, Critically-Acclaimed show MAD MEN. And if you’re a man and you aren’t watching this show you truly need to stop, reappraise your life, possibly join a fight club, and start streaming the first 4 seasons now, NOW, goddammit.

This show is such a disgustingly amazing blend of “the things your grandfather doesn’t tell you” nostalgia, political incorrectness on the eve of revolution, jet-setting business glory days, interpersonal drama and moral ambiguity that it often surprises me that people can claim it belongs to the same loose artistic genre (namely, Drama Television) as CSI: MIAMI (yes, one's a procedural network show and the other's a dramatic cable production but they both get covered by the same agents).

Enough has been written by MAD MEN by now, and its gotten enough attention, that if you’re not already a devoted follower no article I can write here can convince you otherwise. No, there’s no hope for you. But just so you can know what you’re missing (and for those of you who’ve been awaiting season 5 for a painfully long time, even going to see THE ADJUSTMENT BUREAU just to see Roger Sterling wisecracking through Manhattan, here’ s something to get the juices running) here’s just a few things that’ll be beamed into your living room every Sunday starting on 3/25: 

•  Don Draper is the last true stoic American man and at the same time a wonderfully pathetic scumbag. He’ll go from pitching a perfect “off the top of his head” marketing idea to stumbling around drunkenly and two-timing his wife. He’ll at times seem very much like a man whose loyalty knows no bounds but at other moments he seems to enjoy going behind the backs of his “friends” or belittling and tearing apart the people he depends on. More confused and 3-dimensional protagonists are rarely found in classic literature, much less basic cable.
• The 60’s were possibly the most important decade in American history since the civil war. It was in the 60’s that America, building from WWII on the grounds that the rest of the Western World was reduced to rubble, hit its high point. It wasn’t until the 50’s that the average American woman could afford not to work because their husbands were making so damn much. This left them open to become perfect models of domestic efficiency, a great experiment that resulted in the tumult of the hippie generation’s discontent with the false “perfection” of their parents. As such, MAD MEN starts where the 50’s left off – beautiful houses, chatty housewives, innocently philandering businessman husbands, 2 kids, and so on. But what MAD MEN does is lift up the skirt of this false American idyll and show all the unrest and loathing swirling underneath, just about to explode. I just hope this new season picks up with Sally Draper as a rambunctious drug-addled hippie.
• Every executive has a crystal decanter filled with whiskey in his office and starts the day, holds important discussions, and of course ends the day with whiskey on the rocks. Lunch is wet and wild. A brainstorming session is filled with cigarette smoke and amber liquid and a mid-day boozey nap is considered a necessity for the executive man. Fuck you, clean-lunged workplace sobriety.
• These are the pre-feminist feminists here. We forget about this in today’s era, where we work alongside women, are often presided over by female executives, and such terms as “cougar” and “milf” are as commonplace as complimenting your secretary on how her ass looks used to be. MAD MEN shows Joan running shit at the office, more indispensable than most of the staff of Sterling Cooper as well as sexually liberated (somewhat) as well as Peggy showing the men she’s as good as them, thus paving the way for many a man’s sometime dream, being a kept husband.
• Matt Weiner first pitched MAD MEN about 10 years ago but everybody rejected him, though HBO gave him a job on their little pet show THE SOPRANOS. He went on to become an Executive Producer on everybody’s favorite mob drama and was considered by many to be one of the key ingredients in making that show so fucking brilliant.  So after the black-out from DON’T STOP BELIEVING, he re-pitched the project, something never done in TV and, even rarer, it was picked up this time. Now it’s the most-lauded dramatic show in television. Ambition’s just another word for perseverance and refusal to accept failure and, hell, Matt Weiner’s a true success story we can all look up to.
• Manhattan’s starting to get seedy in MAD MEN. Robberies. Bums. During New York’s glory days, the 70’s, before Times Square was remodeled by Disney Imagineers and Rudy Giuliani implemented his “no bums here” plan, you had to be tough to live in the Big Apple (versus now, where you simply have to be rich). And in Mad Men, the great suburban flight is in full effect, all the rich people buying up Long Island leaving only bachelors, young kids and NYC old money to stay on the granite. Thus opening it up to the last great artistic revolution to hit the city as well as its last great crime wave (amazing how those two coincide).
• Everybody is admirable and noble. Also, everybody is two-faced and slimey. Some fall more to one side or the other while Don, of course, is the only person who is often both at the same time and even my wife admits is captivating even while showing how horrible of a husband and father he is. But everybody has their gifts and their foibles and in this way is MAD MEN a more accurate depiction of humanity than anything else on TV.
• Seeing America in the 60’s (admittedly, through the lens of somebody from the 10’s) is a wonderfully transcendent experience. The styles and decorum – men wore fedoras and thick trenchcoats and carried Zippos while women wore nice dresses even when hanging around casually. Sweatpants on a plane? You’d be kicked off by the Pan Am attendant in her short skirt and business-friendly neckline. And everything from the old-timey TV’s, Heineken as an exotic beer (and, for that matter, the old beer cans) show us how the other half used to life. And Don’s 60’s-chic Manhattan Playboy bachelor pad reminds our generation how a real man lives.
• Rampant sexism and racism, even some heavy gay-closeting. There’s an episode where one of the partners refuses to do business with the “Japs” because he remembers his friends getting murdered by the Rising Sun during WWII. It’s good to remind ourselves how far we’ve come, especially for all the PC-loving freaks today who deign to complain about intolerance in this day and age. And admittedly there’s a secret satisfaction, as a man, to see a time when the secretary pool was an open-for-business meat market, before harassment and equality laws took all the fun out of the co-ed workplace. Wait, did I just say that? No, of course not, that would be sexist; downright misogynist, yes.
• Jon Hamm, who plays Don Draper, was roommates with Paul Rudd. Just imagine their conversations "Hey, I got another role as a nice geek." "Great. I'm just gonna struggle for the next 2 decades, then I'm going to become an international symbol of handsome manhood." At the same time, other than MAD MEN Hamm does almost exclusively comedy, everything from the bubble-dwelling handsome guy in 30 ROCK to a comic playboy narcissist in BRIDESMAIDS.Other than comedy, what does Paul Rudd do? Walk around L.A. being annoyingly polite and loveable? Seriously, what else does he do?
• And yet, even with all these atavistic pleasures and prejudices, all the Svengali two-faces and morally bankrupt bawlers, all the attention given to backdrop and time warp and all of it, the plots are entertaining, making it easy to fly through all 4 seasons in a month (like my wife and I) and constantly leaving you hungry. Even more, the themes: identity, corporate responsibility, balance between work and personal life, what makes a good family man vs. what makes a good executive, what do we want, who are we, how do we handle failure and, even more, how do we handle success; how much is your soul worth? These are all themes that ring just as true today as in that 60's world that seems so backwards with its quaint style (available now at Banana Republic) and rampant troglodyte debaucheries. These are timeless concepts rarely explored by pop entertainment in such depth and as such, watching them just makes you into a better, more knowledgeable and self-aware human being (while watching reality TV makes you into a freakish monster and watching procedurals makes you into a habitual killer of small animals).

So there it is. MAD MEN. This Sunday, March 25^th on AMC. To best understand where we are, we must know where we came from. And this show sure explains a lot on that tick. It’s like only by going back will we be able to go forward. 

Don woulda come up with a better last line that that. Goddamn that bastard’s good.

- Ryan