The Mad Men series finale: it's the real thing!

I don't know if I was the only one who was a bit queased-out by the final episode of Mad Men last night. My lack of excitement before I even saw it was telling, and all the way through it I was poised for "it-was-all-a-dream" syndrome, something hopelessly hokey to just kill the whole thing.

In a way, it happened. (This is full of spoilers, so if it's on your DVR and you haven't seen it yet, well, just keep on reading!) I noted an uncharacteristic compulsion to neatly-if-artificially tie up loose ends, and, especially, pair off those nice deserving kids with the right partners (while paring down other, less-workable connections). The show got heavily into the EST-y, Esalin-ish movements of the early '70s, with Don, the least likely candidate, being most deeply-involved. 

Though they didn't show Betty lying with waxen beauty in her coffin with a lily in her hand (and her husband, ol' Whatsisname, anxiously shaking hands up and down the aisle of the church wondering if his wife's corpse was pretty enough to win him the Governorship - sorry, I can't forgive him for that VERY BAD crying scene last week), they did show her smoking as she gently expired from lung cancer. How ironic: it's Betty who self-destructs, not Don.

I won't get into the rest of it because reciting the details lays bare just how soap-operatic the show had become.  How they ended Don - suicidal one minute, compassionate the next, followed by blissfully "ohmmm"-ing on a hilltop - made me literally groan out loud. The topper for all this was a repeat of the "iconic" Coke commercial of 1971, in which an angelic choir of wholesome and well-fed hippies proclaims Coke as "The Real Thing". Irony alert! Irony alert!

The show was all about artifice, wasn't it? Illusion, delusion, hawking products that were just products, things, not some fulfillment of the American Dream. (Remember the carousel? And how about "it's toasted", which essentially means nothing). I don't know if this was intended or not, but three minutes before the ending of the ending, I was saying out loud, "Okay, then. . . " As the old jazz musician once said after playing for 12 hours, "How we gonna end this thing?"

They ended it all right, because they had to. Old Wienerhead finally had his day. (Spelling variation intentional.) I don't know if it was because only one person acted as emperor and Ayatollah, but sometimes the seams showed. The seams represented how much air time a character was allowed in each episode/season. This was contractual, and seemingly non-negotiable. How do I know this? When AMC insisted on adding an extra commercial, a character had to be dropped. This horrified me, but it didn't seem to bother anyone else. And then there were the "hysteric returns": oh Jesus, there's Duck Phillips again! How'd he get in here? He rose from the dead more predictably and annoyingly than Jesus. How did this happen? Why, folks, it was in his contract! Duck Phillips must have had a particularly good agent and worked all this out from the beginning of the series. Sal Romano did not, and was out on his ass just as his character was starting to get interesting. 

It's over, it's over, it's over, as Roy Orbison once wailed, and I'm a bit relieved, and also kind of let down. Sort of like getting married, I think. I've never been divorced, so I can't comment on that. At its best, this show kicked ass. I was in love with Don and made little gifs of him (a sure sign of fascination. No Blingees, though. Can I make one now?). I could hardly believe how consistently good it was. When did it all begin to slip sideways? Everyone wants to blame Megan, poor thing, but wasn't it really all her fault? It had something to do with the way she embarrassed Don in front of all his friends with the Zoo-bee-doo-bee-doo thing.

That would kill any show's mojo, don't you think?

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Jon Hamm: I am worried about this boy

(From the Washington Post. I've long wondered if Hamm's ability to inhabit the tortured soul of Don Draper is connected to some torment in his own soul. This, apparently, answers my question.)

Jon Hamm exits rehab for alcoholism before ‘Mad Men’ final season premiere




Jon Hamm as Don Draper in “Mad Men.” (Michael Yarish/AMC via AP)


After a 30-day stay, “Mad Men” star Jon Hamm has been released from a rehabilitation center where he sought treatment for alcohol addiction.

“With the support of his longtime partner Jennifer Westfeldt, Jon Hamm recently completed treatment for his struggle with alcohol addiction,” a spokesman for Hamm said in a statement, as the Associated Press reported. “They have asked for privacy and sensitivity going forward.”

After a long struggle in Hollywood, Hamm, 44, became famous in 2007 for playing alcoholic, womanizing Don Draper on the landmark AMC series. He won a Golden Globe in 2008 for the role, and has been nominated for an acting Emmy seven times.

TMZ reported that Hamm completed a program at Silver Hill Hospital in New Canaan, Conn., at the end of February. The publication called it a “high-end facility,” and the hospital is affiliated with Yale University.

After an eight-year run, “Mad Men’s” final season will air this spring.

“There’s no version of this ending that is not super painful for me,” Hamm said last year, as The Washington Post’s Hank Stuever reported. “[‘Mad Men’] has been a single constant of my creative life in the last decade, so that’s kind of tough. Yeah, I will be happy when [the final episodes] air and I don’t have to fake like I don’t know how the show ends [but] I will never be able to have this again, and that’s a drag.”

[Jon Hamm and others discuss a ‘super painful’ (but ‘satisfying’) end to ‘Mad Men’ at TV press tour]

In the past, Hamm has tried to draw a bright line between himself and the character he plays on television.

“There is no Don Draper,” he told Esquire last year. “Don Draper was blown up in a ditch in Korea. That whole ‘Be Don Draper’ thing, I feel it’s … sad.”

He added: “This is a fundamentally f—– up human being.”

But some quickly drew a line between the real man and the ad executive who specializes in behaving badly. Deadline Hollywood called Hamm’s trip to rehab “a surreal case of life imitating art.”

“The news does change the narrative in the final promotional push for AMC’s celebrated first original series,” Nellie Andreeva wrote. “It also raises the question about the toll of playing an anti-hero.”

Andreeva pointed out another case of an actor who perhaps got too deep into a role: the late James Gandolfini. After Gandolfini first inhabited New Jersey mob boss Tony Soprano on “The Sopranos,” which debuted in 1999, his personal life seemed to get worse. He got divorced. There were problems with drugs. He would disappear from the set. And he reportedly once punched himself in the face.

“Turning Tony — anxiety-prone dad, New Jersey mobster, suburban seeker of meaning — into a millennial pop-culture icon, the character’s frustration, volatility, and anger had often been indistinguishable from those qualities of James Gandolfini, the actor who brought them to life,”GQ wrote after the actor’s death at age 51 in 2013. “It was a punishing role, requiring not only vast amounts of nightly memorization and long days under hot lights, but also a daily descent into Tony’s psyche—at the best of times, a worrisome place to dwell; at the worst, ugly, violent, and
sociopathic.”

I can't help but note a fundamental change in the things Jon Hamm is saying to the press. In the past, he was almost glib about Don Draper, as if he was a vehicle - classy, if a little cracked and broken in places - that would take him far. At one point an interviewer asked him, "Do you think Don Draper can find happiness?" His response was, "Oh, of course! Why not? Anything is possible," or words to that effect.

I've been a Maddict since the show began in 2007, and while last season kind of slid sideways, there was still much to recommend it. Don's chronic desperation was beginning to get old, almost frayed, as was the character himself. Those message boards plumbing hidden symbols in the show (and Don is a good plumber, by the way, fixing the ineffectual Pete Campbell's leaky faucet) seemed a bit too much for me however. EVERY atom of EVERY episode was analyzed - oh, Don could be like Don Corleone! Or Dawn - the dawning of a new day? Draper - obviously, he has draped himself to hide his real identity, and if you take the d away, you have "raper"! We won't get into Dick Whitman, except that Dick is a penis and Whitman is a folksy/literary allusion to Walt Whitman. And so on, and so on, ad nauseam.

But I was still drawn back again and again. I don't know if I have a favorite episode because the show, more so than most,  is all of a piece. I just saw, for maybe the fourth time, the one where Don has to fire Lane Pryce for embezzlement. It's particularly powerful because of Don's reaction: straightforward, not shocked nor apologetic, but with absolutely no room for discussion. You're out of here, Lane, I can't trust you any more - and he's right. It's hard to feel much sympathy for this cloying, blithering Englishman who tries to commit suicide in a "Jag-yew-ar" that won't start, but when the staff find him hanging dead in his office, Don once again shows a kind of low-key integrity by insisting on cutting him down, honoring the body in a way that reflects his wartime experience, no matter how flawed.

Re-watching these still-watchable things, which I really wasn't going to watch, but I recorded them anyway, I once more got lost in the labyrinth. Fortunately the episodes wear well, better than I thought they ever could. Even knowing exactly what came next, I was drawn in. Again.

One of my favorite characters - maybe my absolute favorite - is Sally, whose odyssey has taken her from chubby eight-year-old girl ballet dancing for guests in the living room to fiery, rebellious young woman, someone who conveys a brokenness that she will somehow parlay into an extraordinary life. She has always been a Daddy's girl, but has seen much of Daddy's dark side, which is very dark and murky indeed. She watched Lee Harvey Oswald get shot, screamed when Don scored tickets to the Beatles, got her first period in the Museum of Natural History and ran home to her mother, jumping over years of alienation and emotional abandonment for an understanding and comfort which, against the odds, she did receive.  Sally and I are the same age, which took me a while to realize. She's experiencing all the madness of the 1960s through the eyes of a smart but confused, often emotionally-deprived child. And where else can you find a character like that, one who is allowed to develop in so many directions, with so many dimensions, over a period of eight years?

I do hope the series winds up with a little more dignity than was displayed in the last few episodes, which in many ways sucked. I groaned at some of it - Ken Cosgrove's meaningless tap dance seems to have hit a new low. It was a mistake to take the series into the beginning of the '70s, when all that Rat Pack coolness had worn off and people were into long greasy hair, sideburns and polyester leisure suits. And everyone's wondering what will happen to Don. Will they kill him off? (That would once and for all eliminate the possibility of Mad Men II: The Adventures of Disco Don.) Will he become hap-hap-happy at last? Will he realize all those flashbacks to the old homestead were a complete fiction (as witness the fact that the young Dick Whitman looks more like Alfred E. Neuman than Don)? I would be happy if they killed off the repulsive, non-acting Glen, Matthew Weiner's talentless, creepy son, who has blighted the show and pulled down the quality of it for many seasons now.

Last episodes are a stumbling block for long-running, epic series. Most of them fumble, drop the ball. St. Elsewhere was ludicrous, with the whole series being the dream of an autistic boy. The Sopranos turned all the lights out or something (I didn't watch), stopping in mid-conversation and leaving everyone hanging. Seinfeld just had a ridiculous jailhouse scene that seemed to be punishing the characters for being too entertaining all those years. It was a long time ago, but I think MASH squeezed it a little too hard, so it came out almost as maudlin as the excruciating ending of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. And Sex and the City - dear God - talk about Don Draper! Carrie returned to the wealthy, powerful, smooth sociopath Big after he had mangled her heart a hundred times - and everyone cried and clapped their hands - it was sickening, but no more sickening/completely irrelevant than the two movies that followed.

We'll keep our expectations low, or maybe we'll have no expectations at all. But we'll watch. I don't think we'll find it as hard to say goodbye to it all as Jon Hamm, who seems to be at a fragile point right now. He speaks in another article about Don Draper building his house on a crumbling foundation. It alarmed me, because I wondered if the brokenness in him was being laid bare by playing a deeply broken character for so long. I was even more alarmed reading about James Gandolfini - I confess I never watched The Sopranos, but I hated to see what happened to him when the show got hold of him.

Actors become. Don't they? Do the best of them stay separate from their work? Can they? And how do you do that, exactly? Why would anyone need to anaesthetize and numb themselves with booze to the point of needing rehab? Doesn't this point to a pain and a pressure approaching the unbearable load Don Draper has carried for eight years?

For if Don's fundamental nature is one of integrity, as that one episode seems to indicate, how and why has he trespassed against himself that many times, and survived?

"You had me at hello"

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Mad Men gifs: I think it moved!

Geez I get mad about this. I finally gather up some truly foxy Don Draper/Jon Hamm gifs gleaned from the first four seasons of Mad Men, then find out only three of them will post here, most of them not too good.

Well, except for that first one.

Don Draper is what you'd call a good-smelling man. You know the type, you can just tell.

Harrison Ford: definitely a good-smelling man. Maybe just a touch too much cologne, but nice-smelling hair, he uses something good on it or else he just has nice-smelling hair. Just the right amount of body hair, too.

Cary Grant: Whatever men used then. He took care of himself, knew how to fill a tux.

Harold Lloyd: Of course! Lemon verbena, the rest just "him".

George Clooney: Need I say more?

Unfortunately, there are also the bad-smelling men.

Matthew McConaughey (or however you spell it): He just reeks, like a skunk. He has admitted he doesn't use deodorant and seems proud of it, though his co-stars have complained about him.

Brad Pitt: His name says it all.

Phillip Seymour Hoffman: He looks like he never washes his hair. Or other things.

Oh, enough of all that crap. *WHEN* is Season 5 of Mad Men going to start? IS it going to start? It was supposed to begin in July, for Christ's sake. JULY. That was, let me see, months ago. Then Matthew Weiner (who doesn't take pictures of his anatomy and Tweet them to his six girl friends, that's the other guy), the prima donna creator of the show, got in a major spat with the network, AMC. I think it was over commercials and having to cut a character (!?) in order to fit in more ads.

This is stupid! All they'd have to do is talk faster! And we can't afford any more leakage. They already cut Sal Romano, whose story line was finally starting to heat up after being on simmer for four years. Then he was unceremoniously dumped.

Enough about gays, I guess: the ones Don called "you people".

I was also getting very interested in pre-teen Sally, Don and Betty's daughter. She was born at the same time I was, and through her child's perception is experiencing the turbulence of the '60s (Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy assassination, Beatles on Ed Sullivan for the first time - on my tenth birthday, by the way).

She has come a long way from running around with a plastic dry cleaning bag over her head. At the end of Season 4 she was seeing a psychiatrist for masturbating at a sleepover while watching Ilya Kuryakin on The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (I was a Napoleon Solo girl, myself.)

They'd better not send her away to Switzerland to deal with the embarrassment.

The thing is. . . I have this awful, queasy feeling that the show is over. There has been nothing to promote Season 5 that I've seen, except a  marathon of the first four seasons which AMC is showing at 3:00 in the morning on Sundays.

That's when they show "remastered" Three Stooges episodes from the 1940s. If there is an inverse to prime time, this is it.                                                                        

It's better than nothing, however, so 'm recording and watching them all again. I'm watching them, even though this may be the 5th or 6th time I've seen them. This has never happened to me before. I just love this show, love everything about it because so far it hasn't been even a little bit predictable or boring.

But what if it never comes back? The whole thing is so mushy. The word on the internet - which we've never been able to depend on up to now - is that it'll be back in March. MARCH?? It was February a couple minutes ago, and before that, January. And September. And. . . How can things go backwards like this?

This show has a huge fan base (or had), but the public has a very short attention span, which means it's probably already haemorrhaging viewers. It'll be a hard job to pull those numbers back up again, and if they can't, it'll be sayonara for good. Matthew Weiner will have effectively committed television suicide.

I have the DVD sets of the first four seasons. I am ashamed to admit (oh all right, I'm not) that I bought the fourth season before it officially came out. Bought it cheap from a suspicious-looking video outfit that was promptly closed down, with a forbidding-looking Homeland Security announcement appearing where the home page used to be. It went on and on about theft and fines and jail terms. Let's hope they don't catch up with me. Honest, I thought this was just a sneak preview! Never mind that it's a direct transfer from TV, with the AMC logo in the corner.

It's not good to get so addicted. It has something to do with my generation, and Sally, and the sex, and the booze, and the smoking. And with Peggy Olson, who has evolved like crazy throughout the four seasons, from mousy junior secretary to unwitting expectant mother to guilt-ridden lapsed Catholic to chicly-dressed, full-fledged copywriter with a quasi-beatnik girl friend who reminds me of Amy Farrah Fowler on The Big Bang Theory (but that's another post).

Don is on the cusp of marrying a gorgeous young secretary, someone he barely knows, mainly because she is willing to overlook his shady past and accept him the way he is. Never is there any mention of what HE intends to bring to the relationship, simply because it doesn't occur to him. She meets his needs, or is supposed to. His needs are: sex; complete erasure of his past; sex. That's why she's there. And with his kids, she's (in his words) Maria von Trapp: or, more likely, Mary Poppins.

Oh, we all have to see how this works out! Don's "secret" life is all over the place now, completely worn out like Sal Romano's secret crush on metrosexual Ken Cosgrove. So that story line will have to be discarded, unless there's more "trouble" later over that ersatz purple heart. I think they've squeezed this lemon long enough.

I wonder sometimes if this whole thing is just a ploy to titillate fans, to make them wait and wait and wait, like Betty Draper waiting for an orgasm. But it won't work. No matter how good this show is, and I happen to think it's the best thing I've ever seen, waiting isn't the viewing public's strong suit.

                                          (Whoaaaaaawwwww. Excuse me.)

Mad Men has already spawned some washed-out imitators like Pan Am and The Playboy Club (which lasted two episodes: take that, Hugh, and get back in your wheelchair). I tried to watch Pan Am because of Christina Ricci, who was an absolute genius in the two Addams Family movies. But as a "stew", she's a bust. The woman in the first episode who runs away just as her wedding is starting is so-o-o-o lame, as she sits in her friend's revving car ("What'll you do?" "I know! I'll become a Pan Am stewardess!" No kidding, that's really what she says.)

Watered-down Weiner isn't working very well. We need the real thing. We need a man who somehow smells good in spite of excessive tobacco and alcohol, who actually looks good in those stupid hats they wore. We need that time machine, that ache from an old wound (as Don once defined "nostalgia": it was when he brilliantly named an ordinary slide projector the Kodac Carousel! How do they ever get permission to do these things?)

Take me back, Don. It was all a mistake, there was never any conflict. I don't care what you've done; I don't care how many women you've snorched. All is forgiven. I need you.

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Withdrawal

'Mad Men' Season 5 set for 2012, negotiations with Matthew Weiner ongoing - From Inside the Box - Zap2it

I haven't even really written about Mad Men yet, and here I've already got the t shirt (from eBay, no kidding, it's great). I don't think I've ever been as involved with a show, any show, in my life. Maybe I hesitated to write about it because I'd have to give a lowdown on all the characters and all the situations, a messy tangle which approximates real life more accurately than anything else I've seen.

But I do have concerns. It seems Matthew Weiner, the genius behind the show, is stamping his foot at proposed budget cuts and time constraints. The network (AMC) and the production company (Lionsgate) want to cut 2 minutes out of each episode to allow for a few extra commercials (I'd say, maybe 5 or 6). Doesn't sound like much, does it? Until you realize that in 2 minutes, a character can die, another character can be born, the business can crash or be reformed (which it already has a few times) . . or even, with a sudden quirk of the eyebrow, Don Draper can make the whole Mad Men universe disappear.

Meantime, horror of horrors, AMC has delayed the debut of Season 5 (slated for summer) until March 2012. Gulp. Almost a year. Does Weiner approve of his masterwork being clawed back like that? Whose nose is being twisted here?

In case you haven't heard of this show (and for God's sake, where've you been for the past 4 years?), it's a slightly surreal take on Madison Avenue in the 1960s. MM takes a huge chance in covering a year per season, unlike MASH which dragged out the 2-year-long Korean War into 11 years (with 11 Christmases in a 2-year period! Those folks must've been mighty festive.) So we're already into, what, 1966? If the show is really successful, it'll spill over into the polyester-and-disco atmosphere of the '70s, which I frankly don't think will work. So they'd better squeeze this juicy material while they still have time.

Another option is making Mad Men movies, but like the Sex and the City franchise I think they'd just writhe and die, the quirky maverick spirit of the series totally bent out of shape by Fox or Warner Brothers or whoever inevitably takes over the whole thing. Sounds like Matthew Weiner will only surrender his show over his dead body: like Charlton Heston's rifle, they'll have to pry it out of his cold, dead hands.

But as I was saying before I digressed (it's Easter Monday, for God's sake, a weird sort of non-day, so don't expect me to make much sense), I'm beginning to see why Sterling-Cooper-Draper-Pryce's art director Sal Romano (played by Broadway actor Bryan Batt) was canned so abruptly in Season 3. It's not that his character wasn't working out. Sal's dismissal was a budget cut, nothing more or less. They couldn't afford him any more.

He was gay, yes; his story line was a bit bizarre, but he had the acting chops and was up for it. In fact, he was one of Mad Men's more subtle characters, hiding his forbidden gay urges under a cloak of suave Old World charm that inspired female crushes. I noticed he was also very high up in the opening credits, which has everything to do with agents and contracts and negotiations and status and (ultimately) paycheques. The budget for MM seems to be mysteriously dwindling (not enough product placement? Can we make the Mrs. Butterworth's bottle a little more prominent on the kitchen table?), so network execs are likely pondering whose head will roll in Season 5.

None of this makes any sense to me. Why is this happening? How could such a ravenously-popular, culture-transforming series be running out of money? Why hold it hostage? Is it to build up viewer hunger (which, with the average 3 1/2 -minute attention span, will probably backfire)? It just feels like they've kicked it into the next solar system. Even waiting for it to start at the normal time has been agony, for I think Don Draper/Jon Hamm is the best-smelling man on TV. (That's another post entirely).

MM has garnered a big basket of kisses already, but I'm beginning to think Emmys are kind of like Oscars: the kiss of death, not just for a career but for a whole series. (I'll never forget one of my favorite comic actors, Tony Randall, receiving his statuette after The Odd Couple's cancellation and saying with a rueful smile, "This is wonderful. Now if I only had a job.")

I want more Don Draper, I want his anguish and ennui and occasional joy. I want to see if his engagement to That French Girl (Megan, is it? She of the Leslie Caron teeth?), a bolt from the blue, will ever come off. There are some potential discards however: I want to see if that blithering old man who was in How to Succeed in Business in One Million BC (heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh, in-joke) will drop at his desk like poor old Miss Blankenship.

Betty, well, she's about as bland as that perforated Pillsbury crescent roll dough (half-baked). Could she fall off a horse or something? How about that creepy neighbor boy Glen (who turns out to be Matthew Weiner's creepy son: so, forget that one, he'll stay until he's voting age).

But there are others I can't do without, so if the network execs get their greasy little paws on them, I swear I'll walk. In particular I want to see Don's 10-year-old daughter Sally launched into the shark-infested waters of adolescence (for she's one of the most gifted actresses in the whole series and is evolving brilliantly: hey, guys, if you send her away to school in Switzerland, I swear I will quit watching forever!).

I can't remember ever doing this before, but I always watch each episode of MM multiple times: when they're new, then the next day, and then, after a few weeks or months, again. In each and every case, I've caught things I didn't "get" the first/second times around. Though everyone claims the '60s were a simpler time when things moved much more slowly, this show is for the quick of eye and swift of mind. Things can blur past you with the speed of a silver bullet. Not to be content with three viewings, I now have the DVD set(s) so I can watch them all again whenever I want. It doesn't matter that I can anticipate what will happen next: like Casablanca or Gone With the Wind, familiarity only enhances the experience.

I've seen a curious number of conflicting articles on the subject of Mad Men's mysterious, infuriating delay. AMC is "officially" saying they can't show MM at the same time as Breaking Bad or Weird Undead Zombies from Hell or whatever the bleep it is. Just a scheduling conflict! Why, I don't know.

Probably because that's not why. This is all about Weiner, who knows damn well he has this show in his hot little pocket, and is consequently stamping his hot little foot. It's power-tripping and yo-yo-jerking and manipulation, while the cast probably holds its breath, each hoping they won't pull the short straw and be relegated to the phone booth in the gay dog park where we saw the last of Sal.