By Lars Trodson
The 17 Emmy nominations given to “Mad Men” for it’s fifth season
is a gift from the television gods. This is a show that has only been around
for five short seasons (13 episodes a year) and it derailed almost completely
in the middle of the fourth season after a wobbly third. We won’t go into the
fifth season here because a lot of you are probably waiting to see it on DVD. I
hope the Emmy nods gives a kick to the writers, because they need it.
The second half of the 1960s was bad enough without these people
ruining it all over again.
This is not, by the way, a good show to watch on DVD. There’s too
much human rot and soullessness to take in all at once. Back-to-back viewings
(as I’ve done) also highlight the shows flaws, which primarily have to do with
a lack of definition for any of the main characters and a grave inconsistency
in tone.
I know, I know. You’re going to tell me that Don Draper has no
character, that even he doesn’t know who he is. Maybe so, but the scene in
which a prostitute slaps him during sex came so far out of left field it was
almost laughable. What were we supposed to think? That Draper hates himself?
Well, almost everything written about his character before showed that he was
in fact quite self-satisfied -- even self-loving. This was an act of desperation
by a writer that didn’t know where to go. I don’t think old Don has been
slapped since.
Who is Peggy Olson anyway? A woman wrestling with her religion,
or is she a bohemian wild child who’s not afraid to strip in front of a
co-worker whom she obviously dislikes? In real life we can be many things, of
course, but the problem here is that this is fiction. We need a center, and
Peggy has no center. One minute she’s taking charge, and the next she’s
quivering in the corner. Or she’s sleeping with a guy from the bar, or with
Duck. That nascent hippy party that she went to in the village was so weirdly
staged that it didn’t look too much different than anything Maynard G. Krebs might
have gone to.
The only two characters that seemed remotely made of flesh and
bone were Roger Sterling and Joan Holloway Harris. But the writers committed an
act of murder on Roger Sterling in the fourth season that was so awful that it
should go down in the annals of character butchery. Roger is certainly a cad,
he’s worse than that. He’s also a drunk. But he also seemed fearless. So when
the writers had him hide out in a hotel after the Lucky Strike account dropped
him you actually didn’t feel bad for Roger Sterling, you felt bad for the
actor, the great John Slattery, who had to have known he was being knifed in
the front.
Just as Roger is going through his paroxysms of self-doubt, Don
Draper (Jon Hamm) all of sudden decides to sop drinking and become a
philosopher. He’s writing down his thoughts in a notebook! Like an artist in a
cold garret, punishing himself for his dream.
Nothing about Don Draper seems terribly deep, and I’m afraid that
this isn’t helped by the fact that Hamm is an actor of modest talent. I’m being
kind. He has about two expressions, one of which is pulling his bottom lip
inward as though he’s about to cry. Don Draper musing is not something I want
to spend a lot of time listening to.
A few moments later, Joan comes swinging into the office. I
actually cheered. But by then I knew the love affair was almost over.
