It’s not news that since it became apparent that as a result of contractual wrangling Mad Men’s hiatus—that industry term for ‘time off’—would be markedly longer than usual a particular buzz has been building around its return. There has been an amplification of anticipation that’s reached a register above and beyond that which greets the always-troublesome latest season. I mention all of this, which we already know, only because I believe it’s key to my ambivalent response to, not the anticipation of Mad Men’s return, but that return’s actualisation in this ninety minutes of television.
The eighteen-month gap in between this season of Mad Men and the last demands from both television artist and audience a talent for bridging, a demand that exceeds those made by most other instances of serial television’s continual new beginnings. I had refused to re-familiarise myself with the end of the fourth season, to pick its moods and energies and problems up off the floor of my memory, to bring them with me to try and join up this new, next episode of Mad Men with that old, last one. I wanted to test the series, to see if it could meet the challenge of my distance from its moods and moves and the forms of responsiveness they demand. I wanted to see if, through sheer force of its designs, the episode could elicit my welcome of it by moving me to involuntarily accommodate whatever demands were made of me by its eventual form.
This logic of mutual demands made by episode and audience means that the fact of my initially deep ambivalence towards the episode can’t, shouldn’t, be put down—as I was for days inclined to do—to simple artistic failure. Perhaps the failure I thought I had found at the episode’s close was not so much the episode’s, but more deeply my own. In hindsight the episode offered a plethora of moments that spoke quietly and elegantly of sweeping and drastic personal, professional, and social change in the making. (In addition to the two bookends by which the Civil Rights movement encroaches on SCDP, I’m thinking of Joan’s involvement in motherhood, of Pete and Trudy’s new space in the suburbs, and of Roger and Pete’s professional skirmishes.) Given this hindsight sense of importance, my unresponsiveness to many of these moments (my not knowing how to respond?) should be attributed to more than just their particular handling in that instant of the show.[1] I have a sense instead that my capacity to meet the episode with the attentive flexibility we must offer to any new aesthetic object, especially one with a long history like Mad Men, was exceeded by that demanded of me by the episode Weiner and Co. chose to make. As a defensive manoeuvre against this exposure of my inadequacy by the episode, I retreated into immediate scepticism and dismissal; the show thus didn’t stand a
chance, and consequently the season’s future looked limp and tiresome.
Yet one moment animated me sufficiently to stimulate more thinking than this easy dismissal. A choice was made to cut from Don and Meagan’s troubling post-coital conversation in which apparently satisfied wants (the carpet) mutually deceive, to Pete, basking in his light of triumph, a light allowed by the window of his new office, the spoils of the less petty of two battles won in his simmering war with the subtly diminishing Roger. It immediately struck me that we were being asked to take the scene of Don’s power-struggle sex with Meagan, not as being a matter of imagination—the scene is definitely real—but that we should take its content of spontaneous, unembarrassed, but ambiguously and dangerously charged sex in a modern space within Manhattan as a point of imaginative fixation in Pete’s mind, one that strangely, perversely, psychically binds him to Don, one that fractures the apparently unified, unreflective self-image of Pete in a manner not dissimilar to Don’s own fractured and isolating self.
Multiple and rich points of connection and resonance arose over time between this reading of that moment and other moments of the show that I more easily passed over as obvious. The achievement of the episode came to seem, not fully satisfying, but richer and more compelling than my initial, immediate experience had been. We might see in this otherwise self-indulgent autobiography a dramatisation of what a more adequate disposition and response to the show might be: one in which we don’t expect it all to add up just right now, one in which we let the achievement of just this moment be, right now, good enough, on its own terms. I’m reminded here of Jason Jacobs’ comments regarding the difficulty of the pilot episode of Luck (pilot episodes facing a similar but not identical challenge to those facing series returns). Jacobs writes that, although we may struggle with the lack of concessions a show makes of us, we should not fight too hard against a show’s difficult expectations: “[W][e will live into it. Understanding the show is less important than cleaving to its moods and ways of binding as well as repelling us (that is, repelling in order to bind us even tighter to it).”[2]
Whether the sense of promise I gained from the moments of “A Little Kiss” which worked in hindsight—the sense of reassurance I have that the season will show me how to “cleave to its moods and ways of binding as well as repelling”—will be met or will hold up in the episodes and the times to come is for now no matter of mine or ours. For the first episode of a new season of television the achievement of promise and of reassurance is all that matters.
[1] That said, I’m also not giving out free passes: many of the early scenes at SCDP struck me as manifesting in the fabric of the episode the writers’, the actors’, everybody’s ‘first day back’ disorientation, in a way similar to the evidence manifested after the first episode of Breaking Bad’s fourth season of the struggles that series’ writers experienced undoing the claustrophobia of its third season; the disorientation I’m trying to talk about in the Mad Men episode is distinct from the deliberate disorientation it so successfully fosters in the initial scenes at Young & Rubicam, Don’s new house, Pete’s train ride.
[2] Jason Jacobs, “Witnessing Excellence in David Milch’s Luck,” Critical Studies in Television Online
