After the fairly ground-shaking events of "Flight One"--Pete's Dad dies! We learn the deal with Peggy's baby! Duck emerges as a full-blown Bad Guy!--I was somewhat surprised to find that "The Benefactor" was basically a standalone with only the tiniest bit of follow-up to the previous episode. But then the more I thought about it, the more I realized something: Almost all of Mad Men's "big" episodes, "Flight One" included, are basically standalones. This approach is a reversal of the main TV model of the 1990s, and proof of just how much series creator Matthew Weiner learned from working on The Sopranos.
I recently absorbed most of Maps and Legends, Michael Chabon's collection of critical essays on genre fiction, in addition to rereading Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, so I hope you'll forgive me for getting a bit academic and pin-headed here. Basically, for most of the history of television, dramas were divided into two varieties: Serials (from Peyton Place through Dallas, Dynasty, etc) and series that were basically collections of short stories about the characters (pretty much every crime/medical/science fiction series you can think of). The main similarity is that in both types of series, the characters never really changed.
Much of this has to do with the nature of the short story, the form that has arguably influenced episodic TV drama more than any other. I'm sure readers of this column will be able to come up with other examples (right now, all I'm coming up with are Ernest Hemingway and John Updike), but sequential short stories following a single protagonist are far less common in the realm of "serious" fiction than in the genre world--and genre fiction characters, like those on TV, are far less likely to experience real change.
In the 1980s, Steven Bochco began to combine the two forms of TV drama, but the process that leads us to Mad Men began in the early '90s with the arrival of Chris Carter's The X-Files and J. Michael Straczynski's Babylon 5. Both presented themselves (the latter more convincingly than the former) as novels for television, with a defined beginning, middle and ending, during which the characters would experience real change and growth. In the interest of luring in casual viewers along the way, Carter and Straczynski established a dichotomy between "mythology" or "arc" episodes--ones which solved lingering mysteries and advanced the larger plot--and entirely self-contained stories. This template was adopted by a zillion other series over the subsequent years (most notably by Buffy, Angel, Alias, Lost and Battlestar Galactica), and while it resulted in some awfully good TV, this paradigm tended to create a belief among TV fans that self-contained episodes are inherently inferior to continuity-oriented ones (with exceptions: some would argue that as the X-Files mythology spun increasingly out of control, its standalones got better and better).
The Sopranos was a highly serialized show from the beginning, and in some ways became more serialized as it went on (for evidence, look no further than the adventures of Vito Spatafore). But with the fifth episode of Season One, "College", it became clear that David Chase was trying something new--coming up with a self-contained TV episode that would change the protagonist in ways that would be evident for the series' entire run. Over the course of The Sopranos's six seasons, Tony, Uncle Jun, Carmela, Dr. Melfi, Bobby Baccalieri and Johnny Sack (in the final season's superb "Stage Five") would all receive such episodes. With each one, The Sopranos became less a crime drama and more a portrait of individuals baffled by a changing world--who in turn added up to a community baffled by a changing world. Like light, which can be both particle and wave depending on your viewpoint, The Sopranos was both a serial and a collection of shared-universe vignettes, albeit perhaps one closer to Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology than to Hemingway's Nick Adams stories or any of Updike's story cycles.
Which, finally, brings us to Mad Men. In his comments on my write-up of "Flight One," Matt Seitz praised what Matthew Weiner is doing this season and connected it to The Sopranos, but I don't think he gave Weiner enough credit for taking the David Chase approach further than Chase himself ever has. The Sopranos launched a golden age in American TV--Deadwood, The Wire, The Shield...you know the drill--but most of Chase's acolytes have been content to stick with relatively conventional serial narratives (even if shows such as The Shield took the serial in bold new directions by embracing the novel as thoroughly as Chase has the short story). Only Weiner has seen fit to fully embrace Chase's vision and offer a sort of fractal drama--one that contains conventional continuity, to be sure, but also one where the narrative model is layered rather than strictly linear, and in which it takes quite awhile (unlike with B5 or The X-Files, which wore their complexity as a badge of pride) to realize that the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
This has all been a fancy way of saying that Mad Men often feels like a collection of short stories about the characters rather than a conventional TV series. Strip away the Peggy material from last week's episode and you're left with a beauty of a short story about Pete, one in which he learns hard lessons that TV characters seldom do. Prune away Betty's activities this week and what remains is an equally fine (and equally resonant) double-helix story about Don and Harry Crane.
As its thesis, "The Benefactor" argues that artists often wind up with the patrons they deserve: Leonardo and Michelangelo got the de Medicis; a mediocre insult comic like Jimmy winds up with Utz Potato Chips. But beyond the theme lies a deeper question: Are Don and Harry artists? As Don famously told us last season, SC is "home to more failed artists and writers than the Third Reich", but despite his jokes about a novel in progress--I've always taken them as jokes, at least--we've seen little evidence of conventional artistic ambition on Don's part. The artform he specializes in isn't making the client (or, ultimately, the consumer) feel what he does, nor is it the simple art of the con. To become the advertising whiz that he is--and to transform himself from Dick Whitman into Don Draper--he had to master the art of the managed expectation. Even those who specialize in such unorthodox art forms occasionally have to suck it up and kiss their patron's ass, and that's what Don does when he takes Jimmy and Bobbi to dinner with "Mr. and Mrs Utz" (a/k/a the Schillings--it can get confusing since at one point "shilling" is used as a verb).
Who is Don's patron in this scenario? It's both Jimmy and the Schillings, to some degree, but ultimately it's SC itself, and Don clearly thinks he deserves a benefactor who better appreciates his talents--otherwise he wouldn't be slinking off to French films in the middle of the day (though by doing so, he's hardly being a slacker--as with reading Frank O'Hara, he's practicing the art of the managed expectation by attempting to acquire a level of broad cultural awareness that one wouldn't typically associate with a suit like him).
Really, Jimmy has it easy--to please his patrons, all he has to do is cough up a simple apology (and while Jimmy may use alcohol and misanthropy to justify his behavior, his instructions to the cameraman make it clear he's enough of a professional to have known what he was doing). Don has to a) sell the Schillings on Jimmy's sincerity, b) manage Jimmy's expectations by letting him think that he's both smarter than Don and has a chance with Betty, and then c) use his masculinity as a literal blunt instrument when Bobbi threatens to use contractual loopholes to exempt her husband from apologizing (Don sliding his fingers into Bobbi may or may not be a basic cable first, but it's certainly the most sexually explicit scene Mad Men has offered yet). For her part, Betty has to "merely" string Jimmy along while simultaneously keeping the Schillings charmed. At first, Betty seems nonplussed about the dinner, asking what kind of prop she's supposed to be--a speaking one or a silent one--but in the final scene she's unexpectedly happy. Like her husband, she's just paid her freight by sucking up to the people who pay for her lifestyle--and, like Don, she just did so by managing expectations. The episode ends with something we rarely get from Mad Men--a scene in which Don and Betty feel like both a real couple and a real team.
The early scenes at SC dealing with Jimmy's disastrous commercial shoot don't say much about the degree to which Don does or doesn't see himself as an artist, but they do suggest that a hell of a lot of his SC cohorts--including Roger, Duck and even Ken "Published Author" Cosgrove--see advertising purely as a business. Of course, as we learned when Paul took Peggy on a tour of the agency back at the start of Season One, the creative and accounts departments are just tiny slices of SC. The biggest department is media, a purely business department and one which thus far has only been represented by Harry Crane. Harry's an outsider in more ways than one among the junior execs--he's the only non-Ivy Leaguer among the lot, and presumably the only Midwesterner. If his department isn't particularly creative, Harry himself is--last year, he co-concieved (with Pete) the plan to lock JFK out of the TV ad market in Chicago, and this time he proves himself fairly visionary by first attempting to help out his friend at CBS and then urging the creation of a TV department at SC (that they don't already have one certifies dinosaur status).
But Harry clearly doesn't have the patron he deserves--if he did, the promotion would have come directly from Bert Cooper instead of being handled by Roger. When Roger offers Harry $225 a week, you just know he'd have given Harry $240 or $250 if he'd come back with a counteroffer instead of meekly ending the negotiations prematurely. Harry's wife, like Betty, takes pride in her husband sticking up for himself, likewise not knowing the whole story. What they both fail to realize about their husbands (as does Bobbi) is that being an artist--and obtaining the patron an artist deserves--requires as much balls as it does talent; while their spouses may not be entirely lacking in testicular fortitude, they haven't mastered the knack of summoning it when it's most needed.
Miscellaneous Notes: Not too much to touch on this time around, though there are some interesting casting notes. I've been a big fan of Patrick Fischler ever since his genius back-to-back bit parts in Mulholland Dr. and Ghost World, so it was a big treat to see him in the meaty role of a second string Rat Packer obviously based in part on Don Rickles (if you don't know Fischler from his movie roles, you surely recognize him from his guest spots on everything from Girlfriends and Veronica Mars to Burn Notice and all three CSIs). And while her blond hair was hidden by her riding helmet (and the role, curiously, is not yet on her IMDB page), Betty's equestrian buddy is played by none other than Denise Crosby, a/k/a Lt. Tasha Yar of Star Trek: The Next Generation. And while Mad TV alumnae Christa Flanagan obviously impressed Weiner--otherwise Lois wouldn't have resurfaced as Don's secretary before getting fired this week--she had better well turn up elsewhere at SC; if she was fired both in real life as well as on camera, that'd be just too fucking cruel. The return of the Belle Jolie Lipstick executive, too, was a pleasant surprise; I'm sure I can't be the only fan who ID'd him by his voice before we even got a look at his face.
As to the story about the episode of The Defenders, most of it is true: As the New York Times reported on April 9, 1962, CBS was left high and dry when the series' three regular sponsors--Brown & Williamson tobacco, Lever Bros. and Kimberly-Clark (the latter two are mentioned by Harry's friend)--bailed on the abortion-themed episode, which wound up airing as scheduled on April 28, 1962. Since next week's episode spans most of April, everything lines up with the calendar just about perfectly. According to a 1997 Times article about Showtime's, er, abortive 1999 revival of The Defenders, the episode was ultimately sponsored by a watch company (unspecified in the article) which bought up all the ad time for pennies on the dollar. Despite the controversy, an article at the Museum of Broadcast Communication says audience response to the episode was 90% positive. The Defenders wound up running until 1965 and was later folded into the same continuity as Boston Legal (and a zillion other series) when David E. Kelley retconned a guest character played by William Shatner into having been a young Denny Crane. My one question: Did Weiner et al leave out clips featuring Robert Reed because there were none that fit, or because they didn't want viewers to laugh archly upon getting a glimpse of the young Mike Brady?
Andrew Johnston is the television critic for Time Out New York.
Even his performance couldn't save what was a pretty bad episode. And I'm speaking in relation to other episodes. I love the show with a passion, but felt tonight's was pretty bad (and no Pete
Does anyone know the title of the French film that Don was at in this episode? It looked like something Chris Marker or Alain Resnais may have directed.
Josh: I disagree completely. In fact I thought this was the sharpest Season Two episode so far — on point in every subplot and scene, with a solid dozen "keeper" lines. ("I miss the blacklist," being one; "We all work for somebody" being another). It also did that "Sopranos" thing of organizing all the subplots around a particular idea or question (in this case, "What are you worth?") but without hammering on it so hard that it took you out of the episode. (At least it didn't take me out.) Even the pop culture references were on-point but not too obvious — the comic asking Don, "Weren't you in Gentleman's Agreement", which points up Draper's look and performance (he's like a worn down, sold-out Gregory Peck) and his imposter status (in Agreement, Peck is a Gentile posing as a Jew).
Bottom line: Loved it. Will probably watch it again right now.
My only complaint, oddly, has to do with a couple of the performances. Fischler was superb in the dinner table scene, but I didn't buy him as somebody funny (which is weird because he's been genuinely funny in other roles). And the guy who played the riding partner (was that the guy who starred in Allison Anders' "Things Behind the Sun"?) didn't really click for me until the second half of the stable scene.
It was "La Jette", wasn't it?
I think it was "La Jetee," although I'm hesitant to declare that because we only saw it in medium or long shot, and my TV's not big enough to read the subtitles. But it looked like the part that's a "Vertigo" reference — which could be another great double-duty pop culture shout-out, since "La Jetee" is about a man trying to re-experience or re-capture a memory only to be destroyed by it, and "Vertigo" is another imposter story.
I loved it was well, for similar reasons as Matt already mentions.
I was thinking the film was Hiroshima mon amour (1959), the still of the hand silhouette makes me think of it, to be specific (one of the interesting flashback scenes from the film). Not sure how it's related to the theme, but watching the one of the first French Wave films certainly works as an extension of Don looking at "different ways to think of things" (Duck's push from episode 2.01,) like Meditations in an Emergency.
Worst episode yet. What a mess.
It started to remind me of the last season of 'Friday Night Lights.'
An extremely upsetting, powerful episode – the last 20 minutes or so (Don's confrontation with Bobbie Barrett outside the bathroom, Jimmy Barrett's humiliating moves on Betty, the subsequent car scene) were some of the most emotionally raw television I've seen in a long time.
I loved the fact that the first half of the episode was The Harry Crane Show – one of my favorite characters and an underutilized player in the first season.
I thought it was a good episode and moved the storylines along just fine.
Some thoughts.
- I don't care how much of a dolt he may be, it was a bit of a stretch to believe that Harry would be so crazy to see Ken's paycheck that he'd just sloppily rip it open without thinking about how to reseal it (heck, even Lucy Ricardo would know that)
- As I suspected last week, Peggy's new hobby, horses, is a substitute for sex. I loved it when Don demonstrated Peggy's advice to Jimmy about pulling back on the bridle
on Bobbie Barrett (using her hair instead) AND it worked
- Enjoyed how they worked The Defenders into the plot — wished the chosen scenes had included Robert (Bob) Reed as well.
- At one point during the meeting with the lipstick company, someone mentions how content "warnings" before programs only make people MORE interested. Which struck me as a little in-joke because of Mad Men's own warning before each episode.
One interesting thing about last night's episode (just very quickly): Don Draper doesn't even appear onscreen until almost 10 minutes in (I actually checked the clock: it was 10.09pm when they finally showed him lounging around the cinema). It was a pretty clever way of highlighting how disconnected he is from his environment, I thought.
Off-topic: the Season 1 recaps are not easily findable from the front page. Tagging them "Mad Men" would be helpful to people (like me) who want to go back and catch up.
Have to agree with Matt on this. Loved the episode but felt a bit taken out by Fischler. I suppose he was supposed to be a send-up of a Don Rickles type, but unlike Rickles he had no endearing qualities. I just found him completely unbelievable. his performance really wasn't funny either, his technically poor and rushed comic delivery made the already stressed one-liners completely painful to watch. Not sure why they chose Fischler.
it reminded me of something i thought about with the character of Salvatore. Salvatore is a bit too obviously gay in all his mannerisms to fool anyone, even in 1962. is the blunt obviousness of his characterization intentional?
with the comic, he was just too much of an unlikeable ass to be anywhere near as famous and beloved as he was said to be. just didnt see these types of mis-characterizations (if that is the right term) on the sopranos.
oh, and matt, thanks for noticing the title of my blog last week. a brilliant bit of inspiration on my part, if i may say so.
Best episode yet this season…can't wait to watch it again tonight!
RE: Matt zoller's word up
oh, i thought the french film was one of those early louis malle documentaries – but i think you all prove me wrong.
regarding matt's inclination towards the one-liners: i loved slattery's amused/despairing throw-away: "I miss the fifties."
This is my favourite episode so far!
I loved the contrast between Betty's "sang froid" flirting with Ponyboy and Don's voilently agreesvive bending of Jimmy's wife – the episode's climax.
One important observation I left out of the recap by accident: The controversial episode of The Defenders was also titled "The Benefactor".
Andrew's recap is up, y'all, and worth the wait.
Chris-
I've tagged all of Andrew's Mad Men Season 1 recaps. Sorry for the problems in locating them. I'm going through the old posts whenever I can to tag 'em appropriately. Thanks for bearing with.
I am stuck on the movie that Don was watching when we first saw him. I'm not sure it was La Jetee. A woman narrator was reading a Francois Villon poem called "Ballade des Dames de Temps Jadis" (Ballad of Ladies of Ancient Times). The stanza that we hear:
" Queen Blanche, light as a lily,
who sang with a mermaid's voice,
Bertha Bigfoot, Beatrice, Alice,
Arembourg, heiress to Maine,
and Joan the good maid of Lorraine
whom the English griddled at Rouen;
where are they, where, O Sovereign Virgin?
Where are the snows of yesteryear?"
Does anyone know what movie Don was watching?
Hey, Andrew–
Lots to chew on here. I particularly like your likening the dramatics of "Mad Men" to light in that it can be a particle or a wave depending on how you view it; I plan to use that line the next time I get in an argument with somebody about the creative possibilities inherent in series TV as opposed to feature films.
Reading that section of your piece, I was reminded of my own "Eureka" moment as a TV viewer, the episode of "Hill Street Blues" that involved the neighborhood's mob uprising against suspects accused of raping a nun; the police captain, Frank Furillo, made a climactic decision that forced a conclusion while violating pretty much any ethical consideration he was theoretically supposed to observe as a police officer. I'd never seen a series lead do something so despicable (in terms of both personal honor and professionalism); Archie Bunker said deplorable things, but "All in the Family" always made sure you knew he was a decent guy at heart, and soap villains such as J.R. Ewing on "Dallas" were clearly marked as "bad guy" or "antihero," to a very melodramatic extent, so that there was no possibility of your seeing too much of yourself in him. But Furillo had a touch of Don Draper about him. He was fundamentally decent and had a moral code, but you weren't sure where the parameters lay, and he kept doing and saying things that cast his trustworthiness and dependability into doubt, plus there was a certain coldness, a controlling quality (linked to his status as a recovering alcoholic), that rendered him essentially unreachable and unknowable. This unknowability was key.
That character was the seed from which so many great subsequent TV protagonists would flower: Tony Soprano, Vin Mackey, Stringer Bell, Jimmy McNulty, Al Swearengen and Seth Bullock and so much of the "Deadwood" gang, and on and on. It was an amazing object lesson (not just for me, the young impressionable viewer, but probably for the industry as a whole) that as long as a character was psychologically compelling, it really didn't matter if he was likable. I thought of that episode (which was written, not coincidentally, by David Milch) while watching that appalling scene with Don near the end of the episode, basically a sexual assault (with overtones of sadomasochistic invitation — maybe this is another, veiled Ayn Rand reference in a show filled with them? It reminded me of the punishment sex scene in "The Fountainhead"). What is this man capable of? We don't really know. We don't really know Don, and Don doesn't really know himself. He's pretending to be somebody else. Who was he, in between Korea and now? What happened to him? What did he do to himself and others? He's a stranger to us and to himself (to paraphrase a favorite Milch observation about his own Seth Bullock).
The structure of the show (which, you're right, is in some ways a refinement of lessons Weiner learned on "The Sopranos") makes such characterizations possible. Maybe we need to explore this in more detail in another roundtable podcast (Alan, are you reading this, and if so, are you game?) but the neither-fish-nor-fowl, it's a short story/it's a novel structure really frees up storytellers to make the characters extensions of/emblems of their time and place without denying them specificity. One of the complaints among people who aren't fans of "Mad Men" is, "They're an entitled, conservative, white-male-dominated culture on a collision course with the sixties–got it, don't need to see anymore" is not really tuned in to what Weiner is doing. If that were all he was up to, I doubt he would have even bothered making a series with these characters set in this time and place. I suspect he's after something darker and more mysterious, something tied into the intersection of personal psychology and social change: more Philip Roth, perhaps even more Albert Camus, than anything we've seen on series drama; a show which explores the systematic dismantling of and destruction of the authentic self, and its replacement by manufactured images and feelings, the very images and feelings Don Draper is so adept at creating. A show can't go to those intellectual/emotional places without the freedom afforded by the endlessly flexible, simultaneously open/closed, static/forward-moving, micro/macro structure you've described in this article.
Great episode, and I always enjoy it again after I read The House Next Door and the comments, you know your television
Whoa–the Defender's episode was also titled The Benefactor? Where else would I learn that, but here.
Re: The movie Don was watching: I wonder if it was this. It was an episode of "CBS Playhouse," which ties into this episode's CBS connection and also explains why he was able to watch it in the middle of the day and he was virtually alone in a small theater — maybe it was a screening room?
A couple of comments:
- I'm sorry, but that "You're so sad" line in the stable scene was so campily melodramatic that it had me chuckling.
- I thought that quick cut to Peggy while they were screening The Defenders episode was a bit too obvious. I would have preferred keeping to the wider shot showing the whole table. You could glean more than enough about her character's reaction when the lights went back and she was maintaining that professional facade, though letting it slip just a little when she slightly hesitates when she answers about whether women would like the show.
- I would have been far more interested in seeing someone much sharper and more ambitious than Crane (Peggy, for instance) getting the measly crumb of Head of Television Department and spinning that into the most profitable arm of SC. I just can't picture Crane using this as anything more than a title on a business card.
- For some reason, Don's firing/demotion of his secretary reminded a lot of what Tony Soprano would do in a situation like that i.e. getting caught in a lie and taking it out on some innocent random underling.
Denise Crosby is the trainer, not the riding buddy.
We're 23 comments into this thread and no one's nominated "My people are Nordic" as the episode's best line? C'mon!