No Time for Television!: Mad Men Recapped

I've been trying to get one of my friends to listen to The Hold Steady for the past four years. We have very similar tastes in music, so in my mind I can't imagine him not liking a band that seems to combine everything we like into one package. And so I do what every good friend tries to do when they want to get someone involved: saturation. I've burned him CDs, sent him articles about the band, clips from their performances on Letterman; basically, I've given the full court press.

Last week, I was talking to him and The Hold Steady came up. Again. Only this time, he brought them up: "I *might* like The Hold Steady. I don't want to, but some songs have been backstabbing in my head."

"I don't want to."

I couldn't even fault him for saying that. The acceptance of new ideas, cultural trends, changes in the routine--that part of our brain slowly starts to erode as we get older. It's like how children can learn a language much easier than I can. Personally, I don't think it's because a child is smarter than me (though that is certainly debatable), but rather, because I don't really care to learn another language.

To put it another way: I don't want to.

Don Draper doesn't want to either.

The second season of Mad Men kicked off last night with an episode that would rank as one of the better Sopranos episodes from the last three seasons (that fills my contractual obligation to mention the David Chase show at least once in this piece.) The first season of the AMC non-hit concerned itself with more linear narrative pursuits: Who is Don Draper and what secret life is he hiding? Will Betty Draper find out that Don cheats on her? Is Peggy really pregnant?

But free from the constraints of "will we get picked up," Matthew Weiner has clearly pushed his baby towards something less tangible. The second season seems poised to ask the unanswerable questions: What makes us happy? Is this all there is?

For the length of the episode, Don walks around in a fog that only seems barely augmented by his five drink a day alcohol habit. At 36, he's still considered wildly successful--job, kids, beautiful wife, house. But you can read on his face the misery he feels each moment. This season takes places a little less than two years after the first season, but amazingly Don looks like he's aged ten years with worry and consternation.

When Roger Sterling (John Slattery, excellent while building an entire performance around the term "slightly buzzed") tells Don that some of the clients think the agency needs to inject some younger blood into the mix, Don scoffs and slams the idea with comments that basically amount to "kids, what do they know?"

Jon Hamm was wonderfully simple and outstanding in season one: an archetype of 1950s male machismo, but with a dark undercurrent. As an actor, he displays a mean streak that separates him from George Clooney. If Clooney is like Cary Grant in North by Northwest, Hamm is like Grant in Notorious. You're not quite sure you know where he's coming from. Like the show though, Hamm doesn't seem complacent in just recreating the beats from the first season. He looks poised to surpass the already great work he's put in. Hamm's Draper is sullen, sad and angry that his life is changing beyond his control--his health, job and marriage, things he used to be king of, are slipping away. While watching, I was reminded of Jack Lemmon in Glengarry Glen Ross playing up the last gasps of a once great man. If Don Draper ends up like Shelley "The Machine" Levine, I wouldn't be at all surprised.

Even the roles in his marriage have begun to shift uncomfortably. When Betty slinks down the stairs at the Hotel Savoy on Valentine's Day (a shot that would have made Hitchcock green with envy), she should be the embodiment of what every male would want. But later on, in bed, Don can't even get it up. Literally. And with the exception of a cryptic package that he sends at the end of the episode, it seems like Don can't even find time in his self wallow to have an affair or two.

Meanwhile, Betty is in the midst of what looks like a new found independence streak--lying to her husband when her car breaks down and at least offering the idea of a sexual encounter to the mechanic that fixed her fan belt (nyuck, nyuck.) But, she is still very child like and naive, lying to herself and friends about what she really is. When Don sexually malfunctioned, he and Betty sat and watched Jackie Kennedy's tour of the White House. But later, when Betty's friend asked her if she saw it, Betty, with a wicked grin, told her they had "no time for television!" Betty and Don spent the entire first season like trains passing in the night, and it looks like they're in for more of the same in season two. Don on his way down, Betty on her way up.

And boy is Don on the way down. As the episode closes, Don quotes a passage from Frank O'Hara's Meditations in an Emergency: "Now I am quietly waiting for / the catastrophe of my personality / to seem beautiful again, / and interesting, and modern."

As the 60s barrel forward, I think Don is going to find himself doing a lot of waiting.