With AMC’s Mad Men returning this week, we look ahead to what we’d like to see more of in season 5…
Mad Men’s season 5 promos strutted onto our tellies with a list of words: style, confidence, secrecy, debauchery, lust, deception... nouns that, with a little fiddling, could be made into Seven Dwarfs-style names for Don, Peggy, Joan, Pete, Roger et al. Except of course that one of the joys of Mad Men is that none of its characters can be summed up in a word; they’re Russian dolls, they’re hateful yet sympathetic, they’re despicable but magnetic. And much more importantly: they’re back.
Away from our screens since October 2010 while showrunner Matthew Weiner tussled with the network over budget and episode length (thankfully, he won), the superlative Mad Men returns this week for its fifth season, and here’s our wish list for the episodes to come…
Season four ended in October 1965, but it’s not so far been Weiner’s style to pick up a new series exactly where he left off. Orienting yourself in the first episode of a new Mad Men season is now something of a tradition, having to extrapolate how much time has passed by comparing haircuts and seeing how tall Bobby Draper’s gotten.
The post-1965 period brings with it a number of possibilities for the show, chief amongst them being the Vietnam War, anti-Vietnam protests and the draft, though race-riots, Thunderball, Reagan’s burgeoning political career, the first Rolling Stone magazine and (for Lane Pryce perhaps), England’s World Cup football victory could all get a look-in.
In season one she did the twist, in season three she declared, “My name is Peggy Olsen and I want to smoke some marijuana”, and in season four she fell in with a group of arty, politicised hipsters. Following that trajectory, by season seven Peggy should be a Woodstock flowerchild wearing nothing but nipple paint, but before she gets there, we’d like to see more of counter-culture Peggy, specifically seeing her reconcile her position as an evil ad writer amongst her group of revolutionary friends.
Also on the wish list for Peggy is a continuation of the entente she and Joan reached by the end of the last season (what a formidable pair, and no, I’m not talking about Joan’s… oh never mind), and a few more scenes of her saving the company at a pitch and leaving the boys behind in her wake.
Think back a little. How many of those ground-breaking presidential speeches Sam and Toby wrote in The West Wing did we actually hear? A line or two maybe, and some post-applause dissection, but never the whole thing.
Mad Men stands apart from series like it by actually showing the work done at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. The scenes are littered with storyboards, print and TV ads for Sugarberry Ham, Glo-Coat floor wax or Patio Diet Cola, alongside real ads from the period. It wouldn't be the same without them.
If only Esther Rantzen’s ChildLine had existed in the early sixties, perhaps little Sally Beth Draper could have benefitted from a friendly ear in the darkest days of her childhood, but sadly, poor Sally’s only confidante is creepy Glen.
Last season saw Sally engage in a self-administered haircut and some public self-abuse (well, who could blame her, The Man from U.N.C.L.E's Illya Kuryakin is sex on a blonde stick), so heavens knows what she’ll be up to now she’s a pre-teen. One positive repercussion of Don’s snap-decision to propose to his secretary is the potential good Megan ‘Maria Von Trapp’ Calvet could do for troubled Sally.
Call me cruel, but there is something intriguing about watching little Sally Draper being slowly transformed from child into ticking time bomb. Let’s just hope the series is still around in about 1970, to catch the fall-out from her inevitable explosion.
Now that Lucky Strike has left SCDP in the lurch, there’s no reason (apart from the company’s impending bankruptcy) that art director Sal can’t return to the fold. At the very least, we’d love to see Peggy run into Sal at a ‘happening’ to find him now a happily out movie director running with the Cassavetes crowd and entertaining everyone with his Ann-Margret impression.
This being Mad Men though, a show notoriously stingy with its happy endings, Peggy’s much more likely to trip over Sal slumped on the floor shooting up in the Stonewall Inn...
Not only does Roger Sterling gets all the best sardonic quips and one-liners in Mad Men, he’s also the author of a memoir startling in its self-obsession (and in its revelations about Ida Blankenship’s youthful, ahem, passions): Sterling’s Gold. I don’t know about you, but I could stand a second instalment of Sterling’s maudlin rich boy navel-gazing.
From the witty: Peggy responding to the statement, “Your boyfriend doesn’t own your vagina” with a quick retort worthy of a copywriter, “No, but he’s renting it.” Closely matched by Don’s comment to Pete that “Sterling Cooper has more failed artists and intellectuals than the Third Reich”.
To the visionary: Bert Cooper’s eulogy for Mrs Blankenship “She was born in 1898 in a barn, she died on the 37th floor of a skyscraper. She’s an astronaut”
And the wildly metaphorical: Don’s comment about the mouse in The Suitcase, that “There’s a way out of this room we don’t know about”. You said it, man.
We’ve had the photocopier excitement of season two and the vending machine of season four, so we’re thinking it must almost be time for… the Xerox Magnatax Telecopier! “Mail letters over the phone”, its 1966 ads proudly declared (the verb ‘to fax’ being a recent addition perhaps?).
Imagine the possibilities: Don could still fax the office taglines even when he’s on his annual lost month in California, Pete could fax entitled “Why me?” whines to fellow Dartmouth alumni and Joan could fax overseas hubby Greg baby pictures: “Huh, he’s got an awful lot of silver hair for a 3 month old…”
Someone to watch an episode of The Twilight Zone and/or Star Trek
Star Trek made its debut on US TV in 1966, so technically season five would be perfect timing for a Trek-episode (we’re thinking Glen or Sally might become fans?), while it’d have to be a re-run of The Twilight Zone if my calculations are correct.
Who didn’t watch Conrad Hilton’s season three Mad Men speeches about building something meaningful without thinking of the somewhat less-wholesome modern legacy being left by the hotelier’s granddaughter?
The power of Mad Men has long been its ability to comment on modern society through the veil of the 1960s, not to mention the steady drip-drip-drip of dramatic irony running through its scripts. One of the show’s best tricks is to have its audience look depressively from then to now and ask ourselves, what’s really changed?
Advertising is based on happiness according to Don Draper, so it’s ironic he’s granted precious little of it by the show’s writers. Season four in particular showed Don not as a suave Bond-figure but alone, drunk, and fading into irrelevancy. Like many of the men around him, Don’s alcoholism and failed marriage had caught up with him for a season-long hangover.
Could the rug-pull executed in the season finale, which saw Don drop Dr Faye in favour of secretary Megan, finally mean happiness for Draper? Cynical though it sounds, I’m afraid I’m with Joan and Peggy on this one.
Oddly, this is a request that came from my husband. I’ve decided not to pursue the matter.
Mad Men returns to AMC at 9pm on Sunday March 25th and comes Sky Atlantic at 9pm on March 27th.
