THE DON OF A NEW ERA
Mad Men recaps ensure no action goes by unnoticed.
If Mad Men is not actually the most carefully designed, intricately layered, psychologically dense show in the history of television, we have at least all decided to treat it like that. AMC may have given its zombie series its own postshow chat session, but that is only because in the case of Mad Men, it would be redundant: From the instant one of Matthew Weiner’s episode-defining historical song choices takes us to the credits, the Internet is flooded with enough critical discussion of SC&P to keep a 24-hour news network’s schedule packed to the gills.
Most of that comes in the form of the online episode recap, the day-after dissection of the series that has reached grad-seminar heights with don draper and co. When Mad Men first started, in 2007, the thinking was that the availability of dVd box sets was going to change how television was appreciated, with next-day water-cooler chatter replaced by longer-form appreciation of a show’s arcs, bends and drawn-out themes.
The ideal model was The Wire, a sometimes glacially slow, careful show that, when viewed in large, obsessive chunks — as it was by almost everyone who now appreciates it, since its ratings pretty much stunk — revealed itself to be a carefully built diorama of American decay.
That option still exists, obviously, and there are even some shows that are probably better watched this way — Game of Thrones, with its cast of millions, springs to mind. But instead of the longform, essayistic appraisals of entire seasons (or even runs) that that was supposed to entail, we have essayistic, longform appraisals of individual episodes, picking apart everything from body language to background images; it’s the equivalent of standing around the water cooler with Marcel Proust.
No show suits this dissection quite as well as Mad Men, which, even in its first season, before this madness was widespread, is impeccably intricate in characterization and design. There is a plot, of course, but it is frequently background to how these people deal with one another, or at least what’s happening around them. On top of that, symbolism and signifiers are layered into every scene — when they’re not overwhelming the action entirely, as in episodes like this season’s “The Crash,” a 45-minute fever dream of television. On some shows, there is nothing to do but recap twists and turns; as has been pointed out in some of the recaps, every episode of Mad Men is like a short story, waiting for us to pull apart its characters and themes.
This can occasionally go too far, as seen by some of the more outlandish conspiracy theories that popped up this year. One popular theory held that Megan draper might be dead; the other wondered about the secret of Bob Benson, with the more enterprising suggesting he might be a G-man out to get don. Mad Men has had its twists, certainly, but even before the much more mundane reality was revealed, these felt like almost paranoid ramblings, picking up Biblical prophecies by reading every third letter of the Psalms backwards, or something. But it’s not really surprising that people start finding odd patterns when we’re already pulling apart every line.
Occasional misfires aside, though, it’s hard to take issue with this kind of close reading. Though there’s something to be said for taking the longer view of a show — for instance, the mid-season criticism that don and the show were stagnating seems a bit misguided now that that’s been revealed as one of the points of the season — only good things can come from this much attention. Audiences gain a more full appreciation for something they like already, and might even get exposed to ways of watching television that they never considered. Creators know that no frame will go unnoticed, which should give them more ammo for creative freedom and control, and a stricter sense of what is good enough to make the final cut.
The only issue for all considered, actually, is finding enough time to read it all.