How’s Don? Not great, Bob
When we first meet Mad Men’s Don Draper in 1963 (his time), he’s immediately captivating: all dark, Brylcreem-ed hair, Jack Daniels-smooth voice and charmingly obnoxious self-assuredness. We’re not 45 minutes into Matt Weiner’s Emmywinning, AMC-saving series before Don is explaining that “what you call love was invented by guys like me, to sell nylons.” Before the episode is over, we are also privy to Don the womanizer, Don the hothead and Don the leader of a double life. He is, straightaway, an excellent character.
When we first meet Peggy Olsen, she’s being introduced to her new typewriter. Ponytailed and fullskirted, she keeps her shoulders tense and her eyes downcast as Joan Holloway explains to her that the technology may look intimidating, but the men who designed it made it simple enough for a woman to use. “I hope so,” Peggy all but whimpers.
Seven seasons later and it has been much of the same for and from Don: happiness continues to elude the ad man, and no amount of beautiful women, Lucky Strikes or snifters of brown liquor can change that. He’s still great at his job, and forever changing the conversation because he never likes what everyone else is saying. And now, as Mad Men prepares to premiere the first episode of its final season, we’re about to find out what ultimately becomes of the man born Dick Whitman. But it doesn’t matter or, at least, it ought to be a secondary concern. Because eight years later, it’s really all about Peggy.
While Weiner’s men continue to fall prey to their own self-laid traps, his women have led startling, nuanced trajectories that speak as much about their individual motives and conflicts as they do the challenges of being an ambitious, intelligent woman in the 1960s. Peggy has always been Don’s foil: by Season 6 she’s the one changing the conversation, having picked up on her boss’s better professional qualities and navigating around his more unsavoury ones, largely under his unofficial tutelage.
Critics have suggested that Peggy will become Don or end up with him but either outcome is as dull as it is unlikely: Weiner never puts his characters exactly where you think they’ll end up, and anyway, that’s too lucky an ending for Don and too dismal a prospect for Peggy.
That fact alone — that Peggy is now, in talent and ambition as well as strength of character, running laps around Don — is a testament to Weiner’s writing of women. It’s not just Peggy: Sally Draper is that rare fictional thing, a fully formed young person whose motives and experiences exist separately from her adult forebears; Joan is a partner at the firm and a single mother whose sexuality is powerful and proud; Betty Francis, love her or hate her, has troubled kids and a second crummy marriage and refuses complicity to both. Who cares who Don is screwing when these women are struggling so mightily and succeeding so spectacularly?
True, the tortured anti-hero is a compelling trope — it’s why we love Don and forgive him. But you can’t help but imagine that, Don or no Don, Peggy would’ve ended up as close to the top as she currently is — and who knows where she’ll be by series’ end. Because for Peggy, stasis was never an option. She walked into Sterling Cooper and she didn’t like what they were saying. And, well, you know the rest.