Mad Men becomes Sad Men
“There’s something happening here/What it is, ain’t exactly clear.”
That brooding lyric from Buffalo Springfield hasn’t popped up yet on the soundtrack for season six of Mad Men, but don’t be surprised if it does.
Not only would it be an apt mood setter for the period of upset and upheaval from 1968 that the awardwinning series is currently examining, but it also accurately reflects a certain malaise coming from the show’s followers.
It was a bit worrying when the season premiere on April 7 attracted 3.4 million viewers, down from 3.5 million for the similar slot in the season before, but what truly became upsetting is when the numbers immediately hurtled downwards, reaching 2.3 million for the April 28 episode.
There’s also been a lot of discontent from viewers and critics alike, calling the initial episodes of this season “blandly disappointing” or “unduly depressing” and, quite frankly, it’s hard to blame them.
When creator Matt Weiner started the season out with his antihero, Don Draper, sitting on a Hawaiian beach for a vacation and settling in to read the opening of Dante’s Inferno, the thought that went through my mind was, “Yeah, I get it, Weiner. Draper’s heading to hell. But couldn’t you lay the irony on a bit more lightly?”
Obviously not. The entire look of Mad Men, Season 6, is dark, claustrophobic, forbidding. We’re in a world of stygian murk and despair that Hieronymus Bosch might have found excessive, which manages to make even luxurious suburban homes and elegant Manhattan restaurants seem like dirty places.
Now, it’s true that that could be the very point, since America is falling to pieces and will continue to do so throughout 1968. The year was not the nation’s finest, with the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the riots at the Chicago Democratic Convention, the increasingly toxic war in Vietnam and the ultimate election of Richard Nixon to the presidency.
Single calendar years don’t get much bleaker on the historical landscape, and as an American college student back then, I remember it all too vividly.
But what I also recall was the astonishing disconnect between everyday American life and the political realities that surrounded us. Peter Max was loading fashion and art with day-glo colours, mindless comedy shows like Laugh-In filled our nights and mindless sentimental garbage like “Honey” and “Little Green Apples” claimed a lot of radio air time.
Weiner has seemed to forget that, and his previous ability to blend history and personal experience so skillfully is gone. I humbly submit from personal experience that not all of New York City was as profoundly shaken by the assassination of Martin Luther King as Weiner would indicate. I’m not proud of that fact, but it was true.
It also seems like practically everyone on Mad Men is being plunged into a world of joyless and tawdry affairs, including Draper’s inexplicable liaison with his neighbour’s wife, played by Linda Cardellini, better known as Lindsay Weir from Freaks and Geeks.
This is the penultimate season of Mad Men and one wants to believe that Weiner is trying to steer us towards a final resolution with the bleakness of his current vision. I just keep waiting for it to hit bottom so we can feel something akin to the great line from King Lear: “The worst is not, so long as we can say, ‘This is the worst.’”
In the meantime, Weiner should listen to Buffalo Springfield: “There’s battle lines being drawn/ Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong.”