-Ginsberg gets an unpleasant departure
Do not be alarmed. This season of Mad Men has been nearly as strong as all the others preceding it, quite the impressive feat when you consider the show is in its seventh season and, since the first, has been hailed as one of the best television shows of all time. Each episode has been denser than your average Mad Men episode while still retaining the slow-burn subtlety and soapy dramatics that initially pulled me - and many others - into it creative aura. Matt Weiner and his team have done the unthinkable - make a show under their terms, never seem to change their attitudes of what their show could - and should - be. Despite its success critically, it has never felt like a series that would cater to the audience's wants, instead delving into some storylines so baffling it might act to push people away - but alas, here it remains, and always will be - an important part of television history.
Why I fear for the show, however, has to do with AMC's transparently business-oriented strategy of splitting the final season into two half seasons, aired a year apart, in order to build up anticipation and also string fans along, knowing they will wait on pins and needles until their beloved Don Draper returns to them. This strategy worked well enough for Breaking Bad, whose final 8 episodes moved at such a brisk pace that to have it follow the first 8 would be too much adrenaline for the audience to handle. But Weiner's creation is drastically different from Gilligan's, most importantly in the way it takes its time in spooling out information, and builds its momentum season after season, finally giving the audience the little bit of catharsis they can expect from such a show in the final few episodes. Wheels turn and motors run, but nothing of great physical consequence ever happens until the penultimate few episodes - and most of the time, the payoff is worth it, due to the audience's patience and ability to have faith that everyone involved in the production knows what they are doing.
With two episodes to go before a year-long break, more has happened on this season of Mad Men than ever before - relationships have shifted dramatically over the course of a few minutes, characters seem lost in the late 60s-going into the 70s, as was clearly shown by Michael Ginsberg's hilarious than tragic downfall into full on paranoia about what computers - and thus the future - might bring. Don has re-established himself in the SC&P offices (or whatever they are called now), but in a way I'm sure few were expecting. And this week, he finally made the move in attempting to take back control, letting Cutler and his replacement, Lou Avery, know just how far he is willing to go to matter again (at least in the eyes of his co-workers and potential clients). As Don hailed a taxi and Waylon Jennings' "You Got the Only Daddy That'll Walk the Line," I excitedly began anticipating next week's entry, only to realize that after that, there is only one more, and then another year until I see how things play out. Not only was I disappointed, like Ginsberg, in the future, but felt like my energy was wasted in investing so much in the 5 episodes I have currently seen. If in a mere two weeks I will lose all connection to these characters in the middle of their journeys to the end, how satisfying can the final 7 episodes really be? Because I know there will be a huge lull after whatever major event happens in two weeks, how can I really care about anything that happens? The payoff is too distant to consider as something worth waiting for, and this cloud hangs over every episode I've seen thus far.
For Breaking Bad, while the show inherently worked regardless of the time in between half-seasons, many fans griped about how rushed they felt the ending was, as well as the second to last episode, Granite State, which fast forwarded several months, a jarring development considering the mere few days that the many episodes before encompassed. Would the show have benefited from two full 12 or 13 episode season instead of two halves cut off in the middle? The answer will never be known - but I do know that giving the viewer too much, rather than too little, especially looking back on a series after it is complete, is rarely a bad thing. Yes, some filler may have been necessary, but perhaps Walter's time in New Hampshire could have been covered better and over a longer period of time, rather the sudden snippet of information we were given.
Mad Men is still a great show - it always will be, as long as Matt Weiner remains the micromanager he has been. But I cannot help but feel like AMC is doing them an extreme disservice by essentially teasing fans after a year break, only to have them wait yet ANOTHER year to see how everything pans out. Like the characters on the show, we will live despite these frustrations, but any emotional momentum the final few episodes might gain will be lost, and the first few episodes of the next season will surely be spent recapitulating to audiences where everyone is - something the first few episodes of previous seasons have done to a fault. For a network whose claim to fame is the very thing they are milking for as long as they can before realizing they have almost nothing else to keep the brand at the level of respect it is, it is almost offensive. There was Breaking Bad, there still is Walking Dead, and there is Mad Men - but viewers' relationship with it is drastically different than what it was before, and those are the only shows that really pull in any sort of consistent, intelligent viewers (and recently even Walking Dead has been in short supply of smart stories). Instead of being about the show itself, it is about the context the show finds itself, and unfortunately that context is one of making money and taking as little risk as possible. In doing so, I believe AMC has caused one of the biggest atrocities seen today in mainstream media: Prioritizing the network's relationship with the show over the viewer's relationship, which reveals just how out-of-touch they are with the current media-driven landscape, in which viewers bounce from one show to the other, with complete disregard for how it affects the people working on the show or how the viewers themselves interprets it - an even bigger mistake considering current viewer's attention spans cannot last much more than an hour long episode, let alone a year between subtle, methodical, character-driven episodes in one of the most serially developmental series of all time.
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