TV (The Book)

by Alan Sepinwall

  In this respect and others, Breaking Bad is a treasure trove of sociological and pop culture signifiers. But nobody would care about that stuff (and the show would not have become a sensation) without Gilligan’s determination to entertain at every second. You wouldn’t think the series could top the season 2 image of the severed head of character actor Danny Trejo (cast as a cartel enforcer turned DEA informant) atop an exploding tortoise, but it did, again and again. As shot by series cinematographer Michael Slovis, and directed by such aggressively visual filmmakers as Michelle MacLaren, Rian Johnson, Adam Bernstein, John Dahl (Rounders), David Slade (who went on to design the look of NBC’s Hannibal), and Gilligan (who is nearly as strong a director as he is a writer), no image was ever obvious. The show always looked for angles and camera moves that would make a scene or moment pop, like the high-angled shot of a poolside covered in corpses (“Salud”), the fleeting ghostlike images of civilians in Hank’s rearview mirror before the parking-lot shoot-out that climaxes “One Minute,” or the way the camera slowly moves toward and then around Gus Fring at the end of “Face Off,” revealing not only his fate but the fact that the episode’s title is a groaner of a play on words.

  The show’s structure, too, is clever, at times to a fault: Starting in season 2, which interpolated flash-forwards of debris in Walt’s pool before gradually revealing how he was responsible for the midair collision that deposited it there, Breaking Bad played around with time, often to create and resolve puzzlement. What are we looking at? What does it mean? How will it all fit together? (Strung end-to-end, the titles of the season 2 episodes with plane crash flash-forwards form the FAA’s announcement of the collision.) This approach is at once intuitive (the Breaking Bad writing staff later admitted that they often wrote themselves into corners and then had to test their powers of invention by writing themselves out) and mathematical (the way some of the season 5 subplots are broken up, cliff-hanger style, feel like the result of scientific tests to determine how best to torment the audience).

  In the end, it comes back to Walt and Heisenberg. Was the monster in there the whole time, or was he truly created from circumstance? The latter fits Gilligan’s original pitch and helps viewers justify the time and emotional investment they gave to a character who turned out to be a shatterer of worlds. Cranston and Gilligan walked us down the path to monsterhood so delicately that some viewers didn’t want to accept Walt’s outrageous villainy long after it had become undeniable to everyone else. As a result, they turned on Skyler—who in any other version of the story would have been considered a sympathetic heroine—in an ugly confluence of the Breaking Bad fandom, unexpected empathy, and latent misogyny that had plagued cable TV’s antihero drama boom from the earliest days of The Sopranos.

  Upon repeat viewings, it seems clear that the show was warning us early on not to believe Walt’s self-mythologizing and excuses. On those rare occasions when we saw flashbacks set prior to the events of the show, Cranston played Walt with the same steely arrogance that would become a Heisenberg trademark. (Objecting to a shabby starter home Skyler wants to buy—the very home they would wind up living in for twenty years—he asks her, “Why be cautious? We’ve got nowhere to go but up.”) And too many of Walt’s explosions of temper—at Skyler, at Jesse, at anyone foolish or unlucky enough to get in his way at the wrong moment (which was, in time, every moment)—were fueled by resentment that started building long before Walt saw his oncologist or went on a ride-along with Hank. Heisenberg might never have emerged—certainly not in such homicidal form—if not for the cancer. But he was there the whole time.

  Gilligan doesn’t like to explain his show too much, nor should he be required to, but it’s telling that he considers the climax of the series to be not Walt going out in a blaze of glory against Uncle Jack and the neo-Nazis but a quiet moment from earlier in the finale, when a chastened Walt finally says out loud what he’s known for a long time was his true motivation: “I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. And I was… really… I was alive.”

  —AS & MZS

  Mad Men (AMC, 2007–2015) Total score: 110

  “Whatever happened to Gary Cooper?” Tony Soprano once lamented. “The strong, silent type. That was an American! He wasn’t in touch with his feelings. He just did what he had to do.”

  Tony’s Gary Cooper fixation was part of a larger belief that he had been born at the wrong time—“I came in at the end,” he also complained—and one that would be proved right in a way by Mad Men. Debuting a month after The Sopranos cut to black, it featured a main character who was very much like Tony’s masculine ideal of Cooper (or Gregory Peck). Then again, Tony probably would have hated Mad Men, since the show treated advertising executive Don Draper’s strong, silent qualities as something not to celebrate, but for him to grow beyond.

  The Sopranos and Mad Men shared Matthew Weiner, who had been a writer and producer on the former, and creator of the latter. Despite the new show’s 1960s production design and trapped-in-amber social attitudes, the sense of continuity was inescapable.

  Weiner came late to The Sopranos, at a time when the show was amping up its already considerable fascination with the effect of social change and dreams on individual psychology, to the point where the series frustrated viewers who craved more whackin’ and less yakkin’. Mad Men would feature the occasional death (plus a man’s foot getting mutilated by a riding mower during a drunken office party), but it was even talkier and more introspective than its predecessor.

  Don Draper (Jon Hamm), creative director of the mid-level ad agency Sterling Cooper, is a charismatic antihero, different from other TV bad boys in some details (he was an impostor who was born to a desperately poor farm family and stole a dead soldier’s identity in Korea) but not in others (funny, hard-drinking, chain-smoking, self-destructive, domineering, intensely quotable, a natural leader, married with mistresses).

  And, like The Sopranos, Mad Men put nature-versus-nurture questions at the center of many of its plots and subplots, and subjected them to scrutiny nearly as merciless. Just as Chase’s mobsters were gangsters with animalistic appetites who posed as tediously ordinary suburbanites, so, too, do Don and his friends and coworkers—who are employed by the American ’60s’ most glamorous profession outside of Hollywood—chafe at the roles that they have either accepted since birth or consciously sought as grown-ups.

  When the series begins, Don has a house in the suburbs, a beautiful and too-trusting wife, Betty (January Jones), and two (later three) cute kids, the eldest of which, Kiernan Shipka’s Sally, is the apple of his otherwise jaundiced eye. But he keeps undermining, straying from, even actively destroying the Eden he’s labored to create: running away from his family, his job, and himself; attempting to re-create the domestic ideal in a second (or is that third?) marriage to a secretary (Jessica Paré’s Megan) who had proved to be good with his kids; plunging into alcoholic despair, pulling out of it, then diving into it again more deeply; often simultaneously acting like his “true” self (Dick Whitman, son of a sex worker who died giving birth to him) and his “invented” self.

  Those quotation marks are necessary because on Mad Men, the very idea of authenticity is repeatedly, forcefully questioned. The characters are never less trustworthy than when they’re announcing who they are and what they’re about, and never more open to alternative possibilities than when their delusions have been smashed and their lives ruined and they’re momentarily humbled enough to listen as others describe who they are, or could be. One fine example of this is the moment in season 2’s “The Mountain King” when Don visits his first wife (technically the wife of the dead man he’s impersonating), Anna Draper, played by Melinda Paige Hamilton. Anna delivers a tarot card reading that predicts a time when Don will accept love and be at peace with the universe (a scene that seems in retrospect to foretell the show’s very last scene, down to the sunlight, ocean wave sounds, and chimes). The show is obsessed by the relationship between people’s polished exteriors and
roiling interiors. It loves to zoom in to catch moments when the mask slips and you can see how one face hides another (and another, and another). One of the most self-aware yet perfect acknowledgments of this tendency is in season 3’s “The Gypsy and the Hobo,” when Don finally admits his prolonged deception to Betty on Halloween, and then the couple has to take their children out for trick-or-treating. “Who are you supposed to be?” a neighbor asks them.

  Most of the other major Mad Men characters go through some version of Don’s quest, though few flame out in as spectacular a fashion, or demonstrate flashes of genius convincing enough that we believe other people would (mostly) put up with their bullshit. Agency senior partner Roger Sterling (John Slattery) was born into money (his father cofounded Sterling Cooper) and coasts on his privilege but seems to hate himself for it; like Don, he has maybe-unconscious sympathies for the counterculture types that he mocks. As the series unfolds, he cycles through three marriages, starts taking LSD and going to therapy (something Don never does), and briefly lives in a hotel room that looks like a miniature version of the commune he’s horrified to learn that his daughter has moved into.

  The arc of Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss), secretary turned copywriter, is likewise circuitous and tied to the character’s attraction-repulsion to her roots. She’s a working-class Catholic of Northern European lineage who at first seems doomed to either toil forever as a secretary or go the route outlined by the buxom, worldly-wise office manager Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks) and escape to the suburbs by marrying an executive. The Peggy of later seasons is outwardly unlike the anxious, virginal secretary we met in the pilot. She smokes pot. She enjoys one-night stands and affairs with married men. She insists on being treated as a social equal by the men in her life. She demands to be properly compensated and awarded for her work. But she never entirely loses that model-grind quality or the sense that she’s always detached from the world she inhabits—a quality that links her to Don, a merciless student of human nature who can translate other people’s fears and longings, as well as his own, into resonant ads.

  But if Weiner had apprenticed at The Sopranos and learned much from it—including an obsession with detail that made Mad Men’s 1960s feel more lived-in than any previous pop culture trip back to the decade of JFK, the Fab Four, and Richard Nixon—he wasn’t bound by David Chase’s rules. He found his own way immediately, a fact that’s instantly apparent in Mad Men’s treatment of the human personality. Among the most enduring Sopranos themes was the enormous difficulty of personal growth and change: The Tony seen eating onion rings in the finale has spent years of self-examination in therapy but is largely indistinguishable from the Tony who first walked into Dr. Melfi’s office years earlier. Mad Men, though, went in the opposite direction, telling and showing us that every person is in fact many selves, all in a constant state of flux, evolving and devolving from one year or month or week to the next, just like the national history unfolding all around them. The show took place during a decade of great social change, but it didn’t limit the transformation to the world outside the ad agency’s windows. The characters’ meandering, semiconscious journeys toward change reflected the alterations occurring in America as a whole without one being forced to mirror the other in too direct or reductive a fashion. So Joan could begin the series scornful of a woman using her job as anything but a means to a lucrative and married end, and conclude it threatening to call the ACLU and Betty Friedan on her bosses for creating a hostile workplace. Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser) could start out as a weasel with a bottomless appetite for acknowledgment and respect, and end up recognizing that the simple married life he’d thrown away was really all he ever needed.

  And Don was in a near-constant state of metamorphosis, even if he often took three steps back for every two forward, and he never seemed to get the balance right between the traits belonging to Dick (cowardly, wounded, but also more sensitive and open) and those belonging to Don (master of all he surveyed, even if he had to push his loved ones out of the way to improve the view).

  Even the series’ final moment—the most abstract, instantly polarizing conclusion to a series since, well, The Sopranos—left things very much up in the air as to how far Don had or hadn’t come from the day we met him. While doing yoga on a cliff overlooking the Pacific, he has an epiphany and translates his experience at a New Age retreat into the iconic ad with all the singers who’d like to buy the world a Coke. Does his serene smile signify great personal growth or is this one last instance of the ultimate adman looking at a genuine emotional experience and figuring out how to sell something with it? Given how much Mad Men loved to live in ambiguous moral spaces—inviting us to perpetually quote grand Don insults like “THAT’S WHAT THE MONEY IS FOR!” even as we were horrified by the effect the line had on Peggy—maybe it was both. Or perhaps we should say: Of course it was.

  That Mad Men ends not on an image of any of its actors, but a forty-four-year-old Coca-Cola ad, spoke to the series’ intimate understanding of our relationship with popular culture. Weiner liked to say that the series wasn’t really about the big historical events of the ’60s, though he presented many of them from his characters’ perspectives. But if presidential assassinations, thwarted armageddons, and giant leaps for mankind were held at a remove from Don and Peggy’s world, the films, music, and television of the era were tied into everything they did, and not just because their ads were meant to accompany episodes of The Defenders and Green Acres. Don does his best thinking at the movies. His least fraught moment with Peggy involves the two of them slow dancing to “My Way.” The wife of flamboyant but closeted art director Sal Romano (Bryan Batt) doesn’t begin to recognize the fundamental flaw in her marriage until she watches her husband act out the title song from Bye Bye Birdie. Weiner saw advertising as just as important and creative an art form as the works those ads sponsored (even as he allowed the writers and executives to mock their profession as glorified hucksterism, epitomized by Roger suggesting, “I’ll tell you what brilliance in advertising is: ninety-nine cents”). But there was always another, subtle kind of mirroring going on here: While Mad Men’s characters advertised products, the characters, the firm, the city, and the nation advertised themselves.

  Mad Men’s attention to detail manifested not just in the attention paid to music or politics but in its memory for the tiny details that embodied the relationships between characters. In the first episode, Peggy, believing that sex with the boss is part of the job description, makes a clumsy pass by putting her hand on top of his. From that point forward, nearly every crucial turn in Don and Peggy’s relationship—their brief reconciliation in one of the series’ finest episodes, “The Suitcase,” her quitting the agency to escape their codependent relationship, or them finally reaching equilibrium with their “My Way” dance in “The Strategy”—is signified by the joining of hands, in a way that added enormous emotional value to those moments even if viewers didn’t consciously identify them as callbacks.

  Nowhere is the show’s dramatic architecture more impressive than in season 1, which introduces Don as a master of his little universe, then charts his systematic unraveling. The first of the show’s many flashbacks to his childhood occurs in the fourth episode, “New Amsterdam,” when a slip on the stairs inspires a flashback to his brother Adam’s birth; this presages the adult Adam’s reemergence in the following week’s episode, “5G,” and from then on, the flashbacks become more frequent. Episode 8, “The Hobo Code,” includes Don’s stepmother’s memorable description of life as being like a horseshoe: “round on both ends, fat in the middle, and hard all the way through.” Episode 12, “Nixon vs. Kennedy,” which juxtaposes Pete’s attempts to blackmail Don by threatening to expose his identity theft, gives us the longest flashback yet, an account of Don’s stint in Korea as Dick Whitman that takes up one-third of the episode. This in turn sets up Don’s psychological implosion, which alienates Betty and brings Don’s Whitman-ish fear of failure and exposure to the f
orefront of his mind, driving him to demand that his mistress Rachel Menken (Maggie Siff) flee to California with him. (Wisely, she refuses, telling him prophetically, “You don’t really want to run away with me; you just want to run away,” a statement that nails Don’s response to every dire predicament.) The season’s emotional peak is the Carousel pitch in “The Wheel,” in which Don describes Kodak’s new slide projector as a “time machine” that “lets us travel the way a child travels—around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know that we are loved.” It is only after repeat viewings that you notice which toy Don slips on in “New Amsterdam”—a Whee-Lo, which consists of a plastic wheel with magnetized tips that can move backward and forward, around and around, on a horseshoe-shaped track.