How Mad Men Changed the World
There’s a good chance you don’t watch Mad Men. Despite the slavish devotion of a small but hearty band of devotees and fetishistic media coverage Mad Men has a regular audience under 3-million people, including those who watch it on a delayed basis.
Seldom in history has a show enjoyed by so few elicited discussion from so many. Part of the deluge of overwrought long-form reflections on Mad Men can be credited to the meticulous crafting and intelligence of Mathew Weiner’s creation. Mad Men rewards viewers with encyclopedic knowledge of popular culture and film. That alone makes it irresistible to critics and the type of people who do crossword puzzles in ink.
Then again, plenty of critical darling programs have disappeared without leaving a mark on the cultural firmament. Mad Men saved a TV network, catalyzed a content bubble that’s still inflating to this day, launched hundreds of blogs and a dozen iTunes podcasts dedicated to nothing but the show.
Here’s how Mad Men changed the world with an audience smaller than the population of Nebraska:
It was central to the move towards Monetizing Streaming
If Mad Men itself didn’t change all the rules for the business of scripted television the show was at least the MacGuffin projecting audiences into the digital age.
Mad Men was the first scripted original show to be aired on AMC after HBO and Showtime both passed on it. At the the time AMC was a podunk network best known for airing commercial free Marx Bros marathons. Even in the middle of last decade it was clear that the market for basic cable networks airing shows that could be seen free on the Internet was dying. Desperation was in the air but making content is pricey. The idea of a cable network creating expensive, scripted original content seemed slightly irrational.
At an estimated budget of over $2m an episode Mad Men was a Hail Mary. Then the damnedest thing happened. It worked.
Mad Men premiered on July 19th 2007, exactly three weeks after the first iPhone. Keep that timing in mind. Critically, Mad Men worked right out of the box. The show won an Emmy for Outstanding Dramatic Series in 2008, making AMC the first cable network to claim the honor in the 60th year of the awards.
It wasn’t an immediate financial hit for AMC but the prestige of being known for something other than Groucho and Godfather marathons convinced the network to keep renewing the show. The timing was perfect. Exactly as the country developed the urge to binge there were 60 episodes of great dramatic television coming on line. Mad Men had the pole position in the race to capitalize on impending massive shifts in the way Americans consume content.
For 30 years basic cable networks made money 2 ways: Advertising and so-called affiliate fees which are what your local cable company pays the nets then passes on to you. Then in 2005 iTunes started carrying video downloads. In 2007 all those smartphone users started watching stuff on their new devices. By 2008 iTunes had sold more than 200 million television episodes.
Miller Tabak estimates that Mad Men will gross around $100 million from iTunes.
Meanwhile, Netflix was moving out of DVDs and into streaming. As the bidding war for fresh content picked up AMC found itself sitting on not just artistic respect but fat piles of cash from two largely unexpected revenue streams in the form of SVOD and iTunes. Once it repeated the success of Mad Men with Breaking Bad then knocked the cover off the ball with The Walking Dead AMC was on fire. Suddenly what looked like a piggish money grab spin-off was a great company.
The timing was impossibly good. DVD sales peaked at $20b in 2006. It took until 2013 for home entertainment spending to regain the subsequent losses. Naturally it was digital streaming that led the way.
Suddenly AMC and its sister networks were a hot property. In 2011 Cablevision spun off AMC Networks under the ticker AMCX. Cablevision loaded the firm with more than $2.5 billion and ambitious plans to go abroad original series like Mad Men, a show about a meth dealing teacher and Walking Dead. The latter franchise has absolutely printed money, holding more than 2x the audience for Mad and Breaking Bad combined.
Driven by its move into original content AMC Networks has been a huge winner. Hollywood being what it is every other player in the digital media food chain is now producing its own shows. The ones who are doing it well, including AMCX and especially Netflix are killing it for shareholders, rising 114% since coming public and destroying analyst estimates on a regular basis.
Shortly after it announced it would be streaming Mad Men episodes Netflix announced its own move into content, first with the regrettable Lillehammer followed more memorably by House of Cards in 2012.
The content gold rush only seems obvious in retrospect. If Mad Men had been on HBO it would have been good but not transcendent. Had it been on network TV Mad Men would have been cancelled. Before Mad Men there were box sets of DVDs. Now there is streaming.
Mad Men didn’t cause the world to change alone but the show’s success was the last good push needed to bring video into the digital age.
Mad Men used the Internet to be smarter but remain accessible
The trend towards two device TV watching and binge viewing are central to Mad Men’s success for artistic reasons as well. Mad Men regularly makes callbacks to characters that haven’t been seen for years with almost no exposition for the benefit of those who aren’t in on the joke.
Constant flashbacks, homages, meta references and inside jokes almost demand Googling, often with hilarious results.
Several seasons ago the show name dropped “Dr. Lyle Evans” and Google exploded. The obligatory fake @Dr_Lyle_Evans Twitter account was immediately created. Later that year in the revered Suitcase episode that Dr. Evans was fictional character who had given Burt Cooper an unnecessary orchiectomy (save you the search: Orchiectomy is essentially the same as castration).
That night was the first and arguably last time a fake television Twitter account was funny:
Not only is Mad Men is constantly, often cloyingly self-referential in a way that demands close attention the show delights in teasing viewers who speculate on the fate of Don and the rest of Sterling Cooper.
Since the opening credits of a free-falling silhouette first ran there’s been speculation the series would end in Don’s suicide. As the show nears its end predicting Don’s ultimate fate has become an Internet meme of sorts.
In obvious response, Matt Weiner recently had a depressed Don vacantly push against the glass in the high-rise Habitrail hellhole that is ME HQ. The scene both worked on two levels, capturing the irritation and confinement Don feels and giving Weiner another way to troll Mad Men’s most obsessive fans.
Weiner famously made his TV bones on the Sopranos. It’s time to stop believing you have the end of this show figured out; the boss is going to take this thing home however he damn well pleases. He’s earned the right.
No matter how the curtain comes down Mad Men’s legacy will be turning art-flick levels of density into pop culture product by leveraging off the internet and social media. Mad Men’s inside jokes are accessible to the masses thanks to the dozens of blogs deciphering the show every week. You can see the legacy in shows like Game of Thrones. Not even HBO would have had the audacity to make a series featuring roughly 4,000 characters named Gnarffington-something if Mad Men hadn’t established that it’s impossible for shows to go too deep anymore.
(Brief Aside: Don Draper is Madison Avenue exec Roger Thornhill)
I’ll go ahead and solve the mystery. The falling man is a Hitchcock riff. The entire opening credits ape the beginning of North by Northwest (a thriller about a dashing, lecherous Madison Avenue executive who is mistaken for someone he’s not… which is basically Don Draper with a different backstory).
Fittingly, the final shot of the penultimate episode of Mad Men was an homage to a scene from near the end of North by Northwest. See if you can tell which is which:
The Show is and always has been about middle aged white guy nostalgia
All the Easter Eggs, film references and nods to Internet Culture buried in Mad Men deepen the connection between show and viewer. Binge watching Mad Men induces a sense of extended deja vu. Even when the show is surreal or “Fellini-esque” [a word applied more often to Mad Men than any show since Twin Peaks 25 years ago] Mad Men is still playing with your memories. What is childhood if not an endless series experiences that only make sense years later when you finally realize grown-ups don’t know anything either?
Most series want viewers to relate to the protagonists. There’s some of that in Mad Men but that’s not what makes it special. We’d like to think we have Don’s better qualities but he’s not a sympathetic character or even really knowable. I don’t have friends like Roger my own age but my grandpa served in the Pacific during WWII and he and Roger would have gotten along famously. Peggy is a modern feminist icon but not many millennial women with degrees from Mrs. Deaver’s Secretarial School are working in Manhattan these days.
We love these people but they aren’t us. They are our parents, grandparents and their friends remembered imperfectly but with great, if not warranted fondness.
It’s tricky business for a show to try to connect with an audience on a deep emotional level. Betty’s diagnosis last week seems like an easy bit of drama. “Kill the mom, make it a weeper”. But remember, Betty wasn’t written to be liked. After she and Don get divorced Betty was barely written at all.
In fact, the treatment and fate of Betty as a character and January Jones as an actress reveals much about the construct of Mad Men.
Jones is exquisitely cast. She’s just the right amount of beautiful. In the pilot she was a plot twist. Gorgeous. Perfect. Adoring. Home for her philandering husband, lying bed with her lipstick perfect and offers of dinner or sex, his choice. From there Betty was fleshed out as childish and just a little crazy. Her development peaked several episodes into season one when she took a rifle to a neighbor’s homing pigeons with a cig hanging from her lips. Think Grace Kelly in an NRA ad.
After that iconic moment Betty was more interesting as a glimpse into Matt Weiner’s heart than a fictional character. The question wasn’t whether she’d be likable or a good mom in a particular episode. To the extent she was featured post-divorce Weiner used her mostly to make Don seem relatively decent to his kids. Or at least his daughter, Sally. The boys are afterthoughts, at best.
In the Universe of Weiner all blessings are tied to a curse. Weiner made Betty beautiful but then smote her for 7 straight seasons. Among other humiliations Weiner had Betty encourage the flirtations of a 9 year old boy [played by Weiner’s son! How’s that for a creepy relationship with beautiful, icy blonde women, Hitchcock?], suffer from “hysteria” (she even bought a fainting couch) and abandon 2 kids for more 6 weeks so she could live in Reno with her infant and Henry Francis.
It’s a wonder Betty didn’t die driving into a school bus while checking her lipstick in the rearview mirror off-screen. On the Trials of Betty scale giving her cancer was a gift.
None of which occurred to me real time while watching last Sunday. Instead I cried like a ninny and I wasn’t alone. Betty’s diagnosis was a masterwork of filmmaking. Henry’s reaction was perfect. The defining shot, the moment when we knew Betty’s cancer was terminal was over was a masterpiece of composition. Betty is front left, dimly lit and already fading as a life force. Henry is in the center, the smallest character in the shot. Hands dug into his pockets in surrender even as his mouth keeps arguing. Henry is weak and petulant. Betty is a rock.
Then there’s the doctor. Towering over Henry and backlit, the doctor is fate. He is a physician at the height of the profession’s reputation. He’s the grown-up in the room, giving the worst possible news not to Betty but to Henry, her current keeper.
If you’ve ever lost a parent this is what the news feels like in stylized form. Betty is the sharp realization. Not quite being able to see Henry and the Doctor reminds us that we can never really, perfectly remember our past. We only think we know our parents. We really don’t anymore than our kids will never get to know us.
In terms of triggering emotion that’s one heck of a lot for one scene in one show to accomplish.
There’s a connection between people and art that runs deeper than simple humor or pathos. It’s delicate but potent. Nostalgia. According to Teddy, nostalgia is a Greek word for the pain of an old wound. It’s a twinge in your heart, reminding you of a place where you ache to go again. A place where your parents are young and powerful. It’s where you know you are loved.
Mad Men was a time machine. It made us nostalgic for our past and escorted us to the future. Now that it’s over we don’t just miss the show. We miss who we were when it started. A desire for what was can never be filled. That’s what makes it the perfect product.
Don’t take my word for it. Listen to the man himself…
Good luck with your other programs.
