« In Which We Enter A Mad Rage »

Voices Carry

by ELEANOR MORROW

Mad Men is a drama that takes itself seriously. Even an innocent morning drive portends something more forboding. Don's daughter Sally hears the grownups laughing it up on a sad day, and the poor girl takes offense to her family's lack of grief. "He's gone, don't you understand?" she tells them, and goes into the television room to learn how to most pleasantly deal with her pain.

The implied guilt parents bestow on their children is on full display in this third season of Mad Men. Between closet homosexuality, abortion, rape, incest, World War II flashbacks, gender confusion, and jai alai, Sterling Cooper has its hands full.

Don Draper has never stopped reliving the heartbreak of that childhood. Don wakes up every night, and the dream's the same. He's basically the Terminator, who also didn't come onto the scene until the end of the world was nigh. Don stares longingly at old photographs and sobs over his lost youth. He's like the Monopoly man but even less convincing.

Mr. Weiner's show comes alive when Don runs headlong against something. The mercurial ad wizard took a leave of absence in Los Angeles last season, and when he came back he should have found a new brilliant British mind to contend with his creative loneliness. Instead it's the same old DD: Don slyly reassuring the employees he trusts by patting them on the back even when they've failed. Don follows a credo that I salute in full: when someone most expects you to destroy them, show mercy.

What exactly was wrong with Sal's Bye Bye Birdie ad for Patio? "She's not Ann-Margaret," was Roger's considered opinion. Thanks for showing up to work, Roger, that appears to be the first meeting you'd made it to where someone wasn't fired in the last year. But yet, the ad itself was off — creeping, pleading. The ad lacked the unbridled natural enthusiasm of the original. It felt like pretend.

I don't know whether to be impressed that Sal's paramour figured out her husband was a flaming homosexual, or feel bad for her. At least she knows the truth for herself. Sal's reliable and trustworthy, one of the few characters in Mad Men's milieu that we do believe.

Jude Law will soon pop up on Broadway as Hamlet, an inspired version where everything the Dane says will obviously be total horseshit. What is Hamlet if we can't be convinced the ghost is real? Mad Men is composed of moments that would be more disconcerting if Jon Hamm and Vincent Kartheiser weren't snickering in delight. Mad Men, with its 21st century tongue and tenous grasp of historical events, seems no more real than ABC's Mad Men counter-programming, Defying Gravity.

Airing in about sixteen different timeslots on ABC before it's thankfully canceled, Defying Gravity amazes me in its utter preposterousness and lack of charm. Astronauts are hurtling across the solar system, and yet all they can think about is what to wear for their interstellar vampire ball (really). This was an actual plot line from Sunday's Defying Gravity. Pitched to ABC execs as "Grey's Anatomy in space", hopefully God will smite every single person involved in the creation of this show, beginning with former Office Space drone Ron Livingston plays the strikingly handsome astronaut Maddux Donner.

Defying Gravity has taken the meaningless soap opera nonsense perfected by The Sopranos and viciously murdered it. The Sopranos proved that dozens of unlike, occasionally connected events could be a new kind of drama; Gravity takes that same formula and ruins it. Matthew Weiner (with David Chase when the latter was sober) basically invented the subtle plot twist where the wrong slip kills a man while he's standing in line at A&P...and they don't even show it. Subtlety is wasted on the young.

Sincerity in human drama staged or fake isn't easy to come by. That our most convincingly heroic actors became our statesmen is tossed over by Don, Pete and the prince of jai alai, that the son must bear the burden of the father. Later, the heads of Sterling Cooper debate whether or not to accept the money of a trust fund baby.

Things aren't so easy in the other borough. A mother demands a 27-inch television and tells her second daughter that she'll be raped in Manhattan. Peggy's reaction was remarkably understated — children always have a slight hesitance in trusting their parents' change of minds.

Last week, Christina Hendricks had to eat huge snausages and play accordion for her husband's doctor buddies. This week she's Miss Manners telling Peggy how to be exciting and fun. "When he has you on the floor," she tells Peggy, "whimper slightly." There's so much the young can learn from the old.

I fear for Bobby Draper — he's not even protected from the vicissitudes of American violence when his father sits mere feet away next to the family's frightening animatronic dog.

"My son lives in the shadow of my success," a client tells Don. He can't help but think of his own son, who barely notices that he lives in the same shadow.

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording. She tumbls here. You can find Molly Lambert's review of last week's Mad Men here.

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