Watch Mad Men, Season 7, Episode 7 Full episode here!
Finally, some drama! As the last series of Sixties-set drama Mad Men reaches its halfway point, there is finally some drama.
For the past one and a half series Mad Men (Sky Atlantic) has failed to delight us. Dragging its heels, spending too long mooning over the undoubtedly handsome Don Draper (Jon Hamm), whose identity crisis we've been reappraised of too many times to care any more, in the end it just got boring.
And yet, and yet, half way through what we know is going to be the final series of this slick, sophisticated take on the New York advertising industry in the 1960s, its chief writer, Matthew Weiner, with Carly Wray, delivered a transcendent episode for the mid-season finale (the last seven episodes will be shown next year). Finally we had some events - a marital split and a death - and finally Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss) took her rightful place center stage. And finally too, as I found myself shouting "Hooray" at the announcement of a business buyout, I realized that Mad Men was back to being brilliant.
The episode was straddled by the 1969 moon landing, which was ironic, because it meant that many of the characters spent much of the episode glued to their televisions, while Peggy made a wonderful presentation to a burger joint about the need to prize people away from their televisions to remember to "break bread together" as a family again. It was another layer of irony too, in an expertly, novelistically structured episode, that a burger joint, so often a derided symbol of the tackiness of modern life, should be recommended as the place that now offers the opportunity for an almost holy confluence of human beings, in contrast to their neglected dining tables. This point felt not only astute and true, but also peculiarly moving.
Mad Men prides itself on the frozen moment, the tableau that tells a thousand tales behind its perfectly choreographed stillness, and this episode had a whole handful of them to offer. There was Peggy's embrace of the gauche, unloved little boy who comes to watch her TV. Tears sat in the corner of her eyes as she held him, giving us the briefest, deepest of visits to the secret sacrifice of a child she had made in order to have a career.
There was our first ever sight of Bert Cooper (Robert Morse) out of the work context. In the montage of shots of characters watching the moon landing, we suddenly saw the goateed eccentric who co-founded Sterling Cooper and hates to wear shoes, sitting watching the TV with only his maid for company. It was a sudden shocking picture of the bathos of a lonely life in the middle of a city, just as we were thinking no one could be more isolated than Neil Armstrong in that moment.
And then there was the sublime end. Ever so occasionally Mad Men enters the surreal, and this time we had Bert dancing and singing The Best Things in Life Are Free, with secretaries for chorus girls and Don weeping at it all. Absurd, charming, original, I almost cried too. Ironically (again), when the episode's theme was how TV has ruined our ability to communicate with each other, this was television so good, it offered its own semblance of human communion. Watching Don watching Bert moved me nearly as much as he was moved.
Watch Mad Men, Season 7, Episode 7 Full episode here!
