Over the past four years, Dear Television has written over 150 recaps on over a dozen shows.
For the uninitiated, Dear TV is epistolary criticism of America&#8217;s favorite medium brought to you by Jane Hu, Phil Maciak, Lili Loofbourow, Evan Kindley, Sarah Mesle, and Dear TV Emeritus Anne Helen Petersen. To commemorate the past three years of their work, we&#8217;ve assembled a bricolage of essays, from their inaugural recaps of Girls to their latest on the final half-season of Mad Men.
The selections hew to a loose theme of &#8220;Boys and Girls,&#8221; since, yes, the shows (Girls, New Girl, Mad Men, The Good Wife) foreground gender, but mainly because the essays herein involve discussions of gender expectations and performance, and the attempts, failures, and successes of parsing this persistent problem, in life and on our dearest television.
We hope you enjoy.

Introduction by Mike Goetzman

Girls, Season 2: "Together"

"Girls in Drag" by Lili Loofbourow

“The Future I Guess” by Evan Kindley

“Together, Again” by Jane Hu

“Girls Is Not fun.” by Phil Maciak

Here Comes the Tidal Wave: On "Enlightened"

"Here Comes the Tidal Wave" by Jane Hu

"The Good Bros of Fox" by Phil Maciak

“True Detective” Finale

"Marty, the Monster" by Lili Loofbourow

Mad Men, Season 7: "Severance"

"Mad Men Fantasies" by Lili Loofbourow

This week on Dear Television:
<ul>
<li>"Round and Round," from Jane Hu</li>
<li><a href="#Kindley">"A Clean Break," from Evan Kindley </a> </li>
</ul>
¤
Round and Round By <a href="https://v2.lareviewofbooks.org/?p=69177" target="_blank">Jane Hu</a> April 15, 2015
Dear Television,
And the seasons they go round and round  And the painted ponies go up and down  We're captive on the carousel of time  We can't return we can only look  Behind from where we came  And go round and round and round  In the circle game
— Joni Mitchell, “The Circle Game”
Here we go again. 
At this point, almost every piece of writing on Mad Men appears to be in part meta-commentary about the seemingly endless and repetitive process of writing about Mad Men. Why do some cultural objects immediately receive so much critical attention, while others that are just as <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3566726/">literary, textually rich, and self-reflexive</a> simply do not? The amount of published essays on a show that hasn’t even finished airing yet is impressive, if not unexpected [<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=G0S2AgAAQBAJ&amp;dq=mad+men+linda+williams&amp;source=gbs_navlinks_s">1</a> <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=WvH-l2yeVeAC&amp;dq=mad+men&amp;source=gbs_navlinks_s">2</a> <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=z7h1BwAAQBAJ&amp;dq=mad+men+linda+williams&amp;source=gbs_navlinks_s">3</a> <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=dmrV29DgHtIC&amp;dq=mad+men&amp;source=gbs_navlinks_s">4</a> <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=tzVeoe97CDEC&amp;dq=%252522linda+williams%252522+mad+men&amp;source=gbs_navlinks_s">5</a>]. Bloggers and academics alike (<a href="http://unitcrit.blogspot.com/search/label/Mad%252520World">or both</a>) have glommed onto the show as a kind of ideal interpretive text — perfect even, especially when it appears to be imperfect. It’s the show we love to love, and love to forgive, with the auteur we love to hate. Sometimes it feels as though I could write a Mad Men recap in my sleep; that’s how well the show and its critics has taught me to watch it. Part of this education has meant learning to watch the show with deep suspicion ("nothing is what it seems!", "anyone can be a Mad Men critic!"). Sometimes the show moves so slowly, so conservatively, that those of us indelibly invested in its purported long game have little choice but to see this passivity as stuffed with significance. When it’s hard to see the point, anything might be meaningful. Mad Men has turned me into the most paranoid of viewers. 
But sometimes holding a magnifying glass up to Mad Men feels like holding one up to oneself. Sunday night Twitter sometimes feels like a kind of cultural Rorschach test. Trying to write about the final season — “The End of an Era” — has felt a bit unnerving, partly because we know how little time there is left. Staying with this show to the bitter end has felt increasingly like a practice of devotion, and I’ve never felt the magnifying glass turned back on me more than during this last half-season. What was I, as a viewer, expecting? The wonder of the show lies in the fact that I still don’t know how to answer this.
“Is that all there is?” sang Peggy Lee at the end of last week’s episode, appropriately titled “Severance.” (Everything in Mad Men can be read as appropriate — or its opposite.) “Let’s break out the booze and have a ball if that’s all there is,” continues Lee, which is kind of an optimistic response to the startling pointlessness of life, unless you’re Don Draper, of course, who follows up this week with neither booze nor a ball, but with a return to familiar habits: a melancholy brunette with a relatively staggering back story and interiority that the show (not to mention Don) can hardly represent without lapsing into straight schlock. “Take me seriously!” Diana seems to demand throughout this week’s episode, which Evan explains is quite inappropriately titled “New Business.” Diana has arrived too late in the game, which is tantamount to saying she’s arrived too late in the show’s narrative. Don doesn’t know how to take her seriously in the way she wants, nor perhaps do we at this point. 
The next two episodes are called “The Forecast” and “Time &amp; Life,” which, like “New Business,” can be read as predominantly time-centric. I love the thought that, in the final march of Mad Men’s repetitive seriality — in which closure is prioritized more than ever — the show has given us a series of episode titles that suggest contradictory narrative trajectories, rather than a culminating one. Here, at the end of an era, time is neither a carousel nor a flat circle, but a blender. 
Car scenes, with their intensely artificial and color-saturated back projections, are important in Mad Men, a show insistent in its refusal to move forward. (Remember Betty and Sally smoking together? Remember Sally telling Don she loves him?) In “New Business,” we get a car scene so emphatically focused on its heightened status as a car scene that we never even see what happens when Pete and Don arrive at their destination. That is to say, the destination doesn’t often matter in Mad Men. Moreover, we probably shouldn’t ignore that it’s not Don who’s driving here, though he doesn’t seem entirely comfortable with this set-up either (the scene begins and ends with Don being such a backseat driver). 
Pete: Do you have to smoke in here? Don: It’s taking my mind off your driving. […] Don: Megan’s moving her things today. Pete: I didn’t know that was still going on. They want to punish you and then you get mad. Then you want to punish them but you know it’s your fault. Don: I’ve been through it before. […] Pete: Jimminy Christmas. You think you’re going to begin your life again and do it right, but what if you never get past the beginning again? Don: Watch the road.
Because we can’t see the road, we’ll have to trust Don on this one. But Pete is, of course, not exactly in the wrong here. “You think you’re going to begin your life again and do it right, but what if you never get past the beginning again?” is basically the thesis of Don’s life.
At the beginning of “New Business,” Don is babysitting for Betty and Henry, though he quickly departs when the parents come home. Before exciting, though, Don gives one lingering look back on the scene of domesticity — a scene so idyllic that it almost feels staged. It almost looks like Betty and Don’s old kitchen. It almost looks like an ad. <a href="https://v2.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/image1.png"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-131738" src="https://v2.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/image1.png" alt="image1" width="480" height="300" data-wp-pid="131738" /> </a>Don’s shoulder shadowing the frame of the shot reminds us not only of the show’s opening sequence — of a body more symbolic than real — but also of the missing fifth body in this picture: Sally. If edging Don out of scenes and spaces means that we must also lose Sally, then I’m certainly not okay with the direction of where this show is going.
But the closing shot of “New Business” might suggest otherwise.  <a href="https://v2.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/madmen.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-131684" src="https://v2.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/madmen.jpg" alt="madmen" width="480" height="300" data-wp-pid="131684" /> </a>If there is not enough space for Don at the start of the episode, there is now far too much by the end. Viewed together, the home is at once too full and too empty for Don and becomes, ironically, an uncomfortable limbo space in which he never really belongs. (When Megan calls Don at 9:45PM ET at the start of the episode, she doesn’t expect him to be home to pick up. Sick burn, Megan!) During the car scene, Don explains to Pete that he can’t go home to retrieve his golf clubs because “Megan’s moving her things today.” So, like Sally, he smokes in the car.
Come home Sally, even if just for a short ride.
I expected more,
Jane
<a name="Kindley"></a>
¤
A Clean Break By <a href="https://v2.lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/evan-kindley/">Evan Kindley</a> April 14, 2015
Dear Television,
SO FAR this season’s episode titles seem to be playing with finitude. “Severance” referred to Ken Cosgrove’s firing, of course, but also the idea that we’re about to cut off from these characters and this universe forever. This episode’s title — “New Business” — suggests hope for narrative renovation, but there’s also something pro forma about it: it’s what the person presiding over a meeting says once the old business is taken care of (which, on this show, it never really is). Don wants to turn a page, to move on to a new story, but we know he only has six hours left, and the question inevitably arises: is this really the time for something new? “You think you’re going to begin your life over and do it right,” Pete, reduced to playing Greek chorus in golf apparel this week, laments. “But what if you never get past the beginning again?”
Lili complained <a href="https://v2.lareviewofbooks.org/essay/mad-men-season-7-severance" target="_blank">last week</a> that Mad Men is “a show allergic to transitions.” She was talking about how the narrative constantly jumps forward into the future, skipping over crucial moments, leaving things unresolved. But it could just as easily be said that the show is addicted to transitions: how many times have we seen Don as we see him here, longing to change his life? The episode opened with Don making chocolate milkshakes for his sons (Sally’s away at boarding school), and provided us with our first glimpse of '70s Betty, along with the knowledge that she’s getting a masters’ degree in psychology. Here is some old business that Don has left unfinished — remember his bonding with Bobby over Planet of the Apes? — but he flees immediately upon the entrance of Henry, who has replaced him as patriarch. From there on out, he floats among old plots: his affair with Diana the waitress, who evokes ghosts of moody brunettes past; his long-forgotten power struggles with Pete and Roger; his lapsed dalliance with Sylvia Rosen, who he encounters in an elevator for the first time since season six; the detritus of his failed marriage to Megan.
What kind of show does Don want to be on? He appears to be tired of playing the genius ad man, is clearly unsuited to being an ordinary father and husband, and the casual playboy lifestyle we saw him indulging in last week doesn’t seem to sustain him (only stain his carpet). In the past, he’s been happiest, if that’s the word, in passionate affairs, but in this case Diana is resistant to being cast as Don’s leading lady. She’s got her own story, revealed to us piecemeal: a child who died, another she abandoned. He sees them as “in the same boat,” but compared to hers, his grief is pedestrian — “You’ve never had a worse day than me,” she tells him — and she’s unwilling to set her tragedy aside in order to become a player in his: “I don’t want to feel anything else. When I was with you I forgot about her. I don’t ever want to do that.”
Don’s plight is analogous to Mad Men’s itself: the show has so thoroughly established its autonomy, its independence from generic restraints, that we don’t really know what to expect from it, or of it, any more. The show has become shapeless, by the standards of prestige serial drama at least. Harry, after making an unsuccessful pass at Megan, tells Don that she should never have quit her soap opera, and maybe she never did: this episode felt pretty soapy, what with Roger and Marie Calvet rekindling their amour fou and the glamorous bisexual photographer Pima Ryan seducing Stan and trying to seduce Peggy and the progressive revelations of Diana’s family tragedy. As on a soap opera, there is periodic excitement, but no sense that there will be fundamental changes to the order of things. In the past Mad Men has avoided this sense of stasis by emphasizing the inevitability of historical change, but, Pima’s pantsuits aside, this was among the least time-stamped of Mad Men episodes. (Meredith’s confused reference to “the Manson Brothers” was about the size of it.) What we have instead is the awareness of a ticking clock, or an hourglass about to run out. Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.
Toward the end of “New Business,” Don cuts Megan a check for a million dollars, a gesture that recalls Kenny’s severance payment from last week’s episode. “I don’t want to fight any more,” he says. This may or may not signal the end of Megan’s presence on the show, and in Don’s life, but it’s a characteristic Draper move: he likes clean breaks, treating relationships like contracts. It’s money that allows Don to start his life over as many times as he pleases without having to be concerned with people’s emotions. (“<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77Y6CIyyBcI">That’s what the money is for</a>,” as he reminded Peggy back in season four, in a different connection: never having to say you’re sorry.) It’s possible that, by giving away such a huge sum, he’s compromised this power, and the remaining five episodes will examine the consequences of that weakness. I do hope he faces some sort of obstacle in the remainder of this season: Don is at his most compelling when dealing with situations beyond his control, like the revelation of his true identity, or the threats from Cutler, Gleason &amp; Chaough. Left to his own devices, he can be stultifying.
I can feel the tension of your need for my opinion,
Evan
¤

Mad Men, Season 7: "New Business"

"Round and Round" by Jane Hu

"A Clean Break" by  Evan Kindley

This Week on Dear Television:
<ul>
<li>"Age of Olson" from Phil Maciak  </li>
</ul>
¤
Age of Olson By <a href="https://v2.lareviewofbooks.org/?p=69022" target="_blank">Phillip Maciak </a>May 4, 2015
<a href="https://v2.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/MM1.jpg"><img class="alignnone wp-image-132548" src="https://v2.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/MM1.jpg" alt="MM1" width="480" height="267" data-wp-pid="132548" /> </a>Dear television,
WHO CARES about Don Draper? I mean that literally. For what longtime viewer of Mad Men is Don Draper either the center of the dramatic universe within the show or the affective one outside of it? Being a viewer of this sort of television is often defined, I think, by the ability to choose one’s way through a series. We are led along by plot, hitched to the narrative wagon of one or several key consciousnesses, but the best of these shows — or at least the ones I like the most — give us the freedom to pledge our allegiances liberally, idiosyncratically. I watched The Sopranos for Carmela and Christopher, Friday Night Lights for Tim Riggins, The Office for Pam and Dwight. Some shows have more insistent core magnetism. (No matter how much Jesse Pinkman stole the show, it was hard not to watch Breaking Bad for Walter White.) Some are more diffuse. (McNulty was no more the protagonist of The Wire than Ned Stark is currently the protagonist of Game of Thrones.) But one of the great things about this era of TV — and one of the many positive things these shows share formally with soap operas — is the ability to free associate. You can choose your own protagonist.
So, back to my question: who cares about Don Draper? It seems silly to even say it, but, just to preface this discussion: structurally, Don is Mad Men’s protagonist. Indeed, in last week’s Hollywood Prospectus podcast, Andy Greenwald and Chris Ryan declared that all those critics who’d suggested that Peggy was the actual protagonist had been proven wrong by the seeming wrap-up of her story and Weiner’s increasing interest in Don’s journey. (For what it’s worth, this episode proved that Peggy’s got lots more gas in the tank as a character.) But, beyond that, claiming that an episode proves or doesn’t prove the location of this show’s primary narrative investment misses the point of critiques like those that claim Peggy as protagonist. I spent most of season six arguing that the show was interested in displacing Don’s narrative perspective — through Sally, Peggy, even Dawn. This didn’t mean that I thought Don was being written off the show but that I thought the show’s narrative arc was looking more and more to other characters. To say, rhetorically, that Peggy or Sally are contenders to be this show’s protagonist is simply to say that they sometimes provide the show’s structuring consciousness. Or, in other words, it’s to say that the show seems to matter most when they’re at the forefront.
In a final season preoccupied with Don’s disappearance, irrelevance, powerlessness, etc., it seems to me that Mad Men is still interested in displacing its lead. Don Draper, the mysterious cipher at the core of this story, has almost never been the most interesting character on his own show. And, this season, his tiresome repetitions, his follies, his failures suggest that the show knows that. We’re going to see where Don’s road trip ends, but, by and large, the world of Mad Men is over Don Draper. He’s moved on and so has his universe. Rather than this show’s dynamic engine, he has become its institution, its context. Jon Hamm stars as The Nineteen-Sixties, more an embodied era than a man. And while the passage of time haunts us all, who has empathy for Time itself? I am interested to see what happens to Don; I care about what happens to Peggy and Sally and Joan. Don will bring the series to its end; they will give that end its meaning. Don is the show’s protagonist, but that doesn’t mean that Peggy can’t be my protagonist.
I mentioned this last week, but, when we talk about this era of television production, we talk about an era dominated by shows that are themselves dominated by male anti-heroes. But anyone who’s actually viewed and loved these shows knows that they don’t actually work that way. Mad Men isn’t dominated by Don Draper any more than Jaws is dominated by the shark. What makes these shows great is what grows up to surround the anti-hero. These guys are anti-heroic in that they’re bad and quasi-villainous, but they’re also anti-heroic inasmuch as they’re surrounded by heroes far more compelling than they are. We all want to know what happens with the shark, but the real action is on the boat.
So let me tell you about my show. It’s called Mad Men, and it’s the story of Peggy Olson. She starts out as a receptionist at a big Madison Avenue ad agency and works her way up through a thick haze of sexism, back-biting, and institutional hurdles to become a junior copywriter and the protégé of a brilliant, asshole ad man named Don Draper. Just as she achieves this goal, she realizes that she’s gotten pregnant after a fling with a weasly young executive. She has the baby and gives it up for adoption in order to pursue her dream and career. That career faces a number of ups and downs including a falling-out with her mentor, an affair with her new boss, and, ultimately, a return to her original agency, but, throughout, we see her grow as both a writer and a human in the world. She wrestles with her Catholic family, her feminism, and her capitalism. She’s funny, she’s flawed, and she has a sense of whimsy when drunk. She’s ambitious, and she’s competent, and we’re going to end this series with a sense of all that she regrets in her life but also all she can and will become when we leave her.
One third of “Lost Horizon” is essentially a bottle episode starring Peggy first with her former employee and then with her current/former boss, Roger Sterling, bouncing around the abandoned offices of SC&amp;P. She’s harsh but respectful with the employee, and she’s frustrated and affectionate with Roger. In another section of this episode, Joan Holloway is facing an institutional sexism so spring-loaded and destructive that even to name it is to set it off like a land mine. The centerpiece of the episode is Joan’s mic-drop threat to call in Betty Friedan and the Feminist Avengers to burn McCann-Erickson to the ground. Watching that scene, it was almost too beautiful to imagine that this lawsuit, this dismemberment of Advertising itself at the hands of Joan Holloway might be Mad Men’s endgame. But, by the end of the episode, Joan seems to have backed off, to have accepted her own story as a semi-tragic one, of tenuous power that’s not worth the trouble. 
But Joan’s struggle is not the end. Ferg, one of this show’s most loathesome, pinky-ringed, cuff-linked creations, infers to her that Peggy will likely face the exact same dilution of power once she arrives. (In reference to Peggy’s status as a boss at McCann, he says, “I doubt that will continue anyway.”) But then Peggy arrives. Shades on inside, cigarette hanging from her mouth, tentacle-porn print slung under her arm, Peggy doesn’t look like she’s going to burn the place down so much as burn a hole through it. Joan put McCann on blast, but it was a rhetorical victory only. Peggy, we’re invited to hope, might ruin this place. Or at least take it over.
<a href="https://v2.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/MM2.jpg"><img class="alignnone wp-image-132549" src="https://v2.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/MM2.jpg" alt="MM2" width="480" height="203" data-wp-pid="132549" /> </a>Over at SC&amp;P, Peggy tells Roger that her ambition is, in his words, to “have her name on the door.” There’s an irony here: Peggy, as a copywriter, has long lived in the shadow of her mentor, unnamed. Don Draper, on the other hand, is the defining intelligence of the agency. Back in an earlier SC&amp;P bottle episode, Peggy tells Don that everybody thinks he does her work for her. (Part of her attraction to Ted Chaough seems to be that he understands her individual talent.) Likewise, Don is the eponymous Mad Man of the title. But, unlike the advertising world of the 1960s, the audience of Mad Men can give credit where credit is due. For me, Peggy’s name is already on the door. Don Draper is a monolith planted in the middle of this show. He’s a riddle to solve, not a story to follow. The show I’ve been watching for eight years is a show about Peggy Olson and her dying, desperate boss.
In “Lost Horizon,” Don is like a contrail evaporating in the sky. He sees Joan in the elevator, but he can’t help her. When he goes to pick up Sally, she’s not there. She didn’t need a ride from him, and Betty, likewise, doesn’t need his massage. Peggy, too, is a woman apart. She explicitly doesn’t ask his advice about her new career move, and the two spend the entire episode in separate spaces. There’s a lot going on here, and Don’s not necessary for any of it. Don Draper is the occasion for us to know any of these people, but they no longer need him around. We no longer need him around. 
The great joy of this TV series, for me, has been how inviting it is to us as contemporary viewers in time. From the dense ensemble to the meticulously-detailed production design, this is an easy show to inhabit. I’ve watched it through probably three times by now, and it’s moving and funny and lovable and sad each time in different ways. And each time, it’s never Don who stays with me. That’s not a fault of the show; it’s the show’s biggest achievement. Don Draper is the sun around which this show orbits. But who loves the sun?
I’m not scary, organ music is scary,
Phil.
¤

LARB Digital eDitions #36: Dear TV

June 201566 pages