a lot.) Totally out of the blue, this cardboardish character is given a black Playboy bunny girlfriend whom he says he wants to marry, but she’s never explained, either: apart from triggering a weird, vaguely sadomasochistic confrontation between Lane and his bigot father (who beats him with a cane and makes him say “Sir”), the affair leaves no trace. It’s simply there, and we’re supposed to “get” what her presence is about, the way we’re supposed to “get” an advertisement in a magazine.
The show’s directorial style is static, airless. Scenes tend to be boxed: actors will be arranged within a frame—sitting in a car, at a desk, on a bed—and then they recite their lines, and that’s that. Characters seldom enter (or leave) the frame while already engaged in some activity, already talking about something—a useful technique (much used in shows like the old
Law & Order
), which stronglygives the textured sense of the characters’ reality, that they exist outside of the script. As for the acting, it is unexceptional in general and occasionally downright amateurish. (The baby-doll performance of the porcelain-beautiful January Jones, as Mrs. Don Draper, is an embarrassment.) I am not one of those critics who admires the performance of Jon Hamm as Don, which seems to me to emblematize the glossy inauthenticity of the show in general. There is a long tradition of American actors who excel at suggesting the unconventional and sometimes unpleasant currents coursing beneath their appealing all-American looks: James Stewart was one; Matt Damon is, now, another. By contrast, you sometimes have the impression that Hamm was hired because he reminds you of advertisements, and after all the show is about advertising—he’s a foursquare, square-jawed fellow whose tormented interior we are constantly told about but never really feel. (He looks uncannily like the guy in the old Arrow Shirt ads.) With rare exceptions (notably Robert Morse in an amusing cameo as the eccentric Japanophile partner Bert Cooper), the other actors in this show are “acting the atmosphere,” as directors like to say: they’re playing “Sixties people” rather than inhabiting this or that character, making him or her specific. Coupled with the fact that most of them are so awful, your sense of the characters as mere types—the loner with a secret, the prep, the philanderer, the bored housewife—short-circuits any possible connection to them. I cared more about what happened to the people in
Friday Night Lights
after one episode than I did for anyone in
Mad Men
after four seasons.
The way that the scene about Lane and his black girlfriend somehow morphs into a scene about an unnatural emotional current between him and his father is typical of another of
Mad Men
’s vices: you often feel that the writers are so pleased with this or that notion thatthey’ve forgotten the point they’re trying to make. During its first few seasons the show featured a closeted gay character—Sal Romano, the firm’s art director. (He, too, wears vests.) At the beginning of the show I thought there was going to be some story line that shed some interesting light on the repressive sexual mores of the time, but apart from a few semicomic suggestions that Sal’s wife is frustrated and that he’s attracted to one of his younger colleagues—and a moment when Don catches him making out with a bellhop when they’re both on a business trip, a revelation that, weirdly, had no repercussions—the little story line that Sal is finally given isn’t really about the closet at all. In the end, he is fired after rebuffing the advances of the firm’s most important client, a tobacco heir who consequently insists to the partners that Sal be fired. (This character seems to be suffering from what can only be called sudden-onset homosexuality: there’s no hint of his being gay until the writers suddenly need this particular subplot.) Naturally the tobacco heir
The show’s directorial style is static, airless. Scenes tend to be boxed: actors will be arranged within a frame—sitting in a car, at a desk, on a bed—and then they recite their lines, and that’s that. Characters seldom enter (or leave) the frame while already engaged in some activity, already talking about something—a useful technique (much used in shows like the old
Law & Order
), which stronglygives the textured sense of the characters’ reality, that they exist outside of the script. As for the acting, it is unexceptional in general and occasionally downright amateurish. (The baby-doll performance of the porcelain-beautiful January Jones, as Mrs. Don Draper, is an embarrassment.) I am not one of those critics who admires the performance of Jon Hamm as Don, which seems to me to emblematize the glossy inauthenticity of the show in general. There is a long tradition of American actors who excel at suggesting the unconventional and sometimes unpleasant currents coursing beneath their appealing all-American looks: James Stewart was one; Matt Damon is, now, another. By contrast, you sometimes have the impression that Hamm was hired because he reminds you of advertisements, and after all the show is about advertising—he’s a foursquare, square-jawed fellow whose tormented interior we are constantly told about but never really feel. (He looks uncannily like the guy in the old Arrow Shirt ads.) With rare exceptions (notably Robert Morse in an amusing cameo as the eccentric Japanophile partner Bert Cooper), the other actors in this show are “acting the atmosphere,” as directors like to say: they’re playing “Sixties people” rather than inhabiting this or that character, making him or her specific. Coupled with the fact that most of them are so awful, your sense of the characters as mere types—the loner with a secret, the prep, the philanderer, the bored housewife—short-circuits any possible connection to them. I cared more about what happened to the people in
Friday Night Lights
after one episode than I did for anyone in
Mad Men
after four seasons.
The way that the scene about Lane and his black girlfriend somehow morphs into a scene about an unnatural emotional current between him and his father is typical of another of
Mad Men
’s vices: you often feel that the writers are so pleased with this or that notion thatthey’ve forgotten the point they’re trying to make. During its first few seasons the show featured a closeted gay character—Sal Romano, the firm’s art director. (He, too, wears vests.) At the beginning of the show I thought there was going to be some story line that shed some interesting light on the repressive sexual mores of the time, but apart from a few semicomic suggestions that Sal’s wife is frustrated and that he’s attracted to one of his younger colleagues—and a moment when Don catches him making out with a bellhop when they’re both on a business trip, a revelation that, weirdly, had no repercussions—the little story line that Sal is finally given isn’t really about the closet at all. In the end, he is fired after rebuffing the advances of the firm’s most important client, a tobacco heir who consequently insists to the partners that Sal be fired. (This character seems to be suffering from what can only be called sudden-onset homosexuality: there’s no hint of his being gay until the writers suddenly need this particular subplot.) Naturally the tobacco heir
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