Item: Mad Men Series Finale a Disappointment!

To be sure, Mad Men is one of the great experiences in television history - trenchant, consistently surprising, enormously provocative, delivering the narrative goods while bedizening the entire edifice with modernist trills, all that and so much more. Unfortunately, it couldn't escape the attendant disappointments of that most dreaded televisual necessity - the series finale. 

In this, the creator of Mad Men, Matthew Weiner, who wrote and directed the series finale, "Person to Person," is hardly alone. Even an underseen show like Rectify (Ray McKinnon, 2013 - 2016, SundanceTV), which matches Mad Men in subtlety and overall brilliance, junked its hard-won delicacy with a trite, utilitarian ending. Such is the fate of most serial narratives; by their very nature, they are bound to disappoint. They borrow the structure of soap operas but unlike soap operas, they must end at some point. We then mourn the loss of the interplay between episodic verticality and serial horizontality that gripped us over several seasons and years. The series finale of Six Feet Under circumvented this problem since the show concerned death, the most final ending of all. And The Sopranos ignored the problem altogether by stopping, not ending. But, in general, from what I've heard about shows I haven't seen (Game of Thrones, Lost) to shows I've completed (Breaking Bad, Succession, Ozark), serial television will one day let us down. 

To start with the godawful, Weiner brings Peggy Olson's (Elisabeth Moss) story to a close with...wait for it...the formation of a heterosexual couple, the most rote method of ending any narrative. Stan Rizzo (Jay R. Ferguson) professes his love for Peggy and Peggy professes back. "I want to be with you. I'm in love with you...I love you, Peggy." "I can't believe it. I think I'm in love with you too. I really do." What, is this the Friends finale? It's not as if the coupling was an unforeseen development; certainly, one could glean some sexual tension between the two throughout the series. But apart from the fact that this ending apes the ending of literally hundreds of thousands of other narratives, the device comes off as cheap and mechanical for two reasons.

First, the formation comes not just in the last episode but almost at the very end of the final episode, with barely ten minutes to spare. Apart from a brief peck between the two before the final scene, this is the last we see of them. The eleventh-hour nature of the device registers a panic over Weiner's apparent need to get the formation in under the wire. Like the ending of an Harlequin romance novel, it arrives as an unexamined imperative rather than a reasoned dénouement. In fact, it's actually worse than a Harlequin because at the very least, we can pick up another Harlequin novel and get back to the tensions we so desperately loved, forgetting the clockwork coupling that occurred on the last page. Here, we enjoy no such luxury since there are no episodes left. Weiner strands us with the most cliché method of tying up loose ends imaginable. 

Second, the formation fails to preserve any of the ambiguity that made Mad Men such a compelling watch to begin with. As Sean O'Sullivan writes, "the synthetic unity of a show...depends fully on...the specific ways in which the variances and interruptions force us to navigate seriality’s inevitable lacunae of space and time – the negotiation among different physical environments, and the temporal omissions within and between episodes, and within and between seasons." (120)* The keyword here is "force" because Mad Men required the viewer to do more narrative bookkeeping than most series - filling in gaps, making connections, gaining one's bearings, determining time and even space, etc. With Stan and Peggy expressing their love for one another (finally!), Weiner shuts the door on this story thread. There's nothing left to negotiate. 

This may seem a preposterous thing to say about a series finale. But negotiation need not cease with the literal end of an episode or series. Indeed, one measure of a great TV show is its ability to keep us negotiating with it long after we've taken it all in. Compare how Weiner afford us a last glimpse of Betty Draper (January Jones). We know she will soon die of cancer. But instead of a Terms of Endearment-caliber death in a hospital, Weiner shows her smoking at the kitchen table while her daughter Sally  (Kiernan Shipka) does the dishes. No dialogue. Sally's future is unknown and thus the moment vibrates with possibility instead of clicking into a preordained narrative position. Even Roger Sterling's (John Slattery) coupling with Marie (Julia Ormond) has a breezy, almost matter-of-fact aura to it that lies in marked distinction to the doctrinaire formation of the Peggy and Stan couple. In Broadway terms, Roger and Marie sing a fine number that only Great American Songbook scholars recall whereas Peggy and Stan blast out the 11 o'clock number or the bombastic Act One showstopper. 

As for other preordained narrative developments, it seemed inevitable that the series would have to end in the west and not just the west but California. And not just California but the very edge of the continental United States. With America fully colonized by 1970, the only frontier left for Don Draper (Jon Hamm) to conquer is the one within. So he must perform yoga on a rocky precipice, the Pacific Ocean raging behind him. Weiner then cuts to the infamous Coca-Cola ad repurposing the New Seekers' "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing (In Perfect Harmony)." Robert Christgau deemed the song the worst single of 1972 presumably in disgust over how easily Madison Ave. was able to commodify the 1960s counterculture. And indeed, that's how it sits at the very end of the series. 

Most critics and viewers (and Hamm too) assume that Draper goes back to McCann Erickson to create the ad (indeed, McCann Erickson is the agency that did actually create the ad) and co-opt the inner light for the soda-swilling masses. I find the maneuver too conceptual for such a tight connection. And pinning its effect to a Draper cause drains the device of its ambiguity. Given the gargantuan disappointment of the Stan/Peggy thread, I'm inclined to ignore the final moments and even main characters and flash back over the ambiguities and expansions I loved so dearly. 

For instance, Bob Benson (James Wolk) was a far more compelling creation than Salvatore Romano (Bryan Batt). If a character is known to be gay, then you can punish that character, a fate that befell Salvatore and, of course, Batt who was out of a job once Salvatore was axed. But Benson never showed his cards and was thus fascinating from the jump. With his fixed smile and potentially evil machinations, he was queer not gay, unable to be categorized or commodified. And the secretaries served as an unexpected Greek chorus to let some air out of the main stories. Ida Blankenship (Randee Heller) and Caroline (Beth Hall) were desexualized workers who could get away with not being unduly preoccupied with the allure of Don and Roger. Shirley points to a world outside when she exits the series by telling Roger "advertising is not a very comfortable place for everyone." And while Meredith (Stephanie Drake) initially came off as a ditz, she revealed more layers as the series progressed. In the final episode, she echoes Shirley when she tells Roger that “there are a lot of better places than here [i.e., advertising].”

As for Joan (Christina Hendricks), probably my favorite main character, I wanted more of and for her. She always deserved far more than she got but Weiner used her as a measure of the two-steps-forward/six-steps-back nature of women in the workplace. Still, I hope what I'm detecting is happiness in her final moment as she runs her own business out of the apartment she never moved from despite financial windfalls below her station. 

Once more - one of the greatest television series of all time. Now to check out The Sopranos again to see if it's still toppermost in my eyes. 

* Sean O'Sullivan, “Space Ships and Time Machines: Mad Men and the Serial Condition,” in Mad Men: Dream Come True TV. Gary R. Edgerton, ed. (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011).