pete campbell

Mad Men 2025– 10 Years Later

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Long time no see, eh? Admittedly, looking back on some of what I wrote about the series years back reads as somewhat cringe but that’s to be expected. A lot of dumb shit’s happened in the last decade. If you can’t be critical of your past self and trying to improve, what the hell are we even doing? Everything shall remain for posterity.

I haven’t sat down to rewatch the series as a whole since 2018. Even then, I fell off in Season 6– the whole Sylvia plotline felt so contrived to me (not to mention the goddamned awful wig the brilliant Linda Cardellini was stuck wearing), but as I’ve gotten older I’ve mellowed a touch. Usually when Don sucks shit in his personal life, at least cool things are happening at the agency to take the edge off.. but here, he’s all garbage.

Watching this show has always felt rewarding since it’s such a richly told story, and as I’ve gotten older, I’ve found more touching moments, more relatability. Fucking News at 11 sentiments aside, it still looks and feels flawless, sleek, current and nuanced. Timeless and ageless. Seven seasons of rich character work, insanely beautiful visuals, and very funny moments.

10 years out from the series finale, I keep turning the same thought over and over. What is the thesis of this story, what are we taking with us at the end? Do people really change, or are we doomed to repeat the same bullshit ad nauseam in an Edge of Tomorrow or Groundhog Day loop?

In Season 1, the late great Bert Cooper once told Don ‘By the time you hit 40, you’ve met every type of person there is’; when I turned 40 in 2024, you bet this thought rattled around in my head for weeks. There’s an iota of truth to that statement. I do believe some people change, but only in a way that directly benefits them; it’s not inherently selfish, but it’s human nature to have that be the One true motivator. Being an opportunist is a human trait, it’s how we stay alive.

At times, the show feels like an advertisement for the American Dream(TM) while exposing the deep decay lingering just beneath the surface of that ideal. Look at Joan and her garbage husband, look at how Betty feels.

After all, Don Draper himself is a polished advertisement for Dick Whitman, what he Could Have Been had his circumstances been different. Probably why nothing ever feels like enough to him when he has So Much. Each season chips away at his carefully crafted persona. The Season 6 Finale In Care Of has him glumly boozing at a bar as Band of Gold drones on the radio, a stark contrast to the opening scene of the series premiere, cool and polished Don no more. All of this mess culminates with an emotional meltdown during the Hershey meeting. You can only keep up the mask for so long.

lol oop

The next time we see him in Time Zones, he is adrift and alone: starting with the Don Draper cosplay on the flight to LA and his deteriorating marriage to Megan, then ending on a long shot of him shivering on his Park Avenue balcony awash in despair, dishevelled in his bathrobe. Is that all there is? Indeed.

image courtesy of Tom & Lorenzo

For me, this series has always been about that existential need to know oneself and all the grit that that mess entails. So many people meander through life going through the motions of What They’re Supposed To Do And Want (Peggy constantly calls this out) even if it does not feel right, and I find it exhausting to watch in my personal life. Happens all the time, the same cycle repeats as we get older. People will do whatever according to The Plan, even if that plan is horrifying; you know that people will do anything to alleviate their anxiety.

Watching Pete’s story unfold is a great example. A lot of his life looks glossy and blue blooded on the outside, and he has a nice ending (which he deserves IMO) after being continually cut down to size. His parents never supported him despite their illusions of wealth which were of course, illusions. In spite of all that it turns out he’s learned lessons and figured out a way to move forward in a productive way, and even though he idolises Don to the end, Pete will always have that edge over him. Pete’s grappling with and eventual personal rejection of his Insatiable Want and WASPy expectations ruined what he had in the first place with Trudy. But hey,

woof.

So what the hell did Don exactly need? He doesn’t know what he wants, but he is Wanting. As the series went on, I kept thinking of Rachel Menken. Well.. Rachel Menken Katz, RIP. Was she continually on Don’s mind like her sister implied? We even get a fur salesman coda in that midseason premiere, a weird David Lynch dream. What was Rachel offering him? She read him for filth and got on with her life, we love to see it. Later, Don writes “People tell us who they are, but we ignore them: because we want them to be who we want them to be“. Since Anna is the key to Dick Whitman, how can he exist in the wake of her death? And then the news of Rachel’s passing hits him like a Mack truck. Trauma bonds are a hell of a drug.

Speaking of important women in Don’s life passing away, I’d be remiss if I didn’t of course mention Betty. Betty had a hell of a ride, man. A complex character often hated by the dense men of Reddit, she is a gorgeous albeit difficult product of her time. She is isolated and married to a career loner, in a time when women were housewives and treated as children. Is it so shocking that she would lash out and have no idea how to process her own emotions? Marrying Henry and getting on a path to pursue a postgraduate degree in psychology showed real growth for her, and having that cut so short is heartbreaking.

Don’s dreamy vision of Rachel in the fur maybe foreshadowed Betty’s eventual demise, as she was also photographed in an ad for a fur coat when she was still a model.

In the very beginning of Season 1, Roger makes an offhand remark that psychiatry is ‘just this year’s candy pink stove’ in regards to housewives. Lo and behold, the Rye mansion Betty later shares with Henry has that exact little detail in their kitchen. She has a cancer diagnosis fake out, and then the terminal one— which means Don must confront his own bullshit from his motherless childhood with his own kids. Betty is a complex character, she struggles to find her voice and to be understood. I hate that she got cut down as she was on the right track. Overall, Betty is a product of her environment and breaking free of those expectations is remarkably difficult, even after your parents are long gone. But she did show growth. I often think of one of the final conversations we see her have with Sally.

B: “I’ve learned to believe people when they tell you it’s over. They don’t want to say it, so it’s usually the truth.”

S: “I’ll be with you. I won’t let you give up.”

B: “I know that.. and I don’t want you to think I’m a quitter. I’ve fought for plenty in my life. I know when it’s over. It’s not a weakness, it’s been a gift to me. To know when to move on.”

And hey, Don finally has a lightbulb moment in the series finale. His experience at the hippie retreat with Leonard reinforces Anna’s dead-on read of his unending sense of feeling alone interfering with his own happiness. Right before that he rings Peggy, “I never got to say goodbye to you”. If he could get out of his own way, things would be a lot easier. Ain’t that the fucking truth? And per usual, Don’s personal lowest points bring him great satisfaction professionally; that Coca-Cola hilltop ad and of course, the events of Shut the Door, Have a Seat. The back half of the final season shows the walls of 70s cynicism slowly closing in. McCann, corporate consolidation, and now fucking everything is owned by private equity. Or Unilever.

What does it all mean? Well, don’t be like Don, for one. Watching these characters evolve over the course of the series is a real treat, and rewatching is a richer experience as I get older. Personal evolution is vital and it is never a straight line. Grief and love are one in the same and neverending, but how we choose to cope is of the utmost importance.

And that’s that! See you soon.

Mad Men s6e7: Man With A Plan

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“My mother can go to hell, and Ted Chaough can fly her there!”

Don sure needs to be in control, huh? Jesus Christ. He’s an insidious prick to Ted, does a whole dominant thing with Sylvia, all to feel some modicum of control in the chaos of the merger. Didn’t quite think that one through, apparently. At least Roger got to fire Burt Peterson again.

One of Don’s central traits is his endless yearning for freedom while also craving control over his life. I mean, the guy reinvents himself at every available turn, what else were you expecting? He’s consistently isolated as a result. People flit in and out of his life all the time, he’s seemingly never Not surrounded by people, but because he doesn’t truly connect with anyone he’ll always be alone.

image courtesy of Tumblr

Natch, we spend our lives thinking we’re the lead in our own movie. Truth of the matter is that nobody thinks about us as much as we fucking do, but we all intrinsically understand that we’re a part of something larger. Don doesn’t really get this. And yeah yeah yeah– it’s a show, he’s the protagonist, our beloved antihero, but he elevates himself to this bizarre mountaintop where he cannot fail, he can only Be Failed. Good way to avoid responsibility, if that’s your bag.

The way Ted settles in for a margarine rap sesh with his colleagues as opposed to Don sitting alone brooding in his corner office says a lot; these guys are night and day, camaraderie and spitballing versus fear and lofty expectations. Don expects everyone in his life to be a skosh like Sylvia in that lovely hotel room; waiting with bated breath for him to appear and liven shit up. Instead of collaborating with his coworkers, Don wants to be the guy who drops that Perf  Lightbulb Idea(TM) in a moment of pure clarity and meaning, blowing everyone’s fuckin socks off with his brilliance.

image courtesy of Tumblr

As a faux olive branch, Don brings some booze to Ted’s office under the guise of yapping about margarine. What he’s really doing is drinking Ted under the table to assert some sort of dominance, and Peggy is of course grossed out by Don’s behaviour. It’s funny though; as much of a brilliant, mysterious and imposing figure Don may be at the office, Ted will forever have one on Don because he was the one who flew them to that Mohawk meeting. And that’s just suave as hell.

image courtesy of Giphy

Sylvia dreamed that Ted’s plane went down, and that she returned home, back to her life after being adrift. Don of course immediately twists it to mean that she missed him– what’s that about everyone being unbelievably fucking self-involved? As she definitively ends their ongoing affair, Don’s façade crumbles. Dude is grasping at sand.

Of course, Don is entangled in his Alpha Man(TM) horseshit and cannot grok the real meaning of what Sylvia is telling him. At this moment it’s incredibly striking how plain it is that Don is a guy without a real home; he brings his ‘change the conversation‘ work ethos home, and his personal relationships suffer as a result. So while Sylvia feels a great deal of comfort in returning home, Don feels nothing. As Megan talks about her day, his mind reverts to TV static.

As Don zones out, Peggy is busy building a life with Abe in a truly terrible apartment building. We’ve got Pete attempting to care for his mother while trying to get back into Trudy’s good graces. Bob Benson is trying to connect with Joan, who wants her son to thrive in a post-Greg world while navigating a complicated relationship with her mother; Don doesn’t seem to see the value in these sorts of human connections because the moment shit goes remotely sour dude is out the fucking door.

After all, in the very same episode where he split with Betty, he formed a new ad agency. Damn, dude.

“God, you’re a real prick, you know that??”

“Damn it Burt, you stole my goodbye!”

Mad Men s6e6: For Immediate Release

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“You’re just Tarzan, swinging from vine to vine!”

Time to blow up some relationships. Peggy and Abe (by way of Ted), Don and Joan with Jaguar, Pete and Trudy/Tom with a big olllll prostitute, and SCDP with The Merger. Hey Lieutenant, want to get into some trouble??

image courtesy of Youtube

Dr. Rosen is disillusioned that he didn’t perform the first heart transplant in the USA, and Don offers the faux advice of ‘you make your own opportunities’. That’s a real lofty point of view– natch, the rich handsome guy can afford to take absurd chances and do all that shit, but when it comes to someone like Dr. Rosen or Pete Campbell, it’s not that simple. Don is indeed a guy who can swing from vine to vine, get on with it, and fail mostly upwards– but everyone else won’t be so lucky.

Like Sterling Cooper dumping Mohawk to chase American Airlines, CGC had to dump Alfa Romeo to chase Chevy. Turns out Don just happened to fire Jaguar at the right time, even though it means the secret IPO the other partners have been working on is shelved.

Brass tacks, Don is a guy who’s always looking for the fucking escape hatch in literally any situation. Musing with Ted over latenight booze in Detroit, he figures the solution to the current crisis at hand is to combine with CGC; it somewhat mitigates the Jaguar disaster and gives them both a real shot at Chevy. If you don’t like what’s being said, change the conversation. Shake it up.

Remember, Don only likes the beginning of things. The guy’s got a hardon for GM’s futuristic Computer-Designed car, which is certainly the Mustang killer. There’s no photos, it’s a totally new design; all of this is what he likes best, that buzzing feeling of Pure Promise, without any pesky reality to bring it back down to earth. Too bad the Vega turns out to be a big old hooptie. And natch, Don assumes he’s made the right decisions here because, of course, he’s the one who thought of them.

Hoo-ray.

image courtesy of Tumblr

When the Jaguar news hits SCDP, Joan deploys a big old Truth H-bomb and puts Don on notice. As much of a scumbag Herb is, Don hasn’t experienced nearly as .. much of him as Joan. And she ain’t wrong; if she could deal with him, anybody could. Dissolving the relationship with Jaguar so hurriedly, coupled with Don assuming it’s The Right Decision for everyone leaves Joan cold, thinking she did all that for nothing. It’s self-serving and fuckin rude as hell to boot.

As a matter of fact, nobody seems particularly chuffed to see Don in this episode, which is funny because he’s supposedly Our Hero, Our Flawed Protagonist. Pete bristles at him declining dinner together (and later yells at him while falling down the stairs), a stunned Peggy winces at the news of the merger (and then Don has her write a goddamn press release about it), and I’ve already mentioned Joan.

iconic TBH || image courtesy of Giphy

Here’s Pegs, she’s made a new life for herself– new apartment in a changing neighbourhood, working for new agency with a renewed sense of pride in her job. Her handsome-ass boss even kissed her, ooh la la. And bam, Don is back at it trying to forcibly merge all the above with her old life.

Both Peggy and Joan have had Some Bullshit heaped on them due to Don, and here he is attempting to smooth things over.. but in a way where he’s neither welcome nor asking what they want or need; vine to vine. Akin to his marriage(s), he uses the people around him to build a life that makes him feel good about himself, without really knowing or giving a shit about what in the hell these people want or need. Natch, it’s all destined to be a big old mess out of the gate.

image courtesy of AMC

Holy fucking shit, how about Pete Campbell running into his father in law at that whorehouse?  What Pete continually fails to account for is that he’s not Don Draper. He’s married to Trudy, a lady who is generally indifferent to how her disinterest in him has only made him long for her more. He doesn’t have that Draper Charm(TM) nor the charisma.

Pete can’t reinvent himself at every turn; though he doesn’t show it too much, slights and little jabs affect him too much. Back on that LA business trip, Don wanders off to Palm Springs with the Hot Idiots while Pete stayed at the hotel working his ass off. Pete’s a guy who tries incredibly hard to win your favour, while Don naurally assumes you’ll hand it over without batting an eye.

Assuming mutually assured destruction, Pete goes to Kenny for advice on the father in law spotted with a prostitute question. It blows up in his face; Tom has a shitfit and pulls Vick chemical’s business. And when Pete goes to tell Trudy about all of this as some bizarre trump card, he tells her that her father has left him no choice.

But, as Trudy astutely points out, Pete has always had a choice. He just keeps fucking it up and making bad choices. Pete’s overt audacity lacks the critical pairing of Don’s Teflon façade with an otherworldly ability to bounce back from sobering defeats with a plan that sounds juuuust crazy enough to work.. followed up with never bothering to ask anybody if it’s what they might want. Works for Don, but not for everyone else.

“What was your fake name again? Curious George?? You’re a riot.”

Mad Men s6e5: The Flood

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“You don’t have Marx, you’ve got a bottle. Is this what you really want to be to them when they need you??”

What up! Hello, hello, we are back in the room. Let’s get down to it, shall we?

image courtesy of Tumblr

Don has no shortage of epiphanies, but has yet to actually commit to change in any concrete way. Like how his first concern is his mistress when the news hits of MLK’s assassination.. woof, bad look. Maybe the fact that Bobby sees Henry as more of a father figure will be a kick in the pants? Who the hell knows. All he knows of the world is what you show him, Don.

On one end of the spectrum, you have the Horror Movie America that is 1968, with that gargantuan cultural shift over the back half of the decade– as seen with the styles/hair, Peggy’s profesh rise, Dawn being hired, et cetera. And then there’s the people stuck in the same old holding pattern; or in Don’s case, falling back on that familiar pattern of banging around after a prolonged attempt to snap the hell out of it.

So it turns out Peggy and Abe are really wrong for each other, holy shit. She doesn’t get the UES apartment she really wants, while Abe sees the bright side; he imagines raising their hypothetical kids in a more ~diverse place~. K. Peggy is taken aback a bit and happy on the surface since he just revealed way more than he thought he did re:the longview, but also feeling backed into a corner. The age old She Should Be Happy about something like this even if it’s not necessarily what she actually wants. Societal expectations sure are a bitch, especially in 1968; ultimately, they have very different goals.

Ay yi yi, Pete Campbell. MLK is assassinated, and natch he rings up Trudy. Let’s be real, the guy just wants to go home. It’s that splash of self-motivated Pete Campbell Shit masquerading as magnanimous, tale as old as time. When he tells Trudy, “I don’t want you to be alone” he’s really saying he doesn’t want to be alone. Thankfully, Trudy stands her ground; Pete’s made his bed, vainly attempting to forge a connection with his Chinese food delivery guy.

SEETHING || image courtesy of 4plebs

And honestly, this is not to say he isn’t mostly correct in his yelling match with Harry.. but he ratchets it all to the next level because he’s ready to pop the fuck off as it is. Like the dearly departed Dr. King, an exceptional and gifted man, Pete feels as if he has been suddenly ripped from his family. But it’s only sudden to him– we could all see it coming from the fucking International Space Station. Don’t shit where you eat, Pete.

Man, Planet of the Apes is iconic; 1968 is a great year for movies. Don takes Bobby to see it to get out of the house, a tried and true method of dealing with tragic events. Between showings, Bobby chats with the usher about how people like going to the movies when they’re sad; they share a human moment, and Don sees his son in a different light, Bobby’s becoming a more fully formed individual. He’s picked out something Don himself does, inferred it, and Don is taken aback.

image courtesy of AMC

“I don’t think I ever wanted to be the man who loves children.. but from the moment they’re born, that baby comes out and you act proud and excited and hand out cigars but you don’t feel anything. Especially if you had a difficult childhood. You want to love them, but you don’t. And the fact that you’re faking that feeling makes you wonder if your own father had the same problem.
Then one day they get older, and you see them do something, and you feel that feeling that you were pretending to have.. and it feels like your heart is going to explode.”

His monologue about his kids is Don at his best and his most honest, a very rare combination– and to me, the most lovable and relatable. In spite of him and Betty arguing over Adult Shit like logistics, Don shows how much he loves his kids and understands them in his own way, bit by bit. And the feelings he describes about the emptiness and lack of engagement upon their birth and how a sudden blaze of terrifying love can kick in later and punch him square in the solar plexus make sense. Evolving as a man in the 60s; heaps of societal expectations there too. It’s a lot to take in, and Megan is quiet while she processes this information dump.

Brass tacks, I think it’s obvious that Don does love his kids a great deal– he’s not a fuckin sociopath, after all. He is, however, completely terrible at sustaining nearly any kind of healthy relationship for a long period of time. And Don being Don, he’s both emotionally perceptive enough to catch when he becomes alienated from his children, and sensitive enough to feel badly about it.. and hopeless enough to do not much of anything about it.

And even though Roger’s friend Randall is a goddamned lunatic, he has a great bit of burnout wisdom.

“This is an opportunity. The heavens are telling us to change.”

Mad Men s6e4: To Have & To Hold

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“Everybody’s scared there.. women crying in the ladies’ room, men crying in the elevator. It sounds like New Year’s Eve when they empty the garbage, there are so many bottles.. and I told you about that poor man hanging himself in his office.”

Tale as old as tiiiime; this is an episode about assumptions, about reality versus whatever the hell you invent in your head, with a splash of infidelity, as always. We get some good Joan time, some eerily persistent swingers, Don being a massive hypocritical flop person, Peggy’s ketchup v. catsup nonsense, the whole gamete.

image courtesy of Den of Geek

On the DL, Don yearns for someone to love Dick Whitman; but because of how he lives his life, he shoots himself in the foot before he can even get it near the door.  He will continue to establish relationships that undermine the very idea that anyone could ever love Dick; they don’t even get a chance, because he’s operating as if Dick Whitman died. To Don, that part of his life symbolises poverty, negative damaging shit, feeling worthless, low self esteem, not being respected or noticed. Don Draper is the inverse; urbane, strong, cultured, fuckin rich, overconfident. Obvi he’s still Dick in his private moments; but imagine the man we’d see if he had grown from those formative Dick Whitman attributes instead of killing it all off to start anew.

I feel like when Don realises that someone has fallen more for his invented persona — fanciful high society for Betty, ingenious adman boss for Megan — than for who he really is, he suffers the most and lashes out.. in spite of not actually being his whole goddamned self around either of them.

I SEE YOU. || image courtesy of ONTD

Even the way he perceives both Betty and Megan is deeply flawed, and it’s really coming to a head with Megan and her career momentum. She’s doing a ~love scene~ with some rando on her soap and Don ain’t pleased. Independent Megan is establishing her own career and ain’t the housecat that Don’s pigeonholed her to be. The love scene is one thing, but what really grinds his gears is that she’s doing this shit on her own. Megan’s got some agency; and when good things inevitably come her way, Don can’t deal with it. The more she advances with acting, the less she’s his little vixen in the palace on Park Avenue and more of an actual fucking human being. IMAGINE THAT. Fuckin fragile man feelings, good god.

image courtesy of Giphy

Speaking of which.. Peggy’s stepped out on Don, popping over to CGC and apparently also in the running for Heinz Ketchup, thanks to Stan’s trust in her regarding Project K.. not a great look, but it’s business I guess. Surprise! Don listens through the door to hear her pitch (rather than ‘letting his imagination run wild’). Since he can’t realistically do much about it in the profesh world and isn’t going to have a shitfit in front of Pete, Stan, and Ted, he instead takes it out on Megan.

Don’s always banging around to find something, to solve something, hoping to achieve some sort of peace or resolution within himself; even Sylvia tells him she prays got him to find some damn peace. This also makes me think of the s2 premiere, and when he mails that copy of Meditations in an Emergency to Anna.

Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

Joan’s BFF Kate is in town, helping her recalibrate a touch. Both that visit and an argument with the persistently tonedeaf Harry Crane, she’s reminded not only of what she did to reach this position, but of all the flop assumptions everyone makes about her. Harry clearly knows about Joan’s night with stank-ass Herb, and has invented an entire world in his head where it’s the Single Reason Joan belongs in that partners meeting, when it’s fucking obvious exactly how important Joan has been to both Sterling Cooper and SCDP.

Self-important Harry even imagines that Joan has gone straight to the other partners to drop a dime on him, when of course she would never bother them with something so utterly trivial. Don’t get it twisted though, dude’s got legit beef– he started the television department from the ground up, and that’s a big achievement. However, he’s got nobody to blame but himself for not advocating for a partnership when the time was right. When Harry brings up what Joan did in the dark, everyone is pretty rattled; they’d rather focus on her boss professional skills than Herb.

image courtesy of TheTVCritic

Post-Electric Circus club night out, Kate reminds Joan that what she’s achieved isn’t an everyday thing; it’s a really goddamned impressive position. It doesn’t matter how it happened, but it matters that she’s there now. With a refreshed perspective, she hands over some of her less glamorous duties to the super capable Dawn. Fuck yeah, Joan– delegate that shit.

“Believe it or not, ‘my daughter is a partner at a Madison Avenue advertising firm’ is something I enjoy saying!”