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Saturday, April 4, 2015

Mad Men fans hit US museums to commemorate the show’s finale



Anna Correa, a devout Mad Men fan, has travelled all the way from her native Buenos Aires to a sleepy residential neighbourhood in Queens, New York, to pay her respects to her favorite show, which will end in seven weeks’ time. She’s arrived at Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men, an exhibition at the Museum of the Moving Image, which explores identity, the workplace and the American dream through the eyes of hard-living advertising executive Don Draper.
“I’m very emotional,” Correa says. The museum show includes artifacts from the show’s production, a recreation of its writers’ room and the notes and journal entries Weiner, the show’s creator, made when dreaming up Don, his protégé Peggy Olson, the suave ad man Roger Sterling, and the dastardly Pete Campbell. “I’m sad, but I’m also very excited,” Correa added about the final stretch of episodes, which begin airing in the US this Sunday and in the UK on Thursday.
Speculation about the way the show will conclude has reached fever pitch among fans. “There seem to be the big four: The Wire, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and Mad Men are the shows that people talk about with this breathless genuflection,” says Robert Thompson, a professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University. “And in all cases there was the same anticipation. With The Sopranos there was almost a drumroll to the final episode. And Breaking Bad had built up so much buzz that by the time the final episode rolled around it was huge. I think that is happening with Mad Men as well.”



It’s no doubt that the show, which has been compared to the novels of John Cheever, has been hugely influential. The show’s sleek wardrobe inspired a line of clothing at Banana Republic; the sets invigorated a renewed interest in mid-century modern furniture design; and, in 2014, Mad Men’s messy workplace politics even got the show namechecked by President Obama in the State of the Union address.

Mad Men also put AMC, which previously just re-ran old films (hence the name, American Movie Classics), on the map. “It was our first scripted series and it set a very high bar for us in terms of quality and distinction, which was our objective in moving into original series,” says Linda Schupack, the executive vice president of marketing for AMC. Without the critical success of Mad Men, the network never would have gone on to make Breaking Bad or The Walking Dead, currently the highest-rated show in the US.
However, the influence that Mad Men has had, and the ardour it has inspired among its hardcore fans, has always been disproportionate to the show’s actual popularity. When the series debuted in 2007, it averaged less than a million US viewers for the season, though it won the Emmy for outstanding drama series, as it did for the next three years. Mad Men’s popular peak came in 2012, when season five averaged 2.7 million viewers in the US, but ratings dipped back down to just over 2 million for the first half of season seven. In 2012 Mad Men also broke an Emmy record, but this time for the most nominations for a show (17), without winning a single award that year.
Still, according to curator Barbara Miller, fans have been flocking to the Momi to see the Mad Men exhibition. There, it’s possible to visit Don Draper’s office from Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce after he and his coworkers struck out to create their own firm; marvel at the avocado-coloured oven in Betty Draper’s Ossining, New York, home where she mourned the assassination of President Kennedy; get close to the blood-spattered green dress that Joan Harris wore after a freak lawnmower accident in the office; and get Zou Bisou Bisou lodged in your head as it plays on a continuous loop next to the black dress with the diaphanous sleeves that Megan Draper wore when performing the song for her new husband.


This exhibition, which AMC helped co-ordinate with Momi, is just one of dozens of events the network has programmed around the country to ramp up excitement for the series’ final bow. In New York, Lincoln Center held a free marathon of “essential episodes” of the show curated by Weiner; the New York Public Library curated a reading list of books that have appeared on the show and will host a live discussion with Weiner just days after the series finale airs; and the Brooklyn Academy of Music is holding a two-day film festival of movies like Mirage that either were on Mad Men or inspired it. At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Weiner and cast members participated in discussions following screenings of several episodes. In Washington DC, the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History held a donation ceremony where props, scripts, and costumes from the program were added to the museum’s permanent collection.

Dwight Bowers, curator of entertainment history at the Museum of American History, says he specifically pursued a donation from the show, “primarily because they did their research and everything is presented with an authenticity. It was a good way of following popular culture and society through popular culture.”
Since nothing says Mad Men like fashion, drinking and smoking, the Museum of American History will preserve one of Don Draper’s famous suits, the bar cart from his office, and several reproductions of alcohol bottles and cigarette packs of the era. The Smithsonian also received an original copy of the season one finale, The Wheel, in which Don gives his memorable pitch to Kodak about how the slide projector creates a sense of nostalgia, using images from his own life to sell his idea. The public won’t get to view these artifacts until 2018, when they are part of a large retrospective of American culture.
AMC went to the country’s most venerated cultural institutions to burnish Mad Men’s already prestigious image. “We feel Mad Men is such a rich and layered show and has meant so much to our network and the TV landscape in general, we were looking for ways to almost enshrine it and to allow the fans to engage in the show in a particular way and to have a semi-permanent way to celebrate the end of Mad Men,” says Schupack.
Gabriele Caroti, the director of BAMcinématek who worked with Weiner to make selections for its mini Mad Men film festival, says that the show is more than worthy of the attention from museums. “Mad Men in itself has become a cultural institution,” he says.


With its richly textured world and depth of characterisation, he show has created a global community of fans. “Internationally people are coming together in their appreciation of this series and the connection to these characters, and I find it moving,” says Miller, who sifted through over 5,500 items sent by Lionsgate, the company that produces the show, for the exhibition.

Yet it’s the show’s writing, rather than its trappings, that will determine whether it will last for the ages. In the Momi exhibition, Weiner introduces defining scenes from each season. We see Pete tell Bert Cooper that Don Draper is really Dick Whitman and Cooper not give a damn; Betty confront Don about his infidelity; Don dismiss Peggy when she quits; and, a few seasons later, seek forgiveness when he is laid low; we see Don write his letter about why he won’t work with tobacco clients.
Visitors crowd around a small bench taking in these indelible moments. They watch them so fervently it’s as if they’ve never seen them before; as if these moments might disappear after the series finale. But no matter what happens to Don in that final hour, which has been the subject of much speculation, they will always have the full show’s 92 hours, and that is the best artefact of all.

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