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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