Hugh Hefner's Playboy's Penthouse

**This is the first in our new series: Mediating the Past, which focuses on how the past is produced, constructed, distributed, branded and received through various media.

About six months before Mad Men’s very first episode takes place, Hugh Hefner debuted a syndicated television program entitled Playboy’s Penthouse.  It was an early example of intra-corporate cross-media promotion, in which—to invoke the era’s term of art and Hefner’s actual words—the “foremost exponent of sick humor.” Lenny Bruce, explained “I would never satirize the obvious,” before wondering aloud, on the program, who would advertise on such a program.  Bruce concluded his ad-libbed ruminations by gibing Hefner directly: “I’m glad you’ve got some guts…you’re not interested in the people that don’t have any money.”

Maybe it was the mise-en-scène, but I recalled this line again during the extended swinging penthouse party sequence in Mad Men‘s fifth season premiere episode (of an apparently contractually finalized seven).  Back with new episodes after 17 months, the media saturation leading up to its return has had me thinking that Mad Men and the cable channel AMC on which it is shown have “got some guts” in rather the way Bruce meant.

For a couple months now, middlebrow America has been utterly awash in Mad Men.  The New York Times ran so many profiles, interviews, style pieces, analyses, reflections, recaps, think-pieces, reviews, political tie-ins, beverage tie-ins, and other pieces, that another media reporter, Joe Flint (@JBflint), tweeted after the season premiere ratings were revealed: “Mad Men draws 3.5 million viewers.  I didn’t know NYT’s staff was that big.”  The Washington Post meanwhile actually ran a piece on the number of Mad Men pieces it ran leading up to the season premiere:  22 including that piece itself!  Newsweek contrived a special retro issue timed to correspond with the new season’s premiere. The New Yorker offers online readers weekly episode synopses, as does Slate, Salon and Esquire (which also lists “all things Mad Men” on its site, and sprinkles its hard copy pages with regular think pieces about the show it has suggested “is the greatest piece of sustained television ever made“).  Even nominally non-commercial public service network National Public Radio ran stories about Mad Men on “Fresh Air,” “Morning Edition,” “Weekend Edition,” “All Things Considered,” it’s online food blog, and “Fresh Air” again!  For certain media consumers, Mad Men has been impossible to ignore.  Have you been hailed by Mad Men? (hint: you’re halfway through another piece about it).

While this media surge contributed to this season’s premiere becoming Mad Men’s highest rated episode ever, ratings are not really the point (it still had 5.5 million fewer viewers than AMC’s The Walking Dead finale had the week before).  Mad Men brings other kinds of value to AMC:  the wealthiest viewers on cable, industry prestige (AMC Networks promotes itself with Mad Men’s four consecutive Emmys and three Golden Globes), and overwhelming (and overwhelmingly positive) media coverage.  Mad Men, in other words, sustains AMC’s brand, providing a specific and prestigious visibility that extends beyond those who actually watch.  Visibility like this matters for attracting more viewers, for setting ad rates, for attracting “quality” program producers, but also, crucially for a cable channel, for negotiating with MSOs and setting carriage fees. (It also helps Lionsgate continue to “monetize” Mad Men beyond AMC).

Branding for AMC is all the more important as it transitions within a changing television industry.  Begun in 1984 to monetize vaults of otherwise unseen old movies, this is no longer seen as the most profitable way to use a library of films much less a branded cable channel.  As AMC sought to expand its revenue (beyond cable carriage fees) by introducing commercials, it began to alter its programming to attract audiences of the type (younger, richer) and size (bigger) advertisers would pay for.  In an era when old movie libraries are now more profitably being licensed to Netflix, Amazon, and iTunes, however, AMC has had to accelerate its rebranding efforts around a significant transformation (which is why “AMC” no longer stands for “American Movie Classics”) without the loss of its most valuable asset, a predominately male audience achieved through non-sports programming.  This audience came to AMC for the Three Stooges marathons and old Westerns.  They’ve been asked to stay for Mad Men.

Actually, not even so much for Mad Men, but for what Mad Men says about AMC, what its presence reflects about the channel.  Set in the milieu of mid-century advertising, it is itself functioning as an advertisement for a channel once associated with mid-century movies and now deriving increasing revenue from advertisements.  Offering viewers the opportunity to feel simultaneously nostalgic for and superior to a version of an earlier era, Mad Men actually achieves something close to what Hugh Hefner only aspired to for his 1959 program, a “sophisticated weekly get together of the people we dig and who dig us.”  If “sophisticated” once again means straight white sex, smoking, booze, and terse conversation, Mad Men at least presents it in ways that feel comparatively and flatteringly grown up for television today.  Rather than zombie walkers and fidelity to a comic book, Mad Men offers well-dressed Manhattanite drinkers and fidelity to the style of an era.  Middlebrow media has not been voluntarily filled with stories on the characters’ inner lives, much less the fashion, style, and recipes of the higher-rated The Walking Dead.  HBO’s hits Game of Thrones and Boardwalk Empire (never mind Mad Men‘s other timeslot competition The Good Wife) have not had their own tabs on The New Yorker website.  But Mad Men has.  It was born to help rebrand AMC.  It lives on to embody and advertise that new brand’s meaning.  In this capacity it is meant for viewers, sure, but it is almost perfectly suited to attract and flatter the imaginations of advertisers, reporters, and the mediasphere more generally.  The show’s value is not entirely dependent upon its immediate ratings.  This is a point lost on would-be imitators like ABC’s Pan Am and NBC’s Hefner-endorsed The Playboy Club, but it is critical to making a show set in the past point to the future of television.  It has got some guts.

Splitting in two, however, would not be a narrative gimmick invented by creative writers for the character, but instead a legal gimmick imagined by creative lawyers.  The U.S. legal system has been busy parceling ownership of intellectual property recently estimated to generate $1 billion annually.  The conflict between DC’s parent company Time Warner and the estates of Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster involves copyright and trademark, work-for-hire and rights termination.  But it also demonstrates the ways in which, for 21^st century media companies, the value of intellectual property is forever and complexly entangled with the narratives it offers.

Consider Smallville:  after ten seasons of serial narrative featuring the adventures of an initially youthful Clark Kent learning to become what every viewer already knew he must become, the literally-titled “Finale” episodes finally returned us to where we started before Smallville ever aired: with Superman.

There are two ways to understand this inevitable if disconcerting return to the start.  The first was articulated nearly 40 years ago by Umberto Eco who argued that for Superman to remain Superman, the mythical character we know, he can never really do anything profoundly new.  Every Superman narrative must start over again at a “virtual new beginning” and essentially repeat the story that made him Superman.  If he were to move on from where the story last left off, our hero would be located in time, within a specific continuity, and thus he would begin a process of consumption that could only, ultimately, lead to death.  As a modern myth, Superman is instead meant to be eternal.  Smallville simply delayed this virtual new beginning for more than 200 episodes as the novel events of Clark’s life before he became Superman inched inevitably nearer the globally familiar, 73-year-old myth that is Superman.

As I have written elsewhere, Smallville‘s engagement of corporate property through the indefinite balance of iteration and attenuation has both semiotic and economic implications.  What holds for myth also holds for branding and the maintenance of trademark.  Superman’s story can’t really change much or he is no longer Superman.  As character or property, truly moving forward can lead only to the end.  To avoid this he must instead always start over.  This helps explain the logic of renumbering DC will put into practice this fall.  It is why the feature films continually revisit Superman’s origins.  It is why Smallville could only ever end with where we had already been.  It is why splitting in two would likely be devastating.  Superman is the myth attracting the audience and the property that Time Warner values.  But this value diminishes if his story is not told enough, so the trick is to render him inexhaustible, allowing him to be consumed without dying.

For the second way of understanding the finale, then, recall another set of comic heroes, Calvin and Hobbes, in a strip in which the eminently reasonable Hobbes asks Calvin how he can ever expect his comic books to become valuable if every kid in America is also carefully saving five copies, sealed in airtight plastic bags.  These books won’t be consumed, they won’t be rare, and they therefore won’t gain in value.  Calvin simply suggests, “We’re all counting on the other guy’s mom to throw them away.”

What Calvin implicitly understood was something Michael Thompson had called rubbish theory to explain why the value of some cultural objects is transient while for others it is durable.  Transient objects lose value inexorably from the moment they are first exchanged.  Durable objects, meanwhile, increase in value over time and are perceived to persist indefinitely into the future.

A transient object eventually loses all value.  Everyone (and their moms) will throw it out.  It becomes rubbish.  But its very lack of value suggests the possibility of transformation.  This is the paradox of Calvin’s insight—he knew that only after the comics are considered rubbish could they start to gain in value.  But as Hobbes intuited, such shifts can be riskily dependent on the uncertain actions of others.  Calvin was holding on to his comics to demonstrate they could persist indefinitely into the future even while hoping everyone else would perceive of their copies as losing all value.

Our current moment, as Smallville demonstrates, is characterized by corporate efforts to do Calvin one better.  Not satisfied with the uncertainty of allowing property to become rubbish, hoping it will be revalued, the culture industries are trying everything to instill their textual productions with built-in durability.  If Smallville leaves us where we started, with Superman again, it offers us Superman retroactively reproduced as the afterlife of a decade of the television series.

Thus the significance of the finale’s final reassertion of the property, the brand, and the character:  Clark atop the Daily Planet building, pulling his shirt open at the chest, revealing a red “S” on blue tights (filling the screen with a final realization of the promise obliquely made in the pilot episode’s much reproduced iconic image) while a version of John Williams’ indomitable theme from 1978’s Superman swells and the series ends.  Thus did Smallville finally catch the narrative up to the start of Superman’s story, his virtual new beginning now novel again.

Despite such extreme semiotic efforts to maintain intellectual property, is the revaluing process of cultural production that easy to short-circuit?  In point of fact, of course, value is not a quality of the text per se.  It is a quality the audience gives a text through interactions and social practices.  Durability is the side effect of labor at the point of consumption, around and about the object, the work of watching, that generates value.  Efforts to bypass the audience as the (always uncertain) source of value notwithstanding, the audience and the culture industries remain crucially interdependent.  If Smallville can teach us anything, then, it may be to both admire and shudder at Lex’s metatextual profundity: “We have a destiny together, Clark… only on different sides.”

AMC was reportedly demanding that future episodes of Mad Men run several minutes shorter to make room for more advertisements, that more explicit product integration be accommodated, and that per-episode costs be reduced by eliminating some cast members.  Mad Men is a program narratively set in an advertising agency.  It has been used by AMC as a fulcrum in the cable channel’s attempts to transition from an exclusively carriage-fee to an increasingly advertiser-based revenue stream.  So these demands are not surprising.

On the other hand, Mad Men signals for AMC the switch from “classic” movie programming to a growing palette of well publicized and critically well received original productions.  Mad Men‘s first four seasons have garnered vast acclaim, won multiple awards, attracted new (and slightly younger) viewers, and put AMC on Madison Avenue’s map.  One might say it has successfully made over AMC, producing a newly identifiable and desirable brand (for advertisers and certain viewers).  So the fact that a settlement was ultimately reached and Mad Men will have three more seasons (albeit with “contained” budgets, two-minute-shorter episodes, and more prominent product placement) is also not surprising.

What would have been surprising would have been if AMC had refused to renew the program and simply cancelled the show absent its demands being met.  But here’s the thing:  it would have been surprising, but no longer unthinkable.

At one time a network might have been grateful or felt indebted or at least tried to maintain the tent pole foisted by such an important show for as long as possible (think of NBC’s outrageous offerings to Warner Bros to keep ER and Friends on the air in the 1990s).  Things have changed.  It is no longer impossible to imagine that AMC might move on, leaving its signature show behind.  As it is, new episodes will not be seen until March 2012, 14 or 15 months after the most recent episode.  AMC has 4 other new shows to debut this year.  And Mad Men has never had stellar ratings.  It is not even currently the highest rated show on AMC (The Walking Dead has it beat).  Most important, however, it comes down to this:  so far as AMC is concerned, the show’s work is done.  AMC is now an established presence in original programming and advertising.  Thank you very much.

Mad Men meanwhile finds itself in an increasingly common position for primetime programming, one of indeterminate value.  To remain valuable to AMC—and thus worth renewing—Mad Men must remain difficult to see anywhere else and at least a bit less desirable to view after AMC shows it.  That is it must circulate in an economy of scarcity with transient (i.e. diminishing) value.  Thus only clips and promotional footage are legally streamable online, with full episodes restricted to AMC, then for sale on iTunes and months later DVD.  At the same time, however, for Mad Men to put AMC on the map, generate buzz and audiences, attract hip advertisers, and for that matter produce an afterlife—generating both residuals and brand new revenue for its producers beyond AMC, it has to maintain its value and be readily accessible everywhere viewers go.  In other words in addition to being scarce and transient it must also be durable and ubiquitous.  That is why you can Mad Men Yourself, follow people pretending to be characters on Twitter, have bought Barbie Dolls, Banana Republic apparel, DVDs, books, music and many other Mad Men products, and why Weiner went to the fansite “Basket of Kisses” during contract negotiations: maintenance of a vigorous afterlife.

As viewing practices change and the television industry adapts to new economics, even successful programs—much like the labor they employ—are finding their value uncertain, caught between competing and incompatible economies of circulation: scarcity and ubiquity, transience and durability.  While Mad Men‘s future has now been determined, the next successful show’s renewal negotiations are all the more precarious.  Meanwhile, over the final three seasons, Daily Variety suggests that the cast and crew—even “topliners”—are unlikely to receive large raises for their efforts on this hit show, which operates now with “an understanding that producers will have to be creative and judicious with the cast budget going forward.” AMC on the other hand continues its rewarding institutional makeover and Matthew Weiner is set to receive $30 million.