Well, technology is a glittering lure. But there is a rare occasion when the public can be engaged on a level beyond flash – if they have a sentimental bond with the product…. [I]n Greek, “nostalgia” literally means “the pain from an old wound.” It’s a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone.

            – Mad Men (Season 1, Episode 13: “The Wheel”)

Certainly you’ll recall that particular Don Draper pitch from an early standout episode of Mad Men, co-written by series creator Matthew Weiner. While embedded with countless themes, Mad Men for much of its viewing audience was a show about connecting with a past, a time and setting of which it was never really a part, but which is both recognizable and sentimental (a topic that Tsapovsky & Frosh examine in a recent Media, Culture and Society article). This pitch was meant to sell a tangible product – the Kodak Carousel – but even in his fictional universe, Don Draper probably wasn’t the first ad man to think of using nostalgia as a vehicle for sales. Today, we see many examples of long gone television series and films finding new life, sold to audiences on the premise of memory.

I use Mad Men as an example for televised nostalgia both because of its recency and its thematic engagement with these ideas, but there are a few threads that connect the show to the current trend of resurrected nostalgia properties on television. There’s the fact that Mad Men existed as a show about memory (or the avoidance thereof) and rebirth. And there’s the recognition of the platform on which many of the show’s fans first encountered it – Netflix, the burgeoning media giant that is in the process of giving new life to several beloved properties. One can imagine Ted Sarandos and his brethren watching “The Wheel” a time or two before making some of their recent programming decisions. A “twinge in your heart” for Full House? Well, for a certain generation, perhaps.

The much buzzed about Fuller House, a many-years-later follow-up to the 1990s ABC staple, certainly does not mark the first time programmers have banked on nostalgia to build audiences. Even Full House progenitor The Brady Bunch had a (bizarrely soapy) sequel in 1990. But for at least the first half century of television history, the medium had little tendency to look back on itself. As scholars like Holdsworth (2011) and others have noted, the notion of television as an ephemeral or disposable media form is diminishing. To some extent, television series as ephemera (and this follows for film as well) began to lose steam early in the post-network era as rerun culture took hold on cable and in syndication. Now, though, television series exist in readily accessible archives, and the economic value of that access is not insignificant; just look at FX Networks’ success with #EverySimpsonsEver or Hulu’s recent acquisition of exclusive streaming rights to Seinfeld for a rumored $700,000 an episode (the show launches on the platform in late June).

To some extent, the archival presence of series like these (among hundreds of others) removes those shows from time. I know many undergraduate students who love shows like Full House and Seinfeld, even though most of those shows’ episodes were produced before the students were born. Yet for many others who experienced them years ago on an episodic basis, these shows are important signifiers of a bygone time – Draper’s “sentimental bond.” The cross section of these two experiences may be key in influencing platforms like Netflix to take a chance on new episodes of a series like Full House. Even 25 years later, in a more cynical television landscape, it’s a property that can resonate with both young and old.

Of course, there are nostalgia properties that would appear far less foolproof, like Netflix’s upcoming prequel to 2001 film Wet Hot American Summer. The film itself was a commercial flop that gained a cult audience through DVD and streaming. It also featured a huge ensemble cast including Amy Poehler, Paul Rudd, and Bradley Cooper, whose names are far more recognizable now than they were at the time of the film’s release, and all of whom have returned for First Day of Camp (and are joined by big name newcomers like Jon Hamm and Kristen Wiig). It may be the case that Netflix will find greater success with their spinoff series than the original film could ever hope of boasting. And this is not the first time that Netflix has revived a cult property, as the (10 years delayed) fourth season of Arrested Development can attest.

The reboot phenomenon is certainly not unique to Netflix, and over the top providers are not the only content hosts that are reaching into the past for programming ideas. ABC’s fall schedule includes The Muppets, a behind-the-scenes, mockumentary-style look at the fictional entertainers. Showtime’s on-again, off-again reboot of Twin Peaks is back on, with director David Lynch on board. Fox is bringing back The X-Files for a limited series event in January (after doing the same for 24 last season). And there are a surprising number of other nostalgia properties coming to the small screen soon.

Is there more to this phenomenon than just a reflexive turn among contemporary television audiences? It’s doubtful that all of these properties will be commercially or critically successful, so these reboots are not safe bets for networks and streaming services any more than a series featuring a well known and likeable star would be (remember The Michael J. Fox Show?). Perhaps television as it stands now is effectively eradicating time. Already, newcomers to a show like Arrested Development can watch seasons one through four in a single binge, utterly unaware of the lapse in time that made the fourth season notable (and controversial). In a few years, a viewer will watch the first two seasons of Twin Peaks and dive right in to the sequel, or watch early episodes of Full House interspersed with the travails of grownup D.J. Tanner on Fuller House.

Even as we have constructed television in terms beyond the ephemeral, we still often think of the medium as a vehicle for public memory, when in fact the nostalgic “twinge” or “bond” is an individual one. As content demands increase, and more money is spent resurrecting the old, it will be interesting to see if audiences still crave more of their favorites, or seek a renaissance of the new.

Fig. 1 — Mad Men from first …

Fig. 2 — …to last.

Post by Piers Britton, University of Redlands

In a manner befitting a series that flourished on its reputation for visual elegance, the finale of Mad Men, “Person to Person,” rewarded attentive viewers with an ending that subtly called upon the pilot episode. The opening of “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” was a gentle right-to-left tracking shot across a crowded bar, which ends with a dolly-in to the back of Don Draper’s head (Fig. 1). The close of “Person to Person” also begins with a right-to-left tracking shot, across the cliff-top lawns of what is supposed to be the Esalen Institute, and in the final moments there is again a dolly-in – but this time to a frontal close-up of the enigmatically smiling Don, eyes closed (Fig. 2). It is tempting to read the shift from rear to front view as a reification of narrative closure: in “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” (and in the opening titles of every subsequent episode) the over-the-shoulder shot of Don draws us into the world of Mad Men, into what lies before us and before him. The frontal shot conversely seems to evoke finality; it acts as a caesura, sealing off behind Don all that we have witnessed in the last eight years, compartmentalizing the series as something done and complete.

If such a visual metaphor was intended, it was perhaps the only way of drawing a clear line under Mad Men, a series that was never going to lend itself stylistically to dramatic resolution in the same way as, say, its AMC sibling Breaking Bad. Mad Men begins and ends with Don Draper, and as the frequently reiterated over-the-shoulder shot from the pilot suggests, his experiences willy-nilly offer the dominant point of view for the audience. Yet Mad Men is not Don’s story: it has always been a ensemble piece, and a resolutely untidy one at that. Some characters have abruptly disappeared (Sal Romano, Paul Kinsey), some others have wandered in and out of focus (Ken Cosgrove, Trudy Campbell, Bert Cooper), while six protagonists apart from Don (Peggy Olson, Pete Campbell, Betty and Sally Draper, Roger Sterling and Joan Holloway) have remained in, or somewhere near, the spotlight throughout. No recurring character had an “arc” in the conventionally understood sense of the word, for Mad Men has remained fundamentally skeptical about its characters’ capacity to grow and change according to some Save The Cat-type screenwriting logic. It is unsurprising, then, that the final few episodes seemed to be casting more lines than they reeled in, with Peggy and Roger embarking on new romantic relationships while Pete and Joan embrace or create new business opportunities. Given what we have seen of these characters over seven seasons, there is no good reason to envisage any of these new departures as “happily-ever-after” scenarios. Indeed, the only real certitude offered by the finale is that of Betty’s impending death from lung cancer. Even the closure of Don’s narrative is provisional: though the narrative does not make it explicit, that final smile seemed to many commentators to suggest that the series ends exactly as Don is dreaming up the famous “Hilltop” Coca-Cola ad that served, appropriately, as Mad Men’s coda. (Showrunner Matthew Weiner has since confirmed this.) Earlier in the episode, Stan Rizzo pointed out that Don’s going AWOL is a recurring pattern, while Peggy, in her person-to-person call with Don, underscored the fact that he could easily return to work at McCann. With these cues in mind, the road trip ending with his Esalen revelation should surely be read not as culminating catharsis but as yet another interlude.

Fig. 3 — Spaces of Madernity

So, if dramatic closure of character storylines was not on the cards, what exactly is it that became complete with the finale of Mad Men? Or, to put it another way, how can we understand the series’ structure in retrospect? One obvious way of answering this—perhaps the only incontrovertible way—is to note that the series’ story spans almost exactly a decade: starting in March 1960, the Mad Men narrative apparently ends in late October or November 1970. Mad Men in toto is thus an encapsulation of the Sixties, a fact that is likely to be remembered long after its narrative twists, recapitulations, and volte faces have faded from the memory of all but the most devoted fans. The “Sixties-ness” of Mad Men is in part marked by historical events that variously affect the protagonists’ work, emotional life, and attitudes, from the 1960 presidential election to the 1970 Newsweek gender discrimination lawsuit. More obviously, and from certain vantage points more potently, Mad Men is defined by the 1960s in terms of visual style. Quite apart from offering a much publicized parade of vintage fashions, period props and stylish environments, the show visually evokes late Fifties and Sixties films in its cinematography, and especially its lighting. Evocation is clearly not the same thing as reconstruction, pace detractors who have raised complaints about narrowness of focus or lack of “authenticity.” A good deal of commentary—some neutral and some adverse—has focused on the fact that Mad Men is a show about the Sixties created by a man who is, as Robert Lloyd succinctly put it, “too young to really remember them.” In itself this claim isn’t particularly useful.  It would be hard to mistake any scene from Mad Men, with its wonderfully stately, stylized dialogue, as an attempt to recreate Sixties mass-media vernacular, however sumptuously persuasive the visual recreation of the period might seem. Indeed, the claim that Weiner is “too young” has curiosity value precisely because he was born in the Sixties: observing that Julian Fellowes is too young to recall the era of Downton Abbey would hardly have the same piquancy.

Fig. 4 — Symptoms of Madmenalaria

That said, if the show did not in any absolute sense espouse period authenticity it seems hard to overstate its Sixties-philiac tendencies. Visual pleasure in Sixties styling looms large, as a key part of Mad Men’s identity, not just in the “raw” text of the episodes but also in its astonishingly consistent, cumulatively powerful paratexts, most notably the documentary videos on the Mad Men section of AMC’s website. “Making of Mad Men” and later “Inside… Mad Men” featurettes have appeared on the site throughout the series run, increasingly focusing on the micro-narrative of each episode and the characters’ motivations, as explicated by the actors portraying them, and by Matthew Weiner. After four seasons the “Fashion File” feature that accompanied each episode was replaced by a second regular video, “Fashion and Style,” based around interviews with the costume designer and property master or set decorator. If the “Inside …” videos speak to Mad Men’s “depth,” which is to say the ways in which it can be recognized as quality TV, worthy of the multiple awards and plaudits it has won, the “Fashion and Style” videos correspondingly speak to the importance of “surface.” Mad Men has reworked and mobilized the so-called “mid-century modern” to generate not just media buzz but an extraordinarily influential brand. The series’ fetishizing of Sixties clothes, hairstyles, accessories, cars and interior decoration has spawned an array of imitative or broadly competitive programming in the US and overseas, from Magic City via The Hour and Masters of Sex to Vegas and Aquarius. Mad Men has made a somewhat improbable style guru of its costume designer, Janie Bryant, it has begotten clothing lines for both men and women at Banana Republic and Brooks Brothers, and more broadly it has produced a fad that one commentator drily named “Madmenalaria.”

As Mad Men coalesced into a whole in the only way that television series can, by ending, then in so doing it underscored the fact that like Don Draper it has always embodied—even depended on—a duality. Other film and television texts may have de facto thrived on a tension between the espousal of emotional truthfulness on one hand and preoccupation with “superficial” visual pleasures on the other, but Mad Men is perhaps the first in which this dichotomy has been so smoothly reconciled into a branding strategy. The final ambivalent meeting of inner worlds at Esalen—with Don either/both finding spiritual peace and/or dreaming up the basis for a career-defining ad—could not more perfectly have encapsulated the obverse and reverse of the Mad Men coin.

In particular, I want to reflect on the fact that when we talk of the aesthetic of a particular text or textual set—e.g. “the Mad Men aesthetic,” or “the Sherlock aesthetic”—the word aesthetic is really just a conventionalized alternative to the term style. Looking back on recent scholarship on television aesthetics (including my own work), I find unacknowledged tensions between the adjectival form of “aesthetic”—used in formations such as aesthetic judgment, aesthetic attitude, aesthetic object and aesthetic category—and the singular nounal form, which connotes the cluster of formal and stylistic properties that define a particular text or textual set.  These two usages are now routinely yoked to one another in the literature of television studies—as in the recent collection Television Aesthetics and Style—in spite of the fact that they represent very different kinds of engagement with texts, and have very different academic histories and profiles. In television studies and elsewhere, the adjectival form of “aesthetic” almost invariably points to an evaluative project that has its roots in Enlightenment debates about the nature of taste and the ontological status of art.  Such debates, which not only address the difference between categories (such as the beautiful and the sublime), but also account for the pleasures of art and distinguish art from non-art, have had considerable influence.  Over the last two hundred years, Enlightenment aesthetics has profoundly affected the critical study of literature, music and the fine arts in the academy, as well as journalistic artistic criticism and the rhetoric of the art markets.  One of its most enduring effects has been the formation of artistic canons – and corresponding exclusions.  Of late, scholars such as Jason Mittell, Jason Jacobs, and Sarah Cardwell have championed this kind of evaluative approach in television studies.[1]  Thus, Cardwell feels able to claim that certain television programs “are more likely than others to proffer aesthetic qualities valuable to the television aesthetician,”[2] while Mittell more bluntly speaks of identifying a given program not only as “great” but also “better than others.”[3]  This approach has inevitably been controversial in a discipline historically driven by the imperatives of cultural studies, which does not recognize absolute or transcendental values and always seeks to locate value judgments in discursively specific contexts.

The nounal form of “aesthetic,” on the other hand, tends to be used in analyses of different formal and stylistic elements within a given medium and text, not in arguments concerning excellence or its absence.  Engagement with “an aesthetic” in this sense ought to be less contentious for television studies than evaluative aesthetics à la Cardwell and Mittell.  Articulating elements and principles of design and style, and considering how or why they might be discernible in a given text or cluster of texts, does not per se constitute a value judgment about that text’s relative status.  Indeed, I would argue that formal analysis should not be considered a function of aesthetics at all: connections between formal analysis and aesthetic judgment were only ever historically contingent, not inherent, in humanistic disciplines such as art history and literary studies.  My initial academic formation was in art history, where analysis of form and style has always been a crucial disciplinary tool.  Its usefulness as such has not dwindled as old models privileging connoisseurship, narratives of “great men,” and the autonomous history of style have given place over the last half-century to studies informed by Marxist social history, feminism, semiotics, reception theory, and so on.  At no point, from the time of Wölfflin and Riegl to the present, has formal or stylistic analysis in art history required aesthetics as a justificatory prop.

“Judgement of Paris,” Joseph Hauber (1819, Neue Pinakothek, Munich)

So why do some scholars of television feel the need to invoke aesthetics, rather than being content with the less portentous terms form and style?  I wonder if the urge does not stem from a collective desire to lend gravitas to a project that for some is still a questionable distraction from the “real” work of television studies.  Perhaps we are too used to the now-automatic legitimation conferred by the politically informed, latently activist ethos of cultural studies, and feel exposed when we fear we are operating outside its ambit.  If so, the irony is that by taking refuge under the aegis of aesthetics, scholars of television risk creating a false dichotomy.  When formal and stylistic analysis are lumped with aesthetics, as opposed to being understood as tools in their own right, it is easy to lose sight of the fact they can inform a wide array of interpretive engagements with television – including the work done by those of us whom Cardwell would class as “aesthetics skeptics.”  In other words, unlike aesthetics-as-evaluation, formal and stylistic analysis need not cut and cross with the longstanding concerns of television studies.

I’m grateful to Eliza Rodriguez y Gibson and Paul Booth for the conversations, critique and suggestions that helped shape this post.

[1]  See, for example, the introduction and the chapters by Cardwell and Mittell in Jacobs and Peacock. [2] Jacobs and Peacock, p. 38. [3] Ibid., pp. 3-4.

Larry Sanders is also a workplace sitcom, which has its own trajectory that coincides with the development of television as a medium as well as society’s shifting identity politics. Thus what resonated with me more was the show’s attention toward Beverly Barnes (Penny Johnson), Sanders’ efficient, long-suffering personal assistant. Unlike Sanders, who hosts his own show, Barnes’ work–which consists of but is not limited to scheduling meetings, booking reservations, intuiting psychological quirks, and mastering interpersonal relations–is invisible. Her success at work is reflected in Sanders’ performance, not on its own substantial merits. We can only see how integral she is to the process in her absence or in the instances when the show fixes its attention on her own subjectivity. She’s so good at her job that she is often unappreciated by Sanders, who is usually caught up in a personal drama over an ex-wife or social rival to thank her on- or off-screen. The political implications of Barnes’ professional invisibility are further exacerbated by being the only black woman in the office, which she occasionally calls out to her employers’ (white, male) discomfort. She is also associated with the telephone, technology that often symbolizes women’s denigrated labor at home or in the office.

Mad Men–primarily a workplace melodrama that uses advertising as a metaphor for creating television–concluded its fifth season a few weeks ago. SCDP hired its first black administrative assistant after a racist prank backfired and forced the agency to show its hand. Dawn Chambers (Teyonah Parris) may be good at running Don Draper’s desk but, in contrast to Barnes and Larry Sanders, even the show (purposely?) has little interest in exploring her acumen or the pride she takes in her work, much less her social life. However, exploring the invisible labor of its white female principals is something the show was interested in from the beginning. In a previous season, copy writer Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss) reminds a free-lancer that office manager Joan Harris Holloway (Christina Hendricks) runs the place, which (once again) gets eclipsed by her figure and presumed status as “just” a secretary. Olson fires him for sketching a cartoon of Holloway performing a sex act on someone who essentially shares her job but is assumed to be her boss. Holloway reminds Olson that they can always make another drawing. They can also turn you out if it’s decided to be in the company’s best interest.

As a feminist media scholar, I am interested in mapping out the professional identities of women who bring music to other mediums as supervisors, licensors, booking agents, and composers. Music became a research interest as it developed out of my own experiences as a fan, musician, deejay, blogger, and Girls Rock Camp volunteer. Though my efforts have been recognized, they have also received a fair amount of derision or condescension (i.e., Rock Camp is “cute”)–if they were noticed at all. So I am invigorated by production scholars’ tactical explorations of below-the-line labor and production identities that blur the line in an effort to offer up such work for critical inquiry. I am excited to be in a field that takes gender and labor seriously, as evident by Cinema Journal devoting a section of short essays on the subject in a forthcoming issue.

Yet in approaching this work, I am also reminded of a colleague who invoked Foucault in seminar last semester. Borrowing from his musings on the pantopticon, she posited that visibility is a trap. Thus when we go about the work of making production environments, reception practices, texts, and contexts visible and audible, we should be mindful of how we are framing the work behind sight and sound, the political implications behind this work, and the responsibility placed on us to challenge that work rather than essentialize or distort it through our own (mis)perceptions.

I realize the potential clumsiness of using two fictional characters as illustrative examples of invisible media labor. Johnson and Hendricks are actresses and therefore firmly above the line. Studying representation was my way into media studies and watching these characters confront and negotiate racist, sexist, and misogynist workplace behavior while conducting personal lives influenced my research. But the laborers we interview aren’t always working from a script. So in designing research projects, conducting interviews, sketching thick descriptions, and preparing manuscripts, we must always remember that in our quest for visibility we must think beyond the page and screen.

In advertising, the “creative” department makes the ads. Distinct from agency account executives (who service the client) or agency media buyers (who buy media time and space), the “creatives” are responsible for generating the advertising concept and executing it textually and visually. Through the first half of the twentieth century, copywriting departments produced text (“copy”), often guided by account executives, and art departments illustrated it. Historically, what is now called the creative was regarded as a service supplemental to media buying.

Before the 1960s, hard sell advertising predominated. Hard sell’s repetitive, annoying, grating “reasons why” to buy was the favored strategy when advertisers believed consumers were “stupid” and the market an undifferentiated mass. By the 1960s, however, advertisers realized that consumers could be sophisticated and that markets are varied and segmented. Advertisers turned to the strategies of subtle, humorous, high concept, and emotionally appealing soft sell advertising. Doyle Dane Bernbach’s 1960s Volkswagen ads, a humorous critique of 1950s hard sell automobile advertising, became the iconographic campaign of the “Creative Revolution.” Copywriters such as Bill Bernbach championed the idea that advertising is an art, not a science.

The post-1960s emphasis on creativity solves a problem for the ad industry. Despite the scientistic behaviorism dominating market research, advertisers cannot predict which advertising appeals will resonate with consumers. So if advertising is not a science but an art, creative advertising may succeed where data-driven advertising may not. Hence, since the 1960s the creatives have rhetorically positioned themselves not as instrumentalists pursuing selling goals but as artists expressing authentic meaning because only though artistry will advertising succeed in touching and moving consumers.

As depicted in The Pitch, the advertising industry is a hotbed of artistic romanticism. In each episode, two agencies meet a client, who explains a marketing problem. The agencies retreat to their offices to develop an advertising concept and a pitch to win the account. Scenes of brainstorming follow, intercut with talking heads explaining themselves directly to the camera. Finally, each agency presents its pitch and one wins the account.

Dramatic tension centers on which agency can prove they are the most creative. Their creativity, however, must be rooted in authenticity, as one agency leader explains in episode 102: “It doesn’t need to be clever, it needs to be honest.” In fact, being glib could undermine them: “We don’t want to outsmart ourselves with clever lines.”

Creative success in advertising should reflect a commitment to meaning; referring to a creative director, another explains, “He’s not in it for the power or the ego, he’s in it for the work.” Referring to careers in advertising, one man explains, “If you’re not committed, if you’re not passionate, you’re not going to be here a long time.” Passion, the byword of the creative industries, is something that cannot be learned. As one agency director explains, “You can’t teach passion, you have to hire passion.”

For one creative director, “The creative process is baring your soul.” Describing pitching to potential clients, another explains, “When you get up in front of them to present your ideas, it’s like being naked and hoping they don’t laugh at you.” Hence, whatever instrumental goal they may be working towards, such as improving the public image of a trash company or selling Subway breakfast sandwiches, these advertising makers insist on their artistic integrity, claiming “the work” is an authentic revelation of self.

The cult of romanticism, and its rhetorical strategies of passion and soulfulness, will continue to thrive in advertising because advertisers are not able to predict which ideas resonate with consumers, despite market research data. The Pitch documents the legacy of the Creative Revolution by showing proponents of creativity in advertising insisting on the value of artfulness over scientism.  Whether or not we believe that the advertising creatives featured in The Pitch believe in the authenticity of their creative work, they are certainly selling it. Hard.

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.

Its link to the Playboy franchise aside, The Playboy Club’s demise is likely due to the fact that it could not fulfill its promise to deliver a period workplace drama similar in quality to AMC’s Mad Men. In early press about the fall premiere season, The Playboy Club was frequently linked to ABC’s Pan Am and both were pegged as Mad Men replicas. To differentiate themselves from Mad Men, both promised to highlight women’s empowerment in 1960s America. To this end, NBC framed the workplace at the center of The Playboy Club as one “Where the men hold the key but the women run the show.” ABC similarly suggested that the women of Pan Am “do it all and they do it at 30,000 feet.” Given The Playboy Club’s cancellation and Pan Am’s drop in ratings, both shows’ visions of “empowerment” haven’t convincingly mobilized the past to capture contemporary viewers’ interest.

The Playboy Club and Pan Am follow the personal and professional lives of young, beautiful, (mostly) white single women who work for their financial independence and explore their sexual desires. Despite the glitz and glam of their jobs, the women in both shows work in equally regimented workplaces that use humiliating inspections to insure adherence to sexist costuming and grooming requirements. In both shows women are harassed and humiliated by male superiors, coworkers, and clients. These occurrences are difficult to watch, yet are important to the plots of programs that truly wish to explore gender roles and women’s empowerment—past or present. Here’s where both shows disappoint: instead of exploring how lead female characters’ alliances and ambitions help them overcome their challenges, the shows’ characters spend most of their time dallying in fairly traditional (and less controversial) romances and sexual exploits. As a result, it’s difficult to tell if the shows’ portrayals of women are empowering or demeaning.

The failures of The Playboy Club and Pan Am raise the question of why we turn to period television, especially post-Mad Men. Do we want a rose-colored view of the past? A smug assurance that we’ve progressed far from these times? Or do we simply wish to imagine what it was like “back then”? Mad Men’s strength has been its ability to encourage us to see the links between our past and our present—something that its imitators (at least this season) failed to replicate. Without this, the copycat shows succeeded at recreating the veneer of the original, but omitted the social commentary at its core. To be fair, Mad Men‘s complexity developed with time and at its best delivers an audience not much bigger than The Playboy Club or Pan Am. Ironically, in all three shows time figures prominently, yet The Playboy Club and Pan Am no longer have the time necessary to develop their stories.

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.

Despite the centrality of advertising to the show’s narrative, until this season the profession itself has received a relatively uncomplicated treatment, making it one of the more dependable aspects of this often topsy-turvy world. This steadfastness provides one of the show’s most tantalizing allures, spinning fantasies of dapper account men and dazzling creativity, of an economics of abundance and unrepentant consumerist fantasies. This season, though, the business has grappled with more existential dilemmas, ones that get at the nature of advertising itself. Mad Men, and its mad men and women, have been on a quest to redefine what advertising is, dramatizing the radical changes that the field underwent during the 1960s.

Most pressing this season has been the fate of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, the agency that dawned at the end of last season and which has shape-shifted in nearly every episode since—from scrappy start up to spunky boutique, from confident newcomer to jilted also-ran. This has not only laid the groundwork for fantastic personal drama (watch Don quake with nerves! See Roger reach new heights of tragic buffoonery!), but also made visible the pressures that face the agency as it struggles to find its competitive niche. In this episode, those stresses come to a head, as layoffs transpire, the partners put up their own money to extend the agency’s credit line, and they wrestle futilely for new work. A veritable Madison Avenue-style David vs. Goliath is at hand, challenging not just the mettle of the show’s leading characters, but also whether small business can compete against behemoth corporations. What can an agency like theirs bring to the table that a larger, more established firm, cannot?

The most surprising answer given this episode is ethics. “For over 25 years we devoted ourselves to a product for which good work is irrelevant, because people can’t stop themselves from buying it,” Don writes in his New York Times letter bemoaning cigarettes. “A product that never improves, that causes illness, and that makes people unhappy. But there was money in it. A lot of money.” For an ad man ostensibly to come out against a client base that provides ample revenue—especially during a moment of crisis, as their agency finds itself in—smacks of an almost pathological gumption, a righteousness unfathomable even a few episodes prior (especially when remembering the reaction, in an earlier episode, to Peggy’s criticism of a client that did not employ people of color). This attempt to make the agency stand for something mirrors Don’s own efforts, however fitful, to turn over a new leaf in his personal life; though like those more personal efforts, this move is primarily a creative one that does not necessarily match the gusto of its surface with substance. The deliberate images of numerous characters smoking in the show’s final movements visualize this, but that is only the most overt display of the duality, even hypocrisy, of Don’s actions. Instead, ethical advertising emerges as the most cunning sales pitch yet. And Don realizes, once again, that he is narrative to be written, a product to be sold.

From a historical standpoint, it is fitting that these introspections are entering at this juncture. The 1960s found advertising fraught with both innovation and crisis, beset on one side by the political and social changes of the era and on the other by brash new ways of thinking among advertisers. Among the changes initiated, solidified, and/or galvanized during this time period are the exploration of previously neglected markets, the establishment of new techniques of market research, and the adoption of more outlandish and unconventional creative techniques. This season has flirted with all these developments, and more—from the recurring themes of market segmentation and research, to renewed continuity with public relations and publicity stunts, to the politics of advertising as a practice. But most crucially, each of these issues comes to bear in recalibrating how the agency—and the people within it—think about what it is that they do. Rather than mere “shenanigans,” the outcome of this episode will be a new future for an agency where promotion and image may become as important as, and potential drivers for, the work of advertising itself.

The title similarly serves as a metaphor for Peggy’s Playtex gloves that help sustain the “meaningful life a woman leads when work is done.” Peggy, though, knowingly betrays the “sanitary” divisions proposed in her pitch between work and meaningful life. Peggy is most satisfied with her life when she’s professionally successful, and the movement of Abe from her bedroom to her office actually seems to enhance her happiness and self-confidence. This is in stark contrast to the behavior of the men at SCDP—for them, an unexpected visit by a wife, or child, is often framed as an improper violation of their professional space. Similarly, Don Draper’s ability to return to his domestic life unaffected by his dalliances in the city made him a compelling antihero in the show’s early seasons.

The slow disintegration of Don’s steady facade has, in fact, been a primary arc throughout the series, and  “Chinese Wall” directly explores the ways that the professional lives of the ad men impinge upon their family lives. What’s surprising, though, is that some of the men in this episode actually seem to process this cost. Pete misses out on the birth of his daughter, while Roger seems to pay the most for his mistakes in this episode. In his last scene, he’s reduced to a professional and a personal failure, completely alone while sitting next to his “loving wife.” Earlier in the episode, we find him alone in a hotel room. Guilt-ridden, he confesses to Joan that he’s known about the loss of Lucky Strike for weeks and hasn’t even bothered flying to Raleigh/Durham to try and win back their business. Surprisingly, though, Joan reestablishes a professional boundary with Roger and simply asks: “what am I supposed to do with this information?”

In an episode (and season) filled with professional and personal revelations, Joan’s response is spot on. It could even be seen to mirror the response of the series’ viewers to the past several episodes, particularly those involving Don’s physical and emotional breakdowns. What indeed are we supposed to do with the vulnerability of the seemingly impenetrable Don Draper? Mad Men has been building to such moments from the finale of season one that left Don sitting alone in his empty suburban home. But even as the series has been driven by a desire to undo the many myths of Don Draper, and, by extension, white American manhood, it’s also consistently relied upon the appeal of Draper’s style, creative strength, sexual prowess, and his ability to police the boundaries between the personal and the professional.

There’s something to be said for the secrets that Don held on to so dearly. Half of the pleasure of watching the show has been constantly trying to figure out what he is thinking or feeling beneath his inscrutable facade. What might we learn about Don through his seemingly empty, and often drunken, stares? Moreover, Mad Men’s interrogation of postwar white American masculinity often centers on key moments in which its women characters—Rachel, Betty, Peggy, Faye, etc.—provide their own reading of Don. In recent episodes, though, we’ve seen a new Don Draper, a man who’s lost control of his drinking, who’s prone to panic attacks and fits of weeping, and who’s even started a diary to help clear his thoughts. Don is a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and in its varied attempts to directly convey Don’s inner conflict, Mad Men has arguably destabilized its own structure by taking away the most fascinating characteristic of its lead, namely his inscrutability.

However, at the end of “Chinese Wall,” the show’s antihero seems to be returning to form. After Don has yet another office liaison, this time with Megan, Faye reveals that she has compromised herself personally and professionally for him. Don doesn’t seem to bat an eye in the process. Don’s tender and distanced exchange with Faye at the episode’s conclusion distinctly references that between Roger and Jane. And in using Roger as Don’s foil, Mad Men once again tries to give us the Don Draper that we’ve been encouraged, both textually and extratextually, to admire and to desire. Unfortunately, in these final scenes, Don’s philandering and inhuman detachment feel more like a retread than a reinvigoration. Perhaps the final two episodes will more effectively restore some of the mystery that Don has possessed in the best moments of the series, while also putting his particular vision of American masculinity in a closer dialogue with the culture and politics of 1965.