Rico
Why we love to let ‘Mad Men’ drive us mad. The final season of the most provocative, elegant and intense drama series on TV is here. Don Draper, Peggy Olson and the colleagues from Sterling, Cooper & Partners come back to bring closure to their outstanding stories full of new dramas, and of course, old habits.
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Season 7 begins in Costa Rica on Monday, April 4, at 8:00pm on HBO.
[/one_third]Mad Men is a show made by compulsives, for compulsives, that rewards compulsivity. But when you find yourself looking for messages and answers in the pattern of a dress, it’s time to step back and just enjoy it.
Mad Men is so carefully and deliberately put together that it’s invariably satisfying to pull apart and examine each gear, even as it pulls itself—or at least its characters, its industry, its era—apart. No show about destruction has ever been so beautifully constructed, and few shows leave you feeling so deeply sad about humanity even as you covet their desk accessories. This is a show about things whose beautiful surfaces mask the constant decay.
Starting Monday (at 8pm on HBO in Costa Rica), perhaps the greatest show in television’s history (we can argue about this) begins its last season on April 14. Or at least half of it begins: Its 14 episodes will be split in two, with seven episodes airing this year and seven next.
In the first episode of the first season of Mad Men, Don Draper is convinced that he is, in the parlance of the times, a big fat zero: “I’m over,” he laments, “and they’re finally going to know it.” It is March, 1960, and the creative genius of the Sterling Cooper advertising agency cannot imagine a new way to sell the pleasurable death sticks that have kept his company afloat for years. Until he does. Lucky Strike tobacco, he thinks, in a pure spasm of inspiration: It’s toasted.
Now it’s Don who is toasted. Six seasons later – nine years in the show’s chronology – he has finally run out of road. When we last saw Don, magnificently played by Jon Hamm, he was stripped bare: loathed by his oldest child; a stranger to his other children; pitied by his ex-wife; abandoned by his current wife; his friends – well, Don never had friends.
He only ever had his bottle, and his secrets, and his job.
By the end of Season 6, (Season 6 is now available in Costa Rica on NetFlix) even that had disappeared, as his fellow partners gave him the boot, furious not at Don’s boozing or womanizing – there would be no one to turn on the lights at the office if they got rid of the boozers and womanizers – but at the fact that he seemed no longer to believe in advertising. That was the one transgression they couldn’t forgive.
That’s right: At the end of last season, in arguably the show’s finest moment, Don began to change. The show’s creator and main writer, Matthew Weiner, has said he has had the final image in his head for a long time. Could it be Don dead? In a pit of flames? (Don’s been reading Dante’s Inferno, a gift from another ill-chosen girlfriend.)
Where will Don’s journey take him?
The last season ended around Thanksgiving, 1968. So where will Don be in 1969? He has always been confounded by the future.
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