I Can't Afford to Watch 'Mad Men'

Dear Person Who Signs My Checks: I need a raise.  According to Nielsen Media Research, via The Hollywood Reporter, half of Mad Men's audience makes over 100k a year.   This is newsworthy because, while MM has lower ratings than other more popular cable originals, it's the largest concentration of wealthy viewers. Which means, if you're the kind of advertiser whose target has a certain standard of living, it's like shooting gilded fish in a diamond-encrusted barrel [PS, thank you BMW for the limited commercial interruptions].  As part of the "Other Half," it got me thinking.

The reason I love Mad Men, and the reason I always enthusiastically recommend it to other people who do my job (yes, sometimes for 30-45 minutes--guilty, EW), is because it's amazing to me to see a reflection of the climate in the creative professions as changed very little in 50 years.  Don is the face of Sterling Cooper Draper Price, but it's really Peggy and Pete who do all the work.  And it's for clients who are usually presented as obstinately in the way of their own success. It's a device to create narrative tension, and not a covert statement about a group of people, but who hasn't heard a tale similar to the bathing suit company that wants to do more business than bikini-makers without showing an inch of skin?  Or the ham company that did test-marketing in Jewish neighborhoods?  Said tales are usually followed up by a whine about the death of the three-martini lunch and the office wetbar.

On Mad Men, the people in power, the decision makers, the ones who probably most likely resemble that newsworthy demographic, are antagonists to the strivers who outwit their clients' own self-destruction, which is more often than not the result of their refusal to embrace a world that is rapidly changing around them.  Peggy and Pete practically invent viral marketing, only to be chastised for "shenanigans" that aren't even billable.

The characters who are portrayed to have it all are the ones who are held up as cautionary tales about the pitfalls of getting what you want.  Don Draper is, without a doubt, an antihero; on the outside he has everything: house in Westchester, beautiful wife, the reporter in the premiere reminds him.  But Don later points out to Roger that the reporter hasn't done his research: the wife is still in the big house in the bucolic suburb, but another man lives there now.  And it's not because of some external tragedy. Don let all of what he supposedly wanted implode around him because it didn't fill the void inside him.  At the end of the episode, Peggy tells him, "we're all here to please you," which is impossible because even Don can't make himself happy.

It reminds me of a conversation about the film American Beauty I had with an elderly coworker when I was in college.  I had said my mother hated, hated, hated it and I couldn't figure out why.  Delores answered with something I'll never forget: "Well, kids like you, they tell themselves they'll never be like that, and old ladies like me, they've been there and come out the other side; but people that age, they see themselves too much and they don't like what they see."  I know what I see when I watch Mad Men.  But that other half, the newsworthy ones, the one who keep coming back, what do they see?