‘Mad Men’
A
I am a heterosexual male with a girlfriend. I also love Don Draper — and I ?don’t care.
I love him because I understand him in the way you understand a person after watching seven seasons of well-written television. I love him because I have seen who he is at his core and what made him that way. I watched him dominate boardrooms with life-changing pitches, and I’ve seen him at his bottom after a divorce left him helpless.
So the premiere of the final half-season of “Mad Men” brings me back to the fundamental truth of my formative years: I love Don Draper.
Sunday’s episode, “Severance,” gives you just about every aspect of Don. Don is single now, he has his job back, and we get to see where he will go with this open-ended portion of ?his life.
We see him killing it in casting rooms, sleeping around with flight attendants and sorting through potential women for the night with his apartment complex’s concierge.
When Rachel Menken, a woman he had an affair with in the first season, dies, Draper attends her Shiva. When he later hooks up with a waitress in a dark alley, it can be assumed it’s because she looks like the late mistress.
To understand how Don acts in this episode, you might need to know some history.
In the first half of the season, in one of my all-time favorite episodes, “The Strategy,” Peggy Olson asks Don what he has to worry about.
“That I never did anything, and that I don’t have anyone,” Don says.
The primary motive of the majority of Don’s actions is the fundamental need to be loved, understood and appreciated. He has never truly felt that, except from maybe Anna Draper.
But I would argue that it is Rachel Menken who had the best chance of truly reaching Don.
It was to her that Don first confided in and told his backstory. He wanted to run away with her and leave his New York life behind. Don had a meltdown in front of her about the meaninglessness of life. He felt real things for her.
So when he met her sister in Sunday’s episode and saw Rachel’s children, Don struggled. The sister says she lived the life she always wanted, and Don’s eyes begin welling up. It is a mixture of happiness for a person he truly cared for and a fear that he never did.
The golden rule of TV writing is that people never change. Don still sleeps around, and Peggy can still be difficult to get along with. Ken Cosgrove, the talented writer who got stuck in the joyless work of account services, has his opportunity to go back to what he loves when he is fired in this episode.
But in the end, he takes a job with the company’s client so that he can be a pain in the ass to his old colleagues. Despite trying so hard to be an intellectual who wanted more than just a job, he still would choose sticking it to his old friends and taking another boring job than doing something else.
The premiere carried the show along in a way that reflected on the past to address the present. Characters don’t change, but their paths have and will continue to.
Oh, and I love Don Draper.
