Mad Men: Smoke, Whisky and the Cost of Reinvention

Nobody wants only what they are asking for

A client wants an advertisement, but also reassurance that their company still matters. An employee wants a better job, but also the satisfaction of being recognised by a particular person. Someone wants a marriage to look right because admitting that it feels wrong would create a problem they have no idea how to solve.

Mad Men is exceptionally good at that gap. The dialogue is clear, often funny, and full of people making requests that are only partly about the thing being discussed. You do not need to decode every line. You simply become more alert to who is trying to impress whom.

The agency setting earns its place because the work is interesting in its own right. A pitch has a shape: the nerves beforehand, the attempt to read the client, the moment an idea either begins to connect or plainly does not. Even when Don takes command, there are other people in the room with bills, ambitions and wounded pride riding on the result.

I particularly like that the series lets professional ability coexist with personal failings. Someone can be right about an advertisement and dreadful to a colleague. Admiring the work does not require pretending the person is admirable in every other respect.

Hamm makes the silences count

Don could easily be an exercise in suits, cigarettes and brooding. Hamm gives him much more movement than that. He can be charming when he wants the room, abrupt when he wants it cleared, and difficult to read when someone asks for a more ordinary kind of closeness.

The performance is especially good when Don is listening. There is often a slight delay before the polished response arrives. Sometimes it feels like calculation; sometimes the confidence seems to have briefly deserted him. Hamm does not have to announce the difference.

That makes Don's conversations more involving than a straightforward procession of revelations. There is plenty to discover, but the interest is not exhausted by finding out a fact about him. The show keeps asking how a person behaves once they have decided which version of themselves the world is going to see.

Nor does it make his talent a magic defence. The same reserve that looks impressive across a conference table can be infuriating across a kitchen table. Mad Men understands why people are drawn to him without insisting that their attraction settles the question of what he is like to live with.

Peggy, Joan and the actual work of an office

Elisabeth Moss gives Peggy Olson an entirely different starting point. She arrives as a new secretary, learning a workplace whose rules are not all written down. Moss catches the watchfulness of being new: deciding when to speak, how seriously to take advice, and whether the person offering it is being kind.

Peggy's scenes are absorbing because she has a mind of her own without arriving fully equipped to deal with everyone else's. The uncertainty is not a defect to rush past. It makes her attempts to find a place in the office worth following.

Christina Hendricks, as Joan Holloway, supplies another kind of intelligence. Joan knows how the place runs and how much of that knowledge goes unacknowledged. Hendricks can make an instruction sound helpful and final at the same time. She is equally good when Joan has understood a slight but has decided not to give its author the satisfaction of a visible reaction.

Their encounters are more interesting than a simple story of friendship or rivalry. They bring different experience to the same workplace, and a piece of advice can contain practical wisdom, irritation and a defence of how things have always been done.

Mad Men gives all that attention to work that other dramas would leave in the background. Who organises the room, who smooths over a problem, whose contribution gets remembered after the meeting: the office feels occupied, not merely decorated.

The suits are not the whole story

The clothes and rooms tell you how much appearances matter before anyone opens their mouth. At Sterling Cooper, a carefully chosen suit can be part of a pitch; at home, the immaculate furniture helps sell the idea that a life is in order.

Then the performances make those spaces less comfortable. January Jones is very good as Betty Draper, whose poise does not make her contentment a settled matter. Jones allows an apparently composed domestic scene to become strained without turning every feeling into a speech. Betty's world has its own expectations and disappointments; it is not simply somewhere Don goes between more important scenes.

The period detail also affects how people interact. Information moves through telephone calls, letters, conversations and what happens to be on television. A silence has somewhere to sit. People can be unavailable, and the person at the other end of that unavailability has to live with it for a while.

The series does not treat the decade as a row of historical landmarks to tick off. Change reaches people through their jobs, families and assumptions about what will last. Some notice early. Others would prefer another drink. That feels much more convincing than giving everybody advance knowledge of the history they are living through.

It is much funnier than the posters suggest

John Slattery makes Roger Sterling marvellous company. Roger has the ease of someone accustomed to being indulged and the wit to make the indulgence seem reasonable. Slattery can land a line with very little visible preparation, as though the room has provided him with a minor amusement.

Vincent Kartheiser gets a less comfortable sort of comedy from Pete Campbell. Pete wants status so badly that even a small disappointment can become a personal affront. Kartheiser is excellent at letting us see the embarrassment beneath the entitlement. He can be intensely irritating and still entirely worth watching.

Those two are a large part of why calling Mad Men merely a solemn prestige drama misses the pleasure of it. There are bruised egos everywhere, and the show knows how ridiculous people become when they are trying to preserve their dignity. Robert Morse's Bert Cooper adds his own wonderfully particular rhythm to the office.

The humour makes the sadness more effective. These people are not permanently posed for an important portrait. They can be petty, unexpectedly generous, sharp and foolish, sometimes within the same conversation. I want to spend time with them because the writing allows that range, not because every hour promises a grand statement about the human condition.