Mad Men!

With the beginning of this week comes season 6 of Mad Men and the online universe has been entertaining itself in the last few days by endlessly speculating (like here, here and here) about what's going to happen with Don and the gang in the waning days of the series.

For a movie/TV dork like myself, Mad Men is a rewarding experience—as the Onion's AV Club points out, it's a work that holds up to...and really demands...multiple viewings to catch all the character evolution, the symbolism, the drawing out of themes in all their tangled glory.

You comp lit/film studies types out there (and God help you, if you are) will recognize this process as "unpacking[1]."

So, if you're like me (ibid last parenthetical reference) you groove on the notion that the best creative stuff inspires a larger conversation about...um, well...other stuff.

All of this is a long way of saying:  there's a new book of scholarly essays out on Mad Men, courtesy of three academics at the University of Illinois.

I picked up my copy of Mad Men, Mad World at a conversation with the three editors at a recent Chicago Humanities Festival event.

And while I am just now digging into it, I can tell you that the first essay I started, "The Writer as Producer; or, The Hip Figure After HBO," by Michael Szalay, peaked my interest.

Szalay builds on the argument that shows like Mad Men and The Sopranos mirror the workplace/labor relations involved with being a showrunner like David Chase or Matthew Weiner.

"Miller argues (Szalay citing another author here) that HBO 'represents the disorganized, decentralized, flexible post-Fordism of contemporary cultural capitalism. It relies on a variety of workers, many of whom do not have tenure and benefits, who are employed by small companies even when they sell their labor to the giant corporation of Time Warner.' 

HBO showrunners are the nexus of this reliance: they supervise their contingent labor force on behalf of Time Warner, even as they themselves work as temporary employees, albeit exceptionally well-compensated ones. 

It's worth asking whether they prove themselves worthy of this position, and of the financing that comes with it, by proposing series that advertise their willingness to participate in a predatory management structure."

Wow! First of all, I'm proud of the pop culture academics for taking the time to understand how work gets created from a nuts/bolts/money perspective--because it does, IMHO, have an impact (sometimes subtle, sometimes not) on the final product.

Second, on that last highlighted part:  this bears more consideration. The Sopranos is definitely about command and control in the workplace (and at home, in the bedroom, in your shrink's office) and Mad Men definitely covers some of that same territory.

But do I really believe that network execs greenlight based on someone like David Chase demonstrating the ways in which he could be HBO's bitch through The Sopranos?

I dunno--that's fairly diabolical, even for a network exec. I also think it gives them too much credit...or maybe I'm giving Chase too much credit.

At the same time, having worked in a much, much smaller, lower-stakes, less glamorous end of the TV biz, I can certainly agree with this:  "[Terrence Winter (Sopranos writer and creator of Boardwalk Empire) and Matthew Weiner]...represent the downward mobility of the workforce that the successful showrunner must manage even as they underwrite the aspirational hip of the market that the series aims to reach.
....
...writers for commercial television sell their labor to production companies that resell that labor (ed. note:  and at a significant markup) as creative work to networks, which sell airtime (again, at a significant markup) to corporations lured by the prospect of reaching those viewers who consume the creative work in question."

In other words:  nearly everybody is getting pimped. Shocking, that.

And if everybody at SCDP and in TV is engaged in what Pete Campbell refers to as, "business at a very high level"where does Peggy fit into all of this? She quit Don at the end of season 5, of course, so it'll be interesting to see how she's doing...and if she winds up handing Don his ass in pursuing an account, as I fully suspect she will. (Perhaps a Pyrrhic victory as Szalay points out that the whole exchange-of-creative-labor-for-pay is rigged and not in labor's favor...but one takes their victories where they can get 'em.)

Either way, 9pm tonight can't come soon enough!

My only regret is that we can't watch the whole SCDP crew in the present day dealing with things like cord-cutting, cord-nevers and what Nielsen is now referring to as "Zero TV homes."

Making the shit between the commercials is hard enough...but selling companies on the idea of commercials when nobody's watching is a higher order of black magic that even Don Draper would blanch at methinks.

[1] And if there's anything the internet was designed for, it's exactly this process, which essentially involves analyzing, cataloguing and discussing, often in mind-bendingly minute detail, the features and virtues of a creative work. Before the internet, that would have simply been referred to as, 'being a gigantic dork.' The difference now is that the hivemind has actually given this process/state of mind some street cred...