Hello, everyone! This is a post I wrote in 2015 when I said farewell to Mad Men, my all-time favorite TV show. This week marks the 19th anniversary of the show premiering on AMC. And the fact that I share some Mad Men love with my favorite actor provides a unique opportunity to share Mad Men again here. I have modified the post a bit, and I hope you enjoy it.
“Mad Men. I watch endless episodes when I should be working.”
-Damian Lewis
Oh, yes!
Damian, I cannot thank you enough for loving Mad Men; because, first, you give me the chance to write about something that I LOVE very deeply, and second, it is so much fun to share this love for Mad Men with you!
Get back to the quote:
“Watching endless episodes when I should be working.”
I know it well. Very well indeed. I cannot tell you enough about the sleepless nights my husband and I had while we were binge-watching Mad Men. We watch one episode. “One more?” “Oh, yeah. It’s only 10pm”. Second episode gone. “One more?” “Why not? Do we really have to get up early tomorrow?” Done. It’s already past midnight and my husband and I look at each other and simultaneously say “One more?”
So, we watched, exactly like Damian, endless episodes of Mad Men when we should have been sleeping so that we could get up reasonably early for work. And, I don’t know about Damian, but we watched some seasons multiple times, too!
Now, I believe Mad Men is one of the best TV dramas EVER. I find the subtlety and depth of characters simply mesmerizing, and I also genuinely LOVE and care about most of them — Don, Joan, Peggy, Roger, Peter, Betty, Sally, Megan… I really cannot wait to find out where we will find them in the final seven episodes.
source: THRDon Draper is one of the TOP anti-heroes in the golden age of TV along with my beloved Nicholas Brody, Tony Soprano, Walter White and others. He is a charismatic, womanizing, confident ad man on the facade with deep wounds inside thanks to his dark past. Don Draper has an interesting similarity with Nicholas Brody that they both come back from war as a changed man and this very fact plays into their vulnerability and sort of makes them who they are… in quite different ways.
Nicholas Brody comes from war almost as a DEAD man. It is not his choice. As Carrie rightly observes in Q&A, he comes back systematically pulled apart first and then put back together again as “someone else” by his captors. Don Draper, on the other hand, comes back from the Korean War literally as a NEW man. It is his choice. Dick Whitman steals his dead friend’s identity and comes home as Don Draper, becomes an ad man, marries a model, has a couple of kids and makes a pretty good life in the suburbs of New York along with his “second life” in the city.
source: AMCOne fascinating aspect of Mad Men is that the background is always as attractive as the forefront itself. The series’ creator Matthew Weiner pays impeccable attention to period detail and thereby lets us immerse ourselves in the culture, fashion, politics, art of the times while our characters live their lives in front of our very eyes — do business, have affairs, get married, have kids, get divorced, get fired, and die… Don Draper reads Dante’s Inferno… Peggy and Ted go see Rosemary’s Baby… The Sterling Cooper gang hear about the MLK assassination at an important Ad Awards dinner… Fascinating. No wonder, Anne Helen Petersen, a media studies professor at Whitman College, teaches a college course on Mad Men — there is SO MUCH to think about, read about and talk about. That’s what a college course is for. Ha, and I admit she inspires me to design a course on… oh, you know what 🙂
Yes, Mad Men is GREAT, but it is also VERY special because I found out about Damian Lewis thanks to Mad Men! You can read the detailed story, and here is the short version:
I vividly remember the evening we met. I was in my living room. He was on TV. I was watching the Primetime Emmy Awards and rooting for Jon Hamm to win the Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series.
Me: “Come on, Jon, come on!”
Julianna Marguiles: “…and the Emmy goes to… Damian Lewis!”
Me: “Who the hell is Damian Lewis?”
Damian Lewis comes to stage, receives his award and makes a fun speech… We find out he’s, in his own words, “one of those pesky Brits.”
😀
source: BBCInterestingly enough, that evening, Damian Lewis got the Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series, beating a very strong set of competitors, including Bryan Cranston and Jon Hamm; but also Homeland put an end to a four-year Mad Men streak at the Emmys when it received the Outstanding Drama Series Award. And, naturally, Homeland sweeping the Emmys intrigued me to a point that I started watching…
And, the rest is HISTORY!
I told you that Damian loves himself a bit of Mad Men, too! How do I know?
First, you all know Damian tweets rarely. And, one of the tweets he did was on Mad Men!
source: @lewis_damian twitterSecond, I have his full confession on tape 🙂 Damian Lewis made it very open and clear on The Hollywood Reporter Drama Actors Full Uncensored Interview when asked about the one TV role he wanted to play:
Third, we all know our guy is one of the best-dressed men ever. EVER. The style website Mr. Porter reports Damian credits “the fashions worn in TV show Mad Men as his go-to inspiration.”
So, any suspicions whatsoever left about Damian’s man crush on Don Draper?
I don’t think so.
The final seven episodes of Mad Men came to AMC on April 5, 2015 at the exact day and time that Wolf Hall came to PBS Masterpiece. Dear Don, as much as I loved you, my Sunday evenings were reserved for Henry, but I always saw you Mondays 🙂
And NYC gave Mad Men an amazing send off with events varying from an amazing Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men exhibition at the Museum of the Moving Image to Mad Men: The End of an Era celebration at Film Society of Lincoln Center with the creator Matt Weiner and cast members, including Jon Hamm. Even the NY Public Library put together a Mad Men reading list. And, topping it all, Don Draper stared at us constantly from taxi cabs, and public buses, and subway stations… telling us “the ride is almost over.”
Don Draper on NYC Bus, source: DamianistaOne of the events I attended to celebrate the end of an era was a Mad Men conversation with the series creator Matthew Weiner talk at 92nd Street. Weiner loves to talk and he told a number of interesting stories but one stood out for me. Weiner told us that, as they were casting for Don Draper, AMC pushed for a British actor that to play Don Draper; and Weiner knew he would never cast a Brit to play this an American “unless they can fool me… The only person that has ever fooled me…” He paused and said:
“Damian Lewis is pretty good.”
I loved it 🙂
The entire talk is here, and the relevant part starts at 46:08.
As I said good-bye to Don Draper, I was also looking forward to saying hi to Bobby Axelrod because Showtime had picked up Billions as a series. And while I already knew that Damian would deliver Bobby as an enigma for us to figure out, and make us think and talk about him constantly, I had a secret hope that there would be a little tiny subtle piece of Don in Bobby that only the Don Draper super fans can notice and appreciate 🙂 And I believe my dreams came true…
Looking back, Mad Men has become an unexpected bridge between two of my favorite Damian Lewis shows. It was Mad Men that first led me to Homeland and to discovering Damian Lewis in the first place. And years later, it became a bridge to Billions. On the surface, Mad Men and Billions couldn’t be more different, but I have always felt that they share one of the things I love most in television: extraordinary male-female workplace relationships built on trust, mutual respect, intellectual equality, and huge loyalty rather than romance.
One of my favorite things about Billions has always been the relationship between Bobby Axelrod and Wendy Rhoades – so much so that I wrote a 12-part essay about their relationship. In fact, Bobby and Wendy remind me the relationship between Don Draper and Peggy Olson in Mad Men. Both pairs share an extraordinary bond. There is undeniable chemistry, immense trust, fierce loyalty, and an almost instinctive understanding of one another. Both shows occasionally make you wonder whether these relationships might eventually become romantic, yet neither ever takes that path.
The parallels don’t stop there. Wendy leaves Axe Capital to work elsewhere because of a tension with Bobby, just as Peggy leaves Sterling Cooper for another agency after an angry outburst from Don. Those departures are important for both women. They discover who they are outside the shadow of the men they have worked alongside for years. Yet, in the end, both return—not because they have nowhere else to go, but because they realize they are at their best working alongside the person who understands them better than anyone else. But neither relationship turns romantic in the end.
I think that’s exactly what makes both stories so compelling. Bobby and Wendy, like Don and Peggy, prove that the deepest connection between a man and a woman does not have to become a love story. They are confidantes, partners in the trenches, and the person the other turns to in moments of triumph or crisis. Yet they each seek romantic love elsewhere. There is something deeply refreshing about that choice. It celebrates a kind of intimacy that television doesn’t often allow to exist without eventually turning it into romance.
Perhaps none of this is a coincidence. Billions creators Brian Koppelman and David Levien have often spoken about their admiration for Mad Men, and I can’t help but wonder whether Don and Peggy left a lasting impression on the way they conceived Bobby and Wendy. Not as copies, but as echoes. Those two relationships are my favorite part of both shows—and one of the biggest reasons I keep returning to them.
And with this, Happy 19th Birthday to Mad Men!
