By Michelle Lerner

Last night was the season finale of MAD MEN. This is significant for a couple of reasons. Firstly, there is no better show on T.V. right now. I was a hater at first, but I was soon won over by the amazing writing. Secondly, it put AMC on the map as a channel capable of deciding to make a very adult drama at a moment when most of the network shows are about grown babies. Not that I don’t enjoy grown babies, it’s just that watching adults behave like adults is refreshing and interesting. Even when some of those adults act like children.

Tonight the show took an interesting turn, especially for a finale. Don has to pitch an idea to Kodak about a slide projector that has a wheel on top. If you are older then 25 you know what it looks like; some teacher in school at some point was probably always grappling with one. Anyway, Don’s big idea is to use nostalgia to sell it, not technology, which is what the client had initially mentioned. At the presentation he uses happy pictures of himself and Betty to illustrate his point. He talks about nostalgia, defining it and telling the clients that it is more then memory. Nostalgia is deeper; it’s a twinge in the heart, that pulls you back.


This speech is excellent. The room is riveted, and so was this viewer. One of the account managers had to leave the room; he is having marital problems and living at the office. The nostalgia was too much for him. But what is also interesting about this speech is that MAD MEN is a show rooted in nostalgia, and that sets about tearing that nostalgia apart. We, even those of us born after the fact, mythologize the early sixties as a heavenly time, full of hope, security, and wealth. After 9/11 doesn’t communism seem like a quaint threat? Vietnam and the Cultural Revolution burned the whole thing down, but in certain ways, we are nostalgic for that too. Rebellion is still somewhat signified by long hair. (If the show lasts long enough to get to that, I can’t wait to see what they do with it!)

Yet the action that takes place in the episode defies the idea of nostalgia. Peggy, Don’s assistant, goes to the hospital with stomach pains after finally being promoted to Junior Copywriter. But she doesn’t have the flu. She is about to give birth, a surprise to her (but I kind of suspected it.) Peggy is very smart, yet naïve enough to be pregnant and not even know it. A sign of the times? Not much to want to remember about that. In one moment her life as she knew it is over, whether she keeps the baby or not. 

Betty, who is the picture of forced nostalgia, constantly trying to push everything under the rug, and then cracking, comes clean this week. Her neighbor confides that her husband is cheating, and Betty consoles her. There is a veiled warning in the encounter though. When the woman tells Betty she thought Betty would know what to do, Betty asks not harshly, but very gently “Why would I know?” It stings more then a fist in the face. Betty checks the phone bill anyway, like a teenager, doing what her friend does. Thinking he may have been calling a woman, she discovers that Don has been talking to her therapist. Her revenge is strange; at therapy she tells her doctor that she would be happy if her husband didn’t cheat. Thus the mask comes off. The lies go both ways, and Betty is not as foolish as she seemed. But more then that, she is sympathetic. She wants to protect Don, even though he isn’t true to her. She wants to be his family. It’s not simple or easy, but it’s realistic.


After the a triumphant day, Don gets home hoping to catch Betty and the kids before they leave to go to Thanksgiving in New Jersey. In the first version of the ending he catches them, and everyone lives happily ever after; the nostalgic version.  In the second he comes home to a large, empty, dark house. Betty and the kids have left. This shouldn’t be a shock. After all Don had been clear, almost snide, with Betty that he had no desire to go. He is alone, and he sinks to the floor and buries his head in his hands. This is the empty house that he made.