“Mad Men“ always had a deeply ambivalent relationship with nostalgia, its slick evocation of ’50s-’60s Madison Avenue never concealing a jaundiced view of the era’s ennui and social politics. And yet the series, which ran from 2007 to 2015, was so good that it now evokes a different kind of nostalgia, for a certain brand of perfectly conceived, gracefully literary television.
It’s this nostalgia that HBO Max looks to feed by streaming the series in its entirety, in 4K no less. Now you can see the lipstick on ad man Don Draper’s collar in startling resolution. I’m only partially kidding. On a recent viewing, as my eyes gravitated toward the lipstick worn by January Jones’ Betty Draper, all I could think was “My God, what a gorgeous shade of red.” (There was also a mishap during the transfer to the streamer involving a puke hose. But who among us hasn’t had a mishap involving a puke hose?)
I wrote recently about the immaculate first episode in my Autopilot series, and I recently found myself streaming highlights of that near-perfect first season. Two episodes in particular have always stood out for me.
One, “New Amsterdam,” pulls off the difficult trick of making us feel bad for the sniveling, opportunistic junior executive Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser). He’s in trouble everywhere: At work, he earns the wrath of Don (Jon Hamm) by pitching an idea when he isn’t supposed to (he also serves as a sort of unofficial pimp for a new client). More poignantly, his ice-cold father won’t help him pay for a new apartment, which means he must go hat in hand to his father-in-law. Nothing emasculating about that. Ironically, Pete comes from old money on his mother’s side, which is the only reason he ends up keeping his job. The final shot emphasizes his essential isolation, unable to become his own man on any level.
Then there’s the season finale, “The Wheel,” which features perhaps the most celebrated scene of the entire series. As Don quietly freefalls into spiritual crisis — he knows he’s a lousy husband, and he discovers that the brother he abandoned has hanged himself — he wrestles with ideas to pitch what is essentially a slide projector, or carousel. At the pitch meeting he ends up showing a sequence of happy images from his own marriage, which he knows is reaching a dead end. He recalls old words from a sales mentor: “In Greek, nostalgia literally means the pain from an old wound. It’s a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone.”
The scene builds to devastating emotional effect; Don’s associate Harry Crane (Rich Somner), in the midst of his own marital crisis, runs from the room in tears. In that moment we are him. “Mad Men” went to some intriguing places during its run, but it might have peaked with “The Wheel.” Like many of the early episodes, it feels like a John Cheever short story come to life, full of longing and acidic self-awareness that all the sales patter and martinis in the world can’t forestall the pain of being alive.
Chris Vognar can be reached at chris.vognar@globe.com. Follow him on Instagram at @chrisvognar and on Bluesky at chrisvognar.bsky.social.
