The TV Room: Mad Men Season 7, by David Bax
In the very first episode of Mad Men, advertising agency creative director Don Draper (Jon Hamm) describes happiness as the “moment before you need more happiness.” The series’ seventh and final season gave Don various opportunities to learn that isn’t true. In the end, though, instead of a breakthrough, he had a homecoming, returning to that very moment after a long time away. He simply experienced, in the most literal and mundane sense of the word, a revolution.
For the most part, this season found Don in a constant malaise. Through valleys and peaks that felt like valleys, he remained morose, even when he was trying not to be. What should have been the emotional highlight, his daughter looking him in the eye and saying, “I love you,” was met with more shock than elation. And even that moment was balanced out by her explanation in the finale, with kind words, of why she doesn’t need him around.
Don was at his very lowest, though, in the season premiere. On forced leave from his job and with his wife living on the other side of the country, the life he had constructed to prop up his assumed identity was in shambles, absent all the career and domestic markers of normalcy on which he had depended for six seasons. We’d seen Don without a wife before – very briefly – but never without the job that defined both him and the show itself. If you’ll remember, back in that first episode, we get a whole hour of him as an ad man before we even learn he has a family.
Over the course of the first half-season, Don worked himself back into the good graces of Sterling Cooper. Still, he remained unhappy, drunkenly turning to Freddy Rumsen (Joel Murray) of all people in a time of loneliness. But the world marched on, exemplified by America’s quest for the moon. At the end of that first group of episodes, Don watches the historic landing not with his actual family but in a hotel room with the de facto one he, like so many television characters before him, has built out of the people with whom he spends the most time. Then, in one of the loveliest moments in the show’s entire run, the recently deceased Burt Cooper (Robert Morse) appears to Don, a wealthy and miserable man, and reminds him that the moon belongs to everyone and the best things in life are free.
The impact of that moment is as plain as day on Don’s face but, when we joined him again this year, not much had changed. Most of this season saw him either falling back on materialism (buying off his ex-wife; trying desperately to hang on to his clients) or looking to repeat his own past (romanticizing a sad waitress by projecting his own journey onto her). Maybe the best things in life aren’t free if you’re spiritually bankrupt.
In the final episodes, though, he truly broke away. We’d seen him go on these sort of walkabouts before but this one felt both bigger and more solitary. Eventually, sobbing over the phone and hugging strangers, he had all the external signifiers of a breakthrough. Then: a contented smile. Then: a ding. Then: a Coca-Cola commercial. The smile was the moment before he needed more happiness. The ding was that moment ending. The commercial was the whole process starting over again. In the end, the heartfelt, cynical conclusion of Mad Men is that anything that makes people happy will only do so until it can be used to sell them something. It’s no one’s fault but the best we can do is try to stay ahead of the wave.