Is Plotlessness OK in Mad Men?

Don looking as perplexed as I feel in "Far Away Places."

Since the fifth season of Mad Men premiered a month ago, the "super viewer" blogosphere has sung its praises. Like it did the last four seasons. Just this past week, AVClub wrote, "There are few shows on the air more effective...at portraying how the feeling of everything spinning out of control can seem completely normal in the moment." Slate's TV club gushed, "This was an episode with two marvelous set pieces--Roger's excellent adventure with Jane, and Don's Howard Johnson noir."
I've been watching too, but with less enthusiasm than the typical super viewer. Though I agree that Mad Men gives you great set pieces, are these set pieces enough?

Since Season Five premiered, it has featured episode-long story arcs that beautifully depict how a particular person reacts to a particular set of circumstances. This week, there was the acid-trip that showed Roger's struggle to be hip when his age betrays him. Meanwhile, Don's trip with Megan suggested that he still abides by some classic fifties concept that a husband can control his wife. Last week, the office wet blanket, Pete Campbell, was beautifully pilloried in a series of awkward sexual encounters, culminating in his getting beat upon by Lane Pryce, the company's treasurer. Each of these vignettes highlights some aspect of the characters' personalities. But is this what we really need five seasons in? We already knew that Roger was insecure. We didn't need three episodes this season showing him buy people's loyalties with cash. We also learned that nothing comes easily for Pete the first time he unsuccessfuly flirted with a woman who wasn't his wife in Season One. Five seasons in, the sets are still gorgeous; the costumes are historically accurate, but the plot is starting to stagnate.
Mad Men wasn't always this way. While the show has always been relatively slow paced, there was some mystery and surprise. I was originally hooked by Don's secret in the first two seasons. Would his co-workers and wife find out that he's a Korean War deserter who took on another man's name? How was Peggy going to climb the corporate ladder after bearing Pete's illegitimate child? Now that these story arcs have been resolved, the characters need other challenges that force them to evolve--not just interesting situations that allow them to stay the same.

More and more, Mad Men is starting to resemble the John Cheever short stories that critics have linked it to since inception. Each week features a character in a challenging social situation (the surprise party, the long-absent husband's homecoming, the multi-racial sleepover). How he or she responds (getting embarrassed, kicking the husband out, hesitating before leaving the purse with a black girl) gives us insight into the characters, and his or her environment. In this way, each episode is actually a terrific introduction to the characters for uninitiated viewers. Indeed, last week episode, "Signal 30," even ended with Ken Cosgrove reading out loud from his Cheever-esque short story.

Though I love Cheever, and I love short stories, I'm not sure I want my TV shows to dramatize them. After all, this is a medium that gives writers nine hours over the course of 13 weeks to craft a couple compelling narratives with a beginning, middle, and end. Why waste them telling longtime viewers what they already know when they could be used to create richer challenges for the characters?

Reading John Leonard's Life

John Leonard's posthumously published collection is a remarkable exercise in criticism as biography. The essays in Reading for My Life span fifty years from 1958 to 2008, when Leonard, a critic for Harper's and The New York Times Book Review, among others, died of lung cancer. Reading the fifty pieces compiled in this one volume, I learned just as much about Leonard as I did about his subjects.

One obvious reason that Leonard's biography comes across is because his essays span his entire reviewing career. We see him grow as America grows. In an essay about the Beat Generation, we see him dropping out of Harvard and heading to the West Coast like so many others who came of age in the late 1950s. In another essay, we see Leonard safely within the New York intelligentsia from where he critiques Tom Wolfe's narrow portrayal of New Yorkers in The Bonfire of the Vanities. Leonard's subjects map the tumultuous American-century. Whether discussing the sexual revolution (through the lens of Gay Talese's Thy Neighbor's Wife) or Israeli-Palestinian relations (through the lens of an interview with David Grossman), his essays exclaim "I was there."

But the most revealing thing in these essays is Leonard's frankness about his own life. He injects himself into his book reviews as frequently as possible. Though one could mistake this for self-indulgence, Leonard presents himself as a common observer. When condemning Richard Nixon's campaign memoir, Six Crises, Leonard adopts the view of the every day American as opposed to the entrenched intelligentsia. He warns the reader, "Let me make it clear at the outset that I am not going to be objective." Not because he has some secret liberal agenda, but merely because he is "fascinated by the flower of rot, and because ...more interesting and instructive than Richard Nixon the success is Richard Nixon the failure."

Besides, Leonard's disdain for some writers is balanced out by his honest, lavish praise for others. He doesn't have enough good things to say about Doris Lessing's The Four-Gated City, finally going out on "She has done her job, and what a staggering one it is." Later, he dubs The Satanic Verses "infinitely more interesting than those hundreds of neat little novels we have to read between Rushdies." Through these essays, we learn that un-selfconscious praise can be delightful.

We also learn that Leonard was a colorblind feminist before those terms were invented. As one of the first to write about women novelists without condescension, Leonard made bold, unqualified statements about the women he admired. On Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior: "It is fierce intelligence, all sinew, prowling among the emotions." Quite a masculine description indeed. We can't blame Leonard for occasionally taking a victory lap for his prescient admiration for women writers by scolding his fellow critics for not recognizing their talents earlier.

One of the most affecting pieces--and the longest--is an essay on television. Leonard was as much a TV critic as he was a book critic. In "Family Values, Like the House of Atreus" Leonard charts a half century of television, demonstrating how the medium simultaneously shapes and reflects American values. The epidemic of single dads on TV in the 1980s could be attributed to our society's reluctance to accept the fact that 89% of single-parent households were headed by women. Leonard surmises why thirtysomething was so popular at a time when "I could leave the house, and go to the corner, and find an overmuch of such people in my own yupscale neighborhood: sun dried as if in extra-virgin olive oil, crouched to consume their minimalist bistro meals of cilantro leaves, medallions of goat cheese, and half a scallop on a bed of money." Perhaps it reflected yuppie navel-gazing at its worst.

Reading for My Life is an absolute must read for any aspiring critic. In a world of cold, academic criticism, Leonard shows us what it means to have a personal connection with culture.