Dawson's: The Bostonians

It's pure soap opera, assuming "pure" is a word that can be applied to that genre. Joey says those words at the end of Season Four and then she and Dawson kiss and, with that, we dial everything back to Season One. Actually, the first kiss starts Season Two but that's the basic issue.

That comes out in a revealing way at the start of the episode. The professor reads the story of the "first kiss' out loud to the class. And then he praises Joey and gives her a C. When she asks why, he tells her that her story ends where it should begin. And here we have one of those meta-moments the show is so famous for (or infamous for if you aren't a fan). The show's creators know they are stringing us along and we know we are being strung along and everyone is fine with this because the show can't move past that kiss without ending. There would be no story left to tell.

As a short story, it seems to me there is nothing wrong with ending the story here.  If F. Scott Fitzgerald had submitted chapter 6 of The Great Gatsby to Professor David Wilder the fact that there is plainly more to be told would not be just grounds for giving it a C.

Of course, Professor David Wilder's comment is really more of a plot device. It is meant to get the story back on track. That's ironical in retrospect because we know that the show's creator will ultimately change his mind and decide that Joey was wrong about seasons three and four being "pure soap opera" and that the love with Pacey was the real story all along. (The right choice if you ask me.)

To get back to Gatsby, there are obvious Gatsby undertones in Joey's story and that is perhaps the most significant thing about the series. The big surprise is not that Joey ultimately picks Pacey over Dawson. The big surprise is that the story is really about Joey. She is the major character. With this episode, Dawson and Pacey both become minor characters and could easily have been dispensed with, only the name of the series stands in the way.

The introduction of Busy Phillips as Audrey Liddell underlines the point. Several women have told me of more or less similar encounters on their arrival on campus. There doesn't have to be a literally Audrey character but any woman arriving on campus will see that her choices are a possibility and the question is not, "Why?" but "Why not?"

And that's about it. Jack's story isn't interesting. This is mostly because Jack's story should be Dawson's story. If there is a character who is gay, it's Dawson. Jen is boring. Pacey is ... absent.

Mad Men: Favors

The clichés came down so fast this episode that I wanted to put on a raincoat.

You can't entirely fault the episode as a single episode. Everything in it made sense and the story arc was logical. The characters all acted in credible ways. They just didn't act in ways that matched the show they were supposed to be in.

The set up wasn't quite credible. As Raymond Chandler put it once, it is perfectly believable that that all these things might happen to various people at various times. What issn't believable is that they could all happen to such a small group of people all of whom are connected to one another within such a narrow time frame.

But, then again, that's what had to happen if they were going to make the story fit the 1960s mythology. Every businessman at the GM meeting spoke exactly the way they would have had they been cartoon characters, straight out of Doonesbury, rather than real human beings and ..., perhaps the less aid the better.

I said last week that I think the show is using the Dawson's Creek playbook this year and last night's episode had it all. It was certainly there on the surface. The show is doing just what Dawson's Creek did in taking the 90210 teen soap conventions and using them in a more serious way. There were the too cute moments with Pete's mother and then Bob Benson's gay come on to Pete and, most of all, the heavy dramatic irony of Ted seeing the connection between Pete and Peggy and getting jealous.

But there was also the dramatic arc issues. Here's the problem. Shows like this are conceived like novels with a clear dramatic arc that takes characters from their inception to a self- realization and then a conclusion. That's the scheme that Jane Austen set out and pretty much every serious English novel has done since. There is a lot of other Jane-ish touches as well, such as the difficulties faced by families where the father is absent or distant, but I'll leave them aside for now. The problem I want to highlight is that the creators of a television series never know when it is going to end,

A novel is driving towards an end so everything goes to that purpose. A TV show has to keep entertaining people for a middle stretch of indeterminate length. In Dawson's Creek, the arc went as follows:

1. a boy and a girl grow up together, puberty changes their relationship, 
2. he has a bit of a Peter Pan syndrome and wants to keep living in a world where this sexual tension doesn't exist, 
3. his best friend does see the girl in a sexual way and they fall in love, 
4. our hero gets enough distance on the episode to muse about childhood and puberty and the lessons learned and feel grateful for it all which, we realize at the end, was the reason he has been telling us this story as the show is really about storytelling.

Okay, but all that could be covered off in one season or two at most and the show ran for six. As a consequence, you get a lot of episodes in the middle that are pure filler. And then, at the end, it has to get yoked back to the story arc again.The thing that the writers at Dawson's Creek realized is that you had to state the theme early and then keep pulling it back every once in a  while just so viewers could remember what the show is really about. For six years we wondered, Dawson or Pacey? Doing that was incredibly silly but it was at least honest.

Mad Men didn't do that. We got the set up of Don's character but we never got an honest treatment of what was at stake for Don. Perhaps because none was possible. All we knew was that there was this guy who had assumed a false identity and was, sometimes perilously, living it out. The relationship with Rachel showed an odd neediness on Don's part but it wasn't explored at any length.

Meanwhile, another Don Draper and another Roger Sterling managed to sneak in between the lines. The best moments in the entire history of the show were those moments between Don and Roger that first season. Without really meaning to, the show's creators gave us a story about a man's world from a-not-so distant past that was compelling and interesting, much more interesting than the domestic dramas that ran parallel to it. That set of the original Sterling Cooper offices was magnificent, to be sure, but one of the reasons so many people loved it was that you knew you were in for a treat any time the camera panned across those desks. The same was true of most of the flashbacks. Some were deeply flawed, but you knew you were going to get a story about manliness.

To put it bluntly, the filler turned out to be better and more meaningful drama than the intended story arc. a Better artist than Matt Weiner would have realized this and gone with it. For a brief moment with the magnificent Bond-ish ending to last season it looked like he might.

The problem with Mad Men this year is that the story arc everything is being yoked to a story arc that doesn't match the opening. It's all has a sort of wimpy, PC quality. For example, notice how we went from gay Bob Benson to gay Pete. That's classic Dawson's strategy. Handle the sexual issues with great gestures of being open and honest but don't connect them to any of sex's wet and sticky flavour. So Bob makes his pitch to Pete in terms of love and tenderness as opposed to, hey Pete, how do you feel about raw sex with another man? It's as if gay men spent their entire lives feeling vaguely different without knowing what it was that made them feel different. That, as opposed, to getting erections when they looked at other men, which, while honest, would actually force the audience to acknowledge that gay love means means gay sex: you know, two men actually doing things with one another's erect penises.

I know, you'd rather not think about that. But is that honest? I mean, you're so terribly hip and cool and so much more open than those uptight evangelicals. But, if that is really true, then why can't you handle a story in which gay men actually do what gay men do? Which is to penetrate one another in various ways. There was no explicit sex between Don and Sylvia but the show is at least honest enough to acknowledge that Don penetrates her.

As a consequence, we get this deeply dishonest account of the gay love. Try to imagine, for example, how Bob Benson would come off as a heterosexual who just tried to get with a girl by being really nice to her all the time. That he never once told her what his purpose was but that he just hoped that, as Bob ultimately explains it,

Is it really so impossible to imagine ... couldn't it be that, if someone took care of you, very good care of you, if this person would do anything for you, if your well-being was his only thought, is it impossible that you might begin to feel something for him?

Recognize that? It's the nice-guy strategy for picking up girls or, in this case, another boy. You run around being a nice guy—just 'cause, you know—and hope that this magically turns into love. You hate that nice guy. Remember? Women certainly hate him. And he always loses in any half-way credible drama. He loses because there is always another guy who pays attention to a woman but not "just 'cause". This other makes it clear that he is paying attention to a woman because he wants her sexually. And that guy had a name for the first five seasons and his name was Don Draper.

How did he suddenly turn into this pathetic, needy loser? The whole Sylvia thing has a deus ex machina quality wherein it pulls Don into a character that just doesn't fit with the guy we have been watching all these years.

It's like the pathetic, nice guy dweeb got to be a TV producer and now he is going to get his revenge on the guy who actually had sex with the girl his nice-guy strategy failed with by making the more successful guy into some pathetic loser after all. And, in that sense, it fails to live up Dawson's Creek. The Dawson who told us that story was honest enough to admit that Joey chose Pacey over him for reasons that made perfect sense seen from a mature viewpoint. For five seasons, Don Draper was a complex, flawed but manly man whom people watched because he was more interesting than the dweeby losers that television and movies feed us these days. Now, he seems to be morphing into an unconvincing Alan Alda type. Don is no longer interesting and the show is no longer interesting.

BTW: Did you notice the guilty quality in Megan's voice when Sally's friend, a character so boring and predictable she doesn't deserve a name, asked her if she was calling her agent? If that turns out to be an affair, I may vomit all over the screen.

Mad Men: Tale of Two Cities Metacommentary

I have to dash off to the doctor's this morning so I'll just give you a bit to nibble on. This is from Tom and Lorenzo:

We wondered a couple episodes back, when the two characters were reunited, if Peggy was going to have a problem with Joan’s ascent to partner and how she got it. Turns out, she kinda does – and that’s perfectly in character for Peggy and perfectly understandable given her own story. We know Joan and understand her the way the viewers outside a story can understand a character, but to Peggy – and to everyone else in the story  – Joan is someone who slept her way into a partnership, and that’s not something most people – then or now – could call an admirable act. Peggy would naturally have an especially tough time handling it, given her own history with Joan – and all of that came beautifully roaring to the surface in their argument.

These guys are among the better analysts of the show but I think they really miss it here. Peggy's remark that she never slept with Don comes in response to Joan's claim that Peggy let Don carry her to "the deep end of the pool". It's not driven by resentment of how Joan got to be partner but by resentment at all the aspersions others have made about how Peggy got to be a writer. (Added: Joan, of course, understands it as a dig at her because she is just as wrapped up in her defensiveness as Peggy is in hers.)

That's the brilliance of it. Neither woman is taken seriously for her talents. And thus they dig at one another. As I've said before, one of the things the show gets no credit for is how realistic it is about how women really do behave.

Speaking of which, this sentence from T&J is a little bit mealy-mouthed:

Joan is someone who slept her way into a partnership, and that’s not something most people – then or now – could call an admirable act

It's true enough that most people would not call it an admirable act  but that is because it isn't an admirable act. Joan sinned against herself mostly but also against all women in the office when she did what she did and she should be called on it. This is a recurring theme here but one of the things our culture does vis a vis women over and over again is to not hold them responsible in sexual matters. It's high time we did.

Okay, have criticized them for a few paragraphs, T&J also blunder into the truth:

But here, have a theme anyway:

“They don’t know our name because we don’t know our name.”

Jim Cutler’s admonition about the tenuousness of the newly merged agency is as good a choice for a theme as any other in this largely themeless episode.

Actually, it's better than that. Think of the Dickens novel that gives the episode its title here (as I get to below, the writing in this episode and the use of the novel is right out of the Dawson's Creek playbook). Sydney Carton is the not very good man who is a doppelganger for Charles Darnay.  It is precisely because no one knows Carton's name that he can make the great sacrifice at the end of the novel. Not having a clear name gives you a certain freedom. A point that is underlined by Don deciding that "Don" is not his real name at the party in LA.

Ultimately, the solution for the name of the firm is for a whole lot of people to remove their name from the masthead! You surrender your identity for a greater cause. It is a far, far better thing that I do et ecetera.

Now we can go back to Joan and Peggy and understand what really happens. These are both strong women but strong, pre-feminist women. What happens in the hallway is driven not by Peggy's resentment at how Joan rose to partner (no one knows that Joan has real skills better than Peggy) but by Peggy's realization of how much she shares in common with Joan. So she helps her out.

Final thought, the theme and the way it was handled had a very Dawson's Creek feeling about it. In fact, this entire season has been very reminiscent of Dawson's Creek both in the way it is written and in the slightly too cute way it handles serious issues sometimes. I'll probably have more to say about that as we go ahead.

PS: Well, that's a bit more than a bit to nibble on but I don't have the time to edit it down. While I'm at it, if you read the bit about Don above and thought, "but it's not his real name, I say, "Who cares?!!!!"

As long as I'm being silly

The teen drama I loved—although I was long past my teen years when it aired—was Dawson's Creek. I liked it because I grew up on the Atlantic Coast and a lot of that series was very familiar to me. There were times when it felt like the writers must have found an old diary of mine.

Anyway, if you do that comparison (that is to say, match Mad Men characters up with Dawson's Creek rather than 90210, here are the correlations  I think you get. (And note how often the character from Dawson's Creek who best matches up with Mad Men is of the opposite sex.)

Peggy Olson=Dawson Leery
Both sort of blunder their way into a career that might have seemed like an unrealistic dream at the outset. Both are the only characters in the show with anything that looks like an actual family. Both are primarily writers in that their role consists mostly of verbalizing—successfully and unsuccessfully—the situation they and others are in. The difference is this: I can't help but think that although Peggy is not a major character, the Mad Men storyline that really matters is hers. That is Mad Men is really the story of Peggy Olson. Dawson is the reverse. He clearly is the main character but ultimately Dawson's Creek was really Joey's story.

[Update: Maybe not. Who is telling us the story of Mad Men? Who is the person who lives through the change but really loves the old values and wants us to understand the importance of old-fashioned values? Peggy Olson, that's who. What Dawson and Peggy have in common is that they are telling us the story not that it is about them]

Don Draper=Joey Potter
Both come from the same sort of background, hick-like families with a missing mother and have difficult relationships with the replacement mother figure in their lives and troubled relationships with their biological fathers. Both reinvent themselves. Now I'll grant you that Joey's reinvention is not based on a stolen identity in the same sense as Don Draper but she does appropriate Dawson's culture and values as her own. Both are also the only characters that appear in every single show in each series. Everyone else is dispensable for a while but you couldn't have either show without these characters.

Betty Draper=Jen Linley
The comparison is so obvious there is almost nothing to say. I can take the text from the Flavorwire site and replace "Kelly" with "Jen" and it's almost perfect.  The only things that don't match is that there is no modeling in Jen's life and Jen is portrayed by an actor with real depth and power whereas the two actors playing the Kelly and Betty are just such hot blonde babes with big breasts and the producers were hoping it doesn't really matter that they are only passable actors.

Roger Sterling=Pacey Witter
Both are saddled with an inherited role and are conscious of not having achieved much on their own. Both grease their own and other people's gears with ironic senses of humour. Both seem morally undependable but are actually the emotionally stable characters that others depend on.


Salvatore Romano=Jack McPhee
Both characters are gay, both don't really fit in the story and , in a really odd parallel, their gayness comes out in cultural differences that set them aside from heterosexual characters as opposed to their actually being sexual attracted to men. As a consequence, neither character ever feels convincingly gay.

Ken Cosgrove=Andie McPhee
Both first appear brash and assertive but are actually considerably more sensitive than those around them. Both seem comfortable in their skins and in higher society but something doesn't quite fit. With Andie the problem turns out to be mental illness that is ultimately treated with drugs that allow her to go to Harvard. And Ken? We don't know yet but my guess is that Ken turns out to be gay. (Not that there is anything ....)

Bert Cooper=Grams and Joan Harris=Mitch Leery
Two sets of characters created to provide a sense of real authority on sets that otherwise might have initially seemed too much like frat parties to be convincing drama. They also step in to be either supports or foils when other characters are making important transitions. Ultimately, both characters became redundant once there was a chance for the others to develop some real depth. Attempts were made by the writers to fill out all these characters by giving them adventures and struggles of their own but it just doesn't work. You still have sightings of them from time to time but they aren't doing much anymore.