I’m in mourning this week, feeling a sense of loss, because the first season of the remarkable AMC series Mad Men has come to an end. Yes, the show has been renewed, but we’ll have to wait until next summer to see it. That’s far too long.
Over the past few years, I have all but given up on standard episodic television. I like Heroes well enough, but strangely, I don’t really mind when it hits a stretch of reruns or goes on hiatus. I was hooked on Lost for part of the first season but gradually drifted away. I think The Sopranos had pretty much run its course. I enjoy that other HBO dysfunctional family saga, Big Love, and do kind of miss it when it’s not around. And I still grieve for Deadwood, which was probably my favorite TV series of all time … at least until Mad Men came along.
Other than that, my TV viewing has been characterized by hit and miss frustration. I pretty much stick to a few shows on the Discovery Channel and a few on the Food Network, filling in the gaps with a limited selection of reality shows and reruns and a rapid-fire, devil may care trigger finger on the remote.
Then Mad Men arrived.
The first few episodes interested me in a somewhat haphazard way. I liked what I was seeing a lot, but I hadn’t yet succumbed. By episode three or four I was feeling the magic. And by mid-season the series had restored my belief that perfection is possible in television. Perfection in writing. Perfection in casting. Perfection in acting. Perfection in directing. Perfection in character development. Perfection in set design and costumes, lighting, props, music. Perfection in every choice made by the people on screen and behind it. Over the last half of the season, Thursday nights couldn’t get here fast enough for me, even during the final few weeks when I knew I was running out of time and would soon be bereft, suffering through eight months without any new stories to anticipate.
If you missed Mad Men or deliberately gave it a pass, I encourage you to correct that situation as soon as possible. There seem to be a lot of options for those who want to catch up: encore airings, On Demand for those whose cable or satellite systems provide it, iTunes downloads, and I imagine a DVD release in the offing.
Let this show, this amazing fictional world, slowly sink its hooks into you, draw you in, envelop you. It’s a show that demands much of its viewers but repays with generous interest. Give it a chance. Like me, you may even find something you’d been missing far too long, that heady sense of joy that comes from settling down in your favorite chair, turning on the TV, and being transported to a different universe, some place familiar but new, disturbing but heartwarming, bright but melancholy, unbelievable but always utterly real and altogether absolutely wonderful.
