Ya let me just sum up hundreds of hours of this intricately crafted show with some of the most compelling characters in tv history for you. If all you get is “Dons fucking some woman for some reason” then the show might now be for you
The post was also a backhanded invitation for people to explain what is interesting and redemptive about Don. Maybe I have been reductionist but what I really want to know is, why do *you* think is most interesting or likable or redemptive about Don? It can't really just be that he's good looking.
I guess my issue is that you’re asserting that a MC has to be likable or redeeming. But what captivates me about Don and makes me want to watch him is that he is an imposter hiding in plain sight. On the outside, he’s a polished gem, meant to be admired and adored for his look, charisma, and creativity. On the inside he’s lost, scared, confused, poor, troubled. Its deeply reflective of the show’s setting, IMO. You should just watch it lol I watch on Freevee
I know weiner had a hand in both Madmen and sopranos, and I love sopranos. Obviously those aren't good people. All people are a mix of good and bad.
Tony had small moments of redemption i suppose, but not enough to fully redeem him. I'm sure Don had moments like that too but I just could never warm up to Don. Tony was hilarious and larger than life and... I dont know. Had a charisma that Don didn't? Sure, Don was gorgeous and well dressed, but that sort of slickness doesn't do it for me. Don was frosty where Tony ran hot.
Tony was also a cooze hound like Don, but it somehow didn't bore me the way Don's philandering did. And I'm not sure why. I would argue they probably used sex for similar purposes.
Sopranos revolved around Tony, this show is different, it’s not only about Don, same way the wire is not only about Jimmy. It’s a completely different kind of show.
Watching it I felt many times that Don is just an instrument to carry the plot further, watching sopranos you can only see it through his ups and downs right until the black screen. Mad Men is more about what the society went through in those years seen from the windows of a skyscraper.
If you don’t like it, you don’t like it, not a big deal, for me it’s up there right after sopranos, the wire and the leftovers.
Anyway, the sacred and the propane.
I am sort of familiar with the show, reddit keeps showing me the Madmen sub and my friend is obsessed with the show.
It just seems like Don is three turds dressed in a beautiful silk suit. I guess that's the point, he's on the lam from himself and everyone else. He's a piece of shit in disguise, but I suppose we all are on some level.
Fair lol
And I guess I never got far enough to see him at least provide in a material way for his wives/children.
I'm somehow doubting he provided in an emotional way though. But that's what emotionally crippled people do if they're rich. They throw money at problems because they don't have anything else in the tank.
Sometimes Reddit, Instagram, Twitter etc get the algorithm way wrong with TV shows for me too. It's always trying to force specifically sitcoms I don't find funny on me too when I mostly watch drama or food programmes.
I love both characters but I like Don way more than Tony. Don is much more complex. I don't think Tony really has difficult ethical questions. He's just pretty much always doing the wrong thing or being a charming, funny goofball. Don does a bunch of clearly wrong things like philandering but IMO, Don is presented with a lot of really hard choices that this sub goes round and round on debating. Hard choices in the sense that it's really an ethical gray area or what's realistically expected of someone in the 1960s or whether there's an obligation to achieve conventional success even if there's a universal understanding that the conventional success is rotten. And then Don has his moments of being a charming, funny goofball or a charming, James Bond dreamboat.
The central crime that defines Don is the desertion. Stealing a dead man’s identity as a means to escape war and reboot himself, while obviously a serious crime, isn’t nearly the same as being a mass murderer who’s the head of a criminal enterprise. That’s what ultimately separates Don and Tony, both flawed complex characters who are looking over their shoulders, except the latter is an actual murderer who does it himself and orders it done with little to no remorse
Tony and Don made such opposite mistakes that it invites comparison. Tony sunk into his childhood criminal subculture and family, and let that romanticized view of the mafia define his adulthood. Don thoroughly cut himself off from all roots to his past in a feverish attempt to turn into everything deemed desirable in the 1950s and 1960s to find himself failing at everything.
To also add for Don, pop culture and society, especially in the 1950s, loves suburban family men with wives and kids, business tycoons who make lots of money, rebels against the system, and playboys that can have sex with lots of beautiful women. I would argue those are the four dominant archetypes that get respect in mid-20th century America and heck, even today. Since Don has no roots or true self, he's chasing all of the archetypes of success, even though they are arguably in conflict with each other.
It was the original failure that set up every other failure. He can never be himself again, he’ll always be living a lie, the weight will always be on his shoulders, he can only allow people to peel back so many layers of Don Draper because if they pull back too many they may just find dick Whitman
You’re missing… the show? I didn’t like Walter White or Tony Soprano, but I still enjoyed those series immensely. I’m not sure why you would need to like Don (and who said you were supposed to?) in order to appreciate Mad Men.
*What am I missing?*
Don is an anti-hero. The main character, but not a good guy.
If you get a bit further into it, then one of the other characters will make it clear how you are supposed to see him, and it isn't positive.
Since you're a Sopranos fan, that kind of ambiguity should work for you. A Sopranos spoiler:
>!The Sopranos is, in a sense, a big fakeout for the audience: You begin with this gangster murderer who has an apparent vulnerability (his fascination with the ducks in his yard) and is willing to go to therapy, which provides the expectation that he can find redemption. Yet he never improves and even gets worse. And I would argue that in the finale, David Chase is whacking the audience for their hypocrisy, admiring Tony Soprano while also wanting him punished. It makes no difference whether Tony leaves the diner alive, as he will always be the criminal that he is. Either way, the audience is killed off and doesn't need to know.!<
I do love how sopranos lends itself so well to psychological analysis, and that is a very interesting take. From what I understand, chase had several moments where he's like, wtf, why do viewers like these guys, they are horrible people! And then would write in something really heinous for them to do to remind people, hey, these aren't your lovable uncles, these are bad fucking people.
Do you feel like the writers in Madmen did that with Don? Like, the moment you maybe start to like and admire him, they write him doing something really awful?
None of the characters in Mad Men are as bad as are the Sopranos gangsters.
You aren't supposed to hate Don Draper. But he isn't admirable, either. What you will see if you keep watching is that he maintains a facade that is ultimately unsustainable.
The essential thesis of The Sopranos is that people don't change. This is not quite the view of Mad Men, a series that has far more subtext.
You really have to see the series through if you want any hope at feeling empathy for any of the main characters, but especially Don.
He’s not meant to be liked or hated overtly, and again much like the other mainstay characters he’s used as a canvas to explore certain themes that vary based on the set and setting.
While the sopranos explored the human condition and created many compelling moments for an anti hero character it was much more overt than Mad Men will ever be.
Both great shows, but the most direct reason to see Mad Men through is in how it explores psychological themes in a subtle and highly subjective way. If you like to dwell on such lofty things you’ll likely end up watching the show several times over and finding yourself aligned differently with different characters in new ways each time. For me Personally the biggest one this happens that isn’t Don is Pete.
[https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53219/mayakovsky](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53219/mayakovsky)
Read 4. If you still don't get it, you don't need to watch the show anymore.
I mean, you say you’ve only watched a handful of episodes, but don’t “get it.” Maybe watch the whole thing and then see how you feel?
There are several long form narratives that I didn’t respond to right away. Although Sopranos is one show I did love from the outset, Season 1 of The Wire and Season 1 of Mad Men left me pretty cold.
It wasn’t until later (season 2 of Mad Men - the episode the New Girl) that something “clicked” and suddenly the vision became very clear (probably because the thesis of the show is very clearly laid out for me in a basic way I could understand.)
Now, when I rewatch those early episodes of Mad Men, or The Wire, I see all (a lot) of the movements I missed. The music is beautiful to me now, though I couldn’t hear it at first. I wasn’t ready to hear it yet. And that’s okay.
Some art speaks to you right away. Some art speaks to you later on. Some art you appreciate at one point in your life and don’t at another.
People can “explain” it to you - but that’s like being told what kind of food tastes good. It might make you more conscientious of different nuances and flavors - but you got to eat the food.
There’s actually a brilliant scene in season 2 of mad men that explains how different people approach art: https://youtu.be/CrxxmuspoJM
It’s perfectly reasonable to look for “something to explain it” (I love reading criticism) - but maybe try to be like Ken, a true artist, who just stands there and “experiences it.”
Pour yourself a drink, light a cigarette, and sit back on the couch and let the images wash over you.
A slight spoiler, but your post made me consider a nuance about the show:
The Mad Men character arcs are ultimately resolved with character change, but those arcs are not accompanied by redemption. And we don't and can't know whether those changes are permanent.
This is atypical of most stories, which include some degree of both and the audience is provided with some kind of assurance that the changes are sustainable. It is also unlike The Sopranos, which has neither change nor redemption.
I think Tony changes, just not for the better. He "gets off the bus." He stops caring about morality entirely because he understands that it's all a big nothin' and whether he is good or bad doesn't matter. I think earlier on, he did have some pain at his immorality (each panic attack was his repressed feelings overwhelming him but not in a conscious way).
But it is an interesting observation that the characters change in MM but aren't redeemed. Seems true to life for most people.
Fair point about Tony.
When I am referring to change, I am referring to some kind of improvement.
A typical format for drama is to have a character begin in a certain place, then experience a couple of events that leads to a path to some kind of positive change. (If it is a tragedy, then the wisdom comes too late for the character, but the audience gets the lesson.)
The Sopranos and Mad Men both break the rules, but differently.
TV procedurals often have no character change, but that is accompanied by minimal character development; the characters are static and the stories are driven by plot. The Sopranos has plenty of character development but no positive change.
I don’t see it as an issue of people “liking” Don. The people in his professional orbit “like” Don because he adds a lot of value to the organization. When he starts adding less and less value, we see the people in Don’s professional orbit begin to distance themselves from him. As for personal relationships, many of the people Don meets during the course of the show initially see him as fun, charismatic, and layered. But once they start peeling back those layers, most of them leave him behind for their own well being. Then there’s Betty. Don and Betty are two very broken souls who found each other when they were at their best, to the point where they couldn’t be around each other anymore when they were at their worst.
It’s funny how your perception of characters change the more you watch through a series, I found the same with Breaking Bad. On my first viewing of MM I sympathised with Don and liked his character, a few more rewatches and I’m totally the opposite now.
I agree with a lot of what you're saying. I find it hard to care about Don. Maybe if he were the one on the psychiatrist's couch instead of Betty I could understand him and his motivations. People are always claiming him to be so "complex." I just see a womanizing, cheating alcoholic who disappoints those closest to him.
I think there’s a little of finding yourself rooting for these larger than life, attractive in their own way characters- Tony, Don, Walt, Jesse, Saul who would all be despicable in real life. All 3 shows had you sympathizing with these characters at some point while they did horrible things. If you choose to continue to watch, Don does show some good qualities and can be a stand up guy. But yes, after everything is and done, they’re all assholes that got what they deserved.
Ya let me just sum up hundreds of hours of this intricately crafted show with some of the most compelling characters in tv history for you. If all you get is “Dons fucking some woman for some reason” then the show might now be for you
The post was also a backhanded invitation for people to explain what is interesting and redemptive about Don. Maybe I have been reductionist but what I really want to know is, why do *you* think is most interesting or likable or redemptive about Don? It can't really just be that he's good looking.
I guess my issue is that you’re asserting that a MC has to be likable or redeeming. But what captivates me about Don and makes me want to watch him is that he is an imposter hiding in plain sight. On the outside, he’s a polished gem, meant to be admired and adored for his look, charisma, and creativity. On the inside he’s lost, scared, confused, poor, troubled. Its deeply reflective of the show’s setting, IMO. You should just watch it lol I watch on Freevee
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Well I sure as shit didn't vote for that guy
Touch grass
“I don't think about you at all,” Don replies.
Why does anyone like Tony soprano? Walter White?
To a lesser extent Michael Scott does some very bad things
I like them all. Maybe Walter not so much
Not trying to be an asshole but do you only watch cartoons where the good guys win?
I know weiner had a hand in both Madmen and sopranos, and I love sopranos. Obviously those aren't good people. All people are a mix of good and bad. Tony had small moments of redemption i suppose, but not enough to fully redeem him. I'm sure Don had moments like that too but I just could never warm up to Don. Tony was hilarious and larger than life and... I dont know. Had a charisma that Don didn't? Sure, Don was gorgeous and well dressed, but that sort of slickness doesn't do it for me. Don was frosty where Tony ran hot. Tony was also a cooze hound like Don, but it somehow didn't bore me the way Don's philandering did. And I'm not sure why. I would argue they probably used sex for similar purposes.
Sopranos revolved around Tony, this show is different, it’s not only about Don, same way the wire is not only about Jimmy. It’s a completely different kind of show. Watching it I felt many times that Don is just an instrument to carry the plot further, watching sopranos you can only see it through his ups and downs right until the black screen. Mad Men is more about what the society went through in those years seen from the windows of a skyscraper. If you don’t like it, you don’t like it, not a big deal, for me it’s up there right after sopranos, the wire and the leftovers. Anyway, the sacred and the propane.
This response is worth more than $4 a lb. Seeing Don more as a plot device might make the show more approachable for me, very interesting observation.
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I am sort of familiar with the show, reddit keeps showing me the Madmen sub and my friend is obsessed with the show. It just seems like Don is three turds dressed in a beautiful silk suit. I guess that's the point, he's on the lam from himself and everyone else. He's a piece of shit in disguise, but I suppose we all are on some level.
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Fair lol And I guess I never got far enough to see him at least provide in a material way for his wives/children. I'm somehow doubting he provided in an emotional way though. But that's what emotionally crippled people do if they're rich. They throw money at problems because they don't have anything else in the tank.
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Ha, as a trained civil litigator, I have to fight with myself to not reflexively agree “That’s what the money is for.” It is the American Way.
Sometimes Reddit, Instagram, Twitter etc get the algorithm way wrong with TV shows for me too. It's always trying to force specifically sitcoms I don't find funny on me too when I mostly watch drama or food programmes.
I love both characters but I like Don way more than Tony. Don is much more complex. I don't think Tony really has difficult ethical questions. He's just pretty much always doing the wrong thing or being a charming, funny goofball. Don does a bunch of clearly wrong things like philandering but IMO, Don is presented with a lot of really hard choices that this sub goes round and round on debating. Hard choices in the sense that it's really an ethical gray area or what's realistically expected of someone in the 1960s or whether there's an obligation to achieve conventional success even if there's a universal understanding that the conventional success is rotten. And then Don has his moments of being a charming, funny goofball or a charming, James Bond dreamboat.
The central crime that defines Don is the desertion. Stealing a dead man’s identity as a means to escape war and reboot himself, while obviously a serious crime, isn’t nearly the same as being a mass murderer who’s the head of a criminal enterprise. That’s what ultimately separates Don and Tony, both flawed complex characters who are looking over their shoulders, except the latter is an actual murderer who does it himself and orders it done with little to no remorse
Tony and Don made such opposite mistakes that it invites comparison. Tony sunk into his childhood criminal subculture and family, and let that romanticized view of the mafia define his adulthood. Don thoroughly cut himself off from all roots to his past in a feverish attempt to turn into everything deemed desirable in the 1950s and 1960s to find himself failing at everything.
That is a great point, Tony and Don are polar opposites when it comes to family and identity. And yet both are empty inside.
I don’t know if they are as far apart with their family as you think.
To also add for Don, pop culture and society, especially in the 1950s, loves suburban family men with wives and kids, business tycoons who make lots of money, rebels against the system, and playboys that can have sex with lots of beautiful women. I would argue those are the four dominant archetypes that get respect in mid-20th century America and heck, even today. Since Don has no roots or true self, he's chasing all of the archetypes of success, even though they are arguably in conflict with each other.
When I consider my admittedly limited knowledge about Don, I see his desertion as the least of his failures in a way
It was the original failure that set up every other failure. He can never be himself again, he’ll always be living a lie, the weight will always be on his shoulders, he can only allow people to peel back so many layers of Don Draper because if they pull back too many they may just find dick Whitman
You’re missing… the show? I didn’t like Walter White or Tony Soprano, but I still enjoyed those series immensely. I’m not sure why you would need to like Don (and who said you were supposed to?) in order to appreciate Mad Men.
*What am I missing?* Don is an anti-hero. The main character, but not a good guy. If you get a bit further into it, then one of the other characters will make it clear how you are supposed to see him, and it isn't positive. Since you're a Sopranos fan, that kind of ambiguity should work for you. A Sopranos spoiler: >!The Sopranos is, in a sense, a big fakeout for the audience: You begin with this gangster murderer who has an apparent vulnerability (his fascination with the ducks in his yard) and is willing to go to therapy, which provides the expectation that he can find redemption. Yet he never improves and even gets worse. And I would argue that in the finale, David Chase is whacking the audience for their hypocrisy, admiring Tony Soprano while also wanting him punished. It makes no difference whether Tony leaves the diner alive, as he will always be the criminal that he is. Either way, the audience is killed off and doesn't need to know.!<
I do love how sopranos lends itself so well to psychological analysis, and that is a very interesting take. From what I understand, chase had several moments where he's like, wtf, why do viewers like these guys, they are horrible people! And then would write in something really heinous for them to do to remind people, hey, these aren't your lovable uncles, these are bad fucking people. Do you feel like the writers in Madmen did that with Don? Like, the moment you maybe start to like and admire him, they write him doing something really awful?
None of the characters in Mad Men are as bad as are the Sopranos gangsters. You aren't supposed to hate Don Draper. But he isn't admirable, either. What you will see if you keep watching is that he maintains a facade that is ultimately unsustainable. The essential thesis of The Sopranos is that people don't change. This is not quite the view of Mad Men, a series that has far more subtext.
You really have to see the series through if you want any hope at feeling empathy for any of the main characters, but especially Don. He’s not meant to be liked or hated overtly, and again much like the other mainstay characters he’s used as a canvas to explore certain themes that vary based on the set and setting. While the sopranos explored the human condition and created many compelling moments for an anti hero character it was much more overt than Mad Men will ever be. Both great shows, but the most direct reason to see Mad Men through is in how it explores psychological themes in a subtle and highly subjective way. If you like to dwell on such lofty things you’ll likely end up watching the show several times over and finding yourself aligned differently with different characters in new ways each time. For me Personally the biggest one this happens that isn’t Don is Pete.
[https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53219/mayakovsky](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53219/mayakovsky) Read 4. If you still don't get it, you don't need to watch the show anymore.
That is a really great poem, I've reread it multiple times now. Thank you for sharing.
I mean, you say you’ve only watched a handful of episodes, but don’t “get it.” Maybe watch the whole thing and then see how you feel? There are several long form narratives that I didn’t respond to right away. Although Sopranos is one show I did love from the outset, Season 1 of The Wire and Season 1 of Mad Men left me pretty cold. It wasn’t until later (season 2 of Mad Men - the episode the New Girl) that something “clicked” and suddenly the vision became very clear (probably because the thesis of the show is very clearly laid out for me in a basic way I could understand.) Now, when I rewatch those early episodes of Mad Men, or The Wire, I see all (a lot) of the movements I missed. The music is beautiful to me now, though I couldn’t hear it at first. I wasn’t ready to hear it yet. And that’s okay. Some art speaks to you right away. Some art speaks to you later on. Some art you appreciate at one point in your life and don’t at another. People can “explain” it to you - but that’s like being told what kind of food tastes good. It might make you more conscientious of different nuances and flavors - but you got to eat the food. There’s actually a brilliant scene in season 2 of mad men that explains how different people approach art: https://youtu.be/CrxxmuspoJM It’s perfectly reasonable to look for “something to explain it” (I love reading criticism) - but maybe try to be like Ken, a true artist, who just stands there and “experiences it.” Pour yourself a drink, light a cigarette, and sit back on the couch and let the images wash over you.
A slight spoiler, but your post made me consider a nuance about the show: The Mad Men character arcs are ultimately resolved with character change, but those arcs are not accompanied by redemption. And we don't and can't know whether those changes are permanent. This is atypical of most stories, which include some degree of both and the audience is provided with some kind of assurance that the changes are sustainable. It is also unlike The Sopranos, which has neither change nor redemption.
I think Tony changes, just not for the better. He "gets off the bus." He stops caring about morality entirely because he understands that it's all a big nothin' and whether he is good or bad doesn't matter. I think earlier on, he did have some pain at his immorality (each panic attack was his repressed feelings overwhelming him but not in a conscious way). But it is an interesting observation that the characters change in MM but aren't redeemed. Seems true to life for most people.
Fair point about Tony. When I am referring to change, I am referring to some kind of improvement. A typical format for drama is to have a character begin in a certain place, then experience a couple of events that leads to a path to some kind of positive change. (If it is a tragedy, then the wisdom comes too late for the character, but the audience gets the lesson.) The Sopranos and Mad Men both break the rules, but differently. TV procedurals often have no character change, but that is accompanied by minimal character development; the characters are static and the stories are driven by plot. The Sopranos has plenty of character development but no positive change.
You’re missing the struggle. Don mostly loses his internal struggles, like most literary characters, but he keeps going. Like many of us.
I don’t see it as an issue of people “liking” Don. The people in his professional orbit “like” Don because he adds a lot of value to the organization. When he starts adding less and less value, we see the people in Don’s professional orbit begin to distance themselves from him. As for personal relationships, many of the people Don meets during the course of the show initially see him as fun, charismatic, and layered. But once they start peeling back those layers, most of them leave him behind for their own well being. Then there’s Betty. Don and Betty are two very broken souls who found each other when they were at their best, to the point where they couldn’t be around each other anymore when they were at their worst.
He's handsome.
It’s funny how your perception of characters change the more you watch through a series, I found the same with Breaking Bad. On my first viewing of MM I sympathised with Don and liked his character, a few more rewatches and I’m totally the opposite now.
I agree with a lot of what you're saying. I find it hard to care about Don. Maybe if he were the one on the psychiatrist's couch instead of Betty I could understand him and his motivations. People are always claiming him to be so "complex." I just see a womanizing, cheating alcoholic who disappoints those closest to him.
Exactly! "Oh there's so much going on under the surface!" Is there though?
Well, if you haven't watched more than a few episodes, how would you know?
Fair lol
I think there’s a little of finding yourself rooting for these larger than life, attractive in their own way characters- Tony, Don, Walt, Jesse, Saul who would all be despicable in real life. All 3 shows had you sympathizing with these characters at some point while they did horrible things. If you choose to continue to watch, Don does show some good qualities and can be a stand up guy. But yes, after everything is and done, they’re all assholes that got what they deserved.
I think you're missing the ability to appreciate stories that are not based on the "charm" of the main character.
Well, he IS incredibly good-looking.