Matthew Weiner speaks, and I rant a little about LOST
After that stellar season finale, I find I’m loathe to let go of Mad Men quite so quickly, and wanted to make a few more comments before letting it drift off into hiatus-land. (For so long! Ahh!)
Most importantly, I want to point to this Daily Beast interview Matthew Weiner gave to Jace Lacob of Televisionary. It appears to be the only press piece of its kind right now, and it’s quite intriguing. Weiner describes the process of putting together each new season, admits he doesn’t know what will happen to characters like Sal Salvatore, Ken Cosgrove, or Paul Kinsey, and suggests that the Draper’s marriage is unambiguously finished (despite Alan Sepinwall’s musings to the contrary). Weiner also mentions that while he cares very little about giving the audience what they want, he does care a great deal about giving Roger and Joan what they want. My sense is that Joan Holloway would manage to reach outside her own fictional status and take what she wanted, regardless of whether Matt Weiner approved.
The most interesting aspect of the interview, from my perspective, is that Weiner describes his commitment to using all the material he has, refusing to save anything particularly good for a later moment. That sort of thinking makes dramas like Mad Men a radically different viewing experience than other shows built around perpetually delaying the thing the audience clearly wants. Often, that type of delayed gratification appears in the form of thwarted relationships (Luke and Lorelai on The Gilmore Girls comes to mind as a particularly egregious example), but it can also show up as the continually deferred explanations about the island on LOST, or even the perpetually ticking nuclear bomb on 24. Obviously, a certain amount of suspense is crucial to maintaining your audience, but there’s a difference between building tension as support for your storytelling, and building suspense with the ultimate goal of frustrating your audience. After a depressingly short length of time, the week-to-week experience of watching LOST starts to feel like an exercise in futility. Nothing will ever actually get explained, so everyone will continue to look at each other longingly while we occasionally discover that they once walked past each other in a convenience store a few years ago. When you don’t keep anything back, though, every single episode feels essential. In the middle of a season of LOST, you can be sure very little will get revealed or resolved. Midway through season three Mad Men, a secretary drove a John Deere over a guy’s foot.
Long story short, Mad Men is better than LOST, and if you read the interview with Matt Weiner, it’s not hard to figure out why. It’s sort of like that parable in Gattaca – you should never save something for the return trip.
If you, like me, are jonesing for a bit more Mad Men to assuage the grief of parting, there are Mad Men thoughts from The Daily Beast and Alan Sepinwall above, as well as Salon, the slate.com TV Club, and a nice interview with Chelcie Ross, the actor who plays Conrad Hilton, over at The Watcher.