Alan Sepinwall has done my favorite post-game interview with Mad Men‘s Matthew Weiner about this season of Mad Men, and I wanted to pull out this part of it, in which Alan asks Weiner about what it means for the show to be entering the second half of the decade, because I think it gets at something critically important:

I’ve always been telling a story, from the beginning of season 2, when the youth culture starts to be the focus of the advertising industry and commerce in general, and then the society. And you see Clearasil and talk about Pepsi, but there’s the scene in the elevator with the guys talking and they won’t take their hats off. And the crudening of our culture, it’s a big part of the story. There becomes less irony, and as the manners disappear, there’s less hiding. That’s something that I’ve really tried to tell. That’s why Ginsberg will swear out of the middle of nowhere, that’s why more of the language becomes more on the nose. Witticisms start dropping off. It hasn’t changed for Don and Roger, but I’m trying to tell a story about how we’ve become the way we are now. And I think that being inundated with nihilism, random violence, the rise of subversion in the marketplace — which Ginsberg represents — multi-culturalism, this is not a good or bad judgment. It’s just part of how we became more modern, and what people perceive. One of my things is that human behavior doesn’t change, but certainly the manners change, and what you’re watching is the manners changing.

In a way, this clarifies for me why I’ve never felt as attached to Mad Men as some of the folks who love it do — I’m somewhat interested in the reactions of folks on the wrong side of history, but I’m more excited to spend time with folks who will be liberated by the crudening of that culture. Because while politeness can be a spur to style, and wit, and class, it can also be a powerful means of enforcing privilege and preserving the comfort of people who benefit from it.

Politeness is staying quiet while your fiance rapes you so you don’t disturb anyone else in the office — and so their sense of you isn’t disrupted. Politeness isn’t interfering in the early days of the marriage of the colleague who got you pregnant. Politeness is wondering if you should have slept with Lane Pryce to keep his spirits up. Politeness is letting Don Draper appropriate or undermine your ideas. Politeness is not speaking up when your colleagues keep you at the office so late that you can’t get home safely to the neighborhood where you live because that’s all your salary allows.

And that’s why I found the rudeness of certain characters on Mad Men this season so refreshing. When Peggy calls out Don in a test kitchen with other people around, she’s being rude, but she’s also entirely justified. I love Michael Ginsberg in his awkward, profane, emotional nakeness. There isn’t a polite way to talk about being born in a concentration camp, to call out your boss for undermining your work. The fact that he’s a raw nerve end is a kind of courage, particularly in a season where Lane Pryce’s inability to talk about his problems or to ask for help lead him to commit what he hoped was a quiet transgression, and ultimately to his death.

Mad Men is, to me, the beginning of a conversation that our culture is still very much struggling to have, about the fact that style and privilege don’t have to be connected. It’s why Ron Swanson is such a transformative figure in his suggestion that performative hypermasculinity is in no way dependent on the oppression of women. And it’s why, in a way, it’s nice to see vintage cocktails and sixties styles come back. Feminism doesn’t mean that Peggy Olson and I are here to take away your old fashioned.

My affection for the finale of Mad Men has increased the more I’ve thought about the episode, even as I wonder if I might look back on it as a better series finale than jumping off point for anything new. For a show that’s been blunter than previously about its themes in any given episode, the fifth season of Mad Men is a fairly subtle look at how and why men of a certain era failed to anticipate the rise of feminism, or to recognize that a rearrangement of gender roles could do anything to ease their lingering discontents.

The end of the finale emphasized, as clearly as was humanely possible, that Don Draper is a limited person. That’s not to say he’s incapable or weak, but that he’s settled deeply into certain patterns and is profoundly bounded by certain desires and fears, which really may be a way of explaining that he’s feeling middle age hard. When Megan gets drunk and tells Don “This is what you want, isn’t it? For me to be waiting for you? That’s why you won’t give me a chance,” she’s partially right. Don wants not to want that, but he can’t help himself. The stay-at-home wife who he failed to satisfy intellectually or emotionally left him. The work wife he nurtured professionally moved on without him. Don may be at peace with Peggy’s departure—”I’m proud of you. I just didn’t know it would be without me,” he tells her before the beginning of Casino Royale. But his privilege means he’s never developed the capacity to work his way through personal situations that are difficult for him. Of course he only likes “the beginnings of things.” Everything else requires skills Don doesn’t have. And the finale of the show seems to emphasize that he will never develop them.

We can see that fundamental, but it’s an uncertainty that’s invisible to many of the men around him. Don’s walk off Megan’s set and towards the bar begins with a nifty bit of lighting that transforms him briefly into the silhouette from the credits sequence, a featureless archetype of masculinity. Don Draper may be an individual, but he’s a role model to the men around him, and he may be a void, but they see the strong, clean lines, the cut of the suit, the swoop of the hair, the success.

That archetype’s always been appealing to Pete Campbell in particular, a man who’s always looking for someone to emulate. Pete is somewhat closer than Don to articulating why he’s unhappy, and more active in pursuing alternatives, whether it’s his vigorous attempt to eclipse Roger at work, sleeping with a prostitute at a classy brothel, or pursuing an affair with his neighbor’s wife. When Beth returns to his life, Pete’s reaction is a combination of an attempt at Don-like suave and something new. “This is not a joke,” he says in an evocation of Don’s California reset button. “Let’s go to Los Angeles. I’ve been there. It’s filled with sunshine.” She’s not buying it, and Pete’s attempts to stand up for her autonomy don’t stick a landing either. His insistence that “Howard can’t make you do this. He can’t control you. He’s a monster,” doesn’t acknowledge that Beth might want shock therapy. Instead, his real goal is keeping her sexually available to him. He didn’t like the idea that she was ignoring him or had forgotten him voluntarily after their first encounter, and the prospect that he’s literally been erased from her memory permanently drives him into a rage. “You are the most disgusting person I’ve ever seen,” Pete spits at Beth’s husband on the train, provoking the first of two fights he’ll lose within five minutes. “You just couldn’t wait to get her in the hospital and erase her brain.”

Unlike Don, who sees only the newness of things as they come into their lives, Pete’s ahead of the curve only in that he sees the disappointments immediately. He feels Beth’s distance immediately after sleeping with her, but he can’t seem to process that Beth’s treating him like men in this series often treat women: she wants to sleep with him and then make him disappear. When Trudy, lured in by Pete’s story of how he got his injuries, relents and decides he should be allowed an apartment in the city, he’s ceased wanting it before they’ve even signed a lease: he doesn’t have an idea of who he wants to have an affair with there anymore. But whether he can see the rot earlier than Don is doesn’t mean that Pete’s gotten the shock that would make him realign his goals and values. The incentives to stay within the protective shell of patriarchy, to retain the right to blow off Joan in partners’ meetings and cheat without getting caught, are simply too great. If anything, the man who got the sharpest shock this season, aided by LSD and Pete’s condescension, is Roger Sterling. And the closest he comes to progress is an affair with an age-appropriate woman who sets her own terms for their encounter.
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If you wondered why Mad Men bothered to open its fifth season with a Civil Rights protest and to make the arc of the first episode the arrival of the first black employee at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, only to assign Dawn, the new secretary, a single substantive sequence for the entire rest of the season, Matthew Weiner has words for you:

One issue some thought would be explored more thoroughly this season was race. The premiere featured a civil rights protest and a black secretary was introduced, but after that, the topic was largely ignored.

“I feel like the expectation that introducing a black character means you have to tell the civil rights struggle is in a way racist,” said Weiner. “I use her character the same way I use all the characters on the show. She is there. I’m sorry if people were disappointed. Do I regret there wasn’t more of it? Yeah. All I can say is, it’s early. We have 26 episodes left. I don’t feel like in the history of the United States that 1966 was the year of civil rights; it’s early.”

This strikes me as somewhat disingenous. There’s nothing wrong with not wanting to pigeonhole black characters, but it’s not as if Weiner’s Dawn anything close to a substantive role that fleshes her out as an individual. In seeking to avoid making her a stereotype, he’s largely treated her as a token, an acknowledgement that the world around SCDP is changing but that the characters within it are not always adapting successfully. That’s a fine point to make, but it feels like Dawn exists solely to serve other characters’ development, she’s a device, rather than a person. Weiner and the Mad Men staff have a lot of other tools at their disposal to illustrate Don Draper’s aging, Pete Campbell’s dissatisfaction, Roger Sterling’s lost touch. To me, introducing Dawn only to reduce her to one of those tools is not actually more impressive than telling her a Civil Rights story that gave her humanity and an inner life would have been.

If you’re not at Netroots, never fear! My ThinkProgress colleagues and I are leading a series of conversations with the conference’s speakers and elected officials, which we kicked off with Amanda Marcotte this afternoon. The two of us discussed why liberals are dismissive of mainstream culture, whether Peggy Olson is actually one of Mad Men‘s main characters, and the awesome women of Game of Thrones:

“Tears aren’t a woman’s only weapon. The best one’s between your legs. Learn how to use it.” – Cersei Lannister

“There is no number.” – Peggy Olson

“What do we say to the god of death?” – Syrio Forel
“Not today.” – Arya Stark

I’ve been saying for some time that once the books are finished and the television series has caught up, there’s an essay I can’t wait to write about the male mentors of Arya Stark. But watching this Sunday’s episodes of both Game of Thrones and Mad Men, I was struck by the parallels between those series’ traditional women, Sansa and Joan, and their trailblazers, Peggy and Arya, and the advice they receive from others about how to make their lives better.

One of the ways we understand that Don Draper is a fundamentally selfish person is his failings as a mentor, one of the major threads of this season. On a fairly fundamental level, he’s incapable of seeing Peggy’s — or anyone else’s — success as a contributor to his success rather than detracting from it. He’s not going to advocate with her with Heinz. He hangs up on her when she tries to apologize. Instead of seeing Ginsberg’s rise as another opportunity for Don to get credit for spotting and developing a talent that other people might have passed over, he undermines the younger man by leaving his design for a Sno-Cone ad in a cab so he has an excuse not to pitch it. Alan Sepinwall remarked on how “Peggy tries to resume her role as Don’s work wife — literally in the Cool Whip pitch — but the chemistry’s not the same” in “Lady Lazarus,” but in a way, that’s an illustration of the fundamental awkwardness of their relationship. Don’s lack of confidence means that he’s keeping a ledger of what Peggy owes him, rather than secure and able to spend his influence and knowledge without expecting a return with interest in a series of scheduled payments. Everything he does when Peggy gives her notice is wrong. He’s asked too much of her over the years to understand she sees their account as basically even. Even if Peggy wants the role of Don’s work wife, his ardent, courtly kiss on her hand is an attempt to seduce her rather than respect her, a fundamental reminder of her gender. The emotion is powerful, but what she wants is a kind of relationship that Don is unable to engage in.

Joan, who gets and takes the best advice (which is not saying much) offered to her all episode by Lane, who advises her to get a fair price for what she’s selling, was never really considered a potential subject for mentorship and professional growth. She buys her way to a more stable, secure, second-class existence. It’s a place she can have not just because, as Don tells Peggy, she’s been there for thirteen years, but because giving your office manager five percent of the firm is fundamentally different from admitting a woman as an equal partner. Joan, as Emily Nussbaum argues at the New Yorker, has won her right to be in the room, to hear what the men think of her. Peggy wants to change the terms of the conversation rather than simply hearing it, or participating in it. Her deep drink, her conviction to leave, is less about the firm choosing Joan over her, and more about the affirmation that Don Draper has trained her for something he doesn’t actually know how to give her: leadership.
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When AMC announced earlier this week that Breaking Bad will premiere its fifth season on July 15, it was met with so much rejoicing that many missed the second half of the press release: AMC will also be premiering the first of eight episodes in a new reality series called Small Town Security, about “a family-owned private security company in Georgia.”

Even for AMC, which has made several high-profile missteps over the past few years, this seems like a strange detour. Over the past year, the network has dabbled in both talk shows and reality shows with Talking Dead, Comic Book Men, and The Pitch. But those series were clearly piggybacking on the success of AMC’s two most prominent (and most profitable) successes: The Walking Dead and Mad Men.

It’s admittedly harder to make a reality series about manufacturing meth, though I’d definitely tune in for a Breaking Bad talk show (Talking Bad? Breaking Chat? Just spitballing here). But Small Town Security is AMC’s first step toward standalone reality programming.

The conventional narrative – and in my opinion, the correct one – is that AMC grew too fast, too soon. After quietly rolling along as the premiere channel for commercial-filled American movie “classics” for decades, the network experimented with original content and hit two unprecedented home runs: Mad Men and Breaking Bad. But quality costs money, and each of AMC’s attempts to curb the costs of its original programming resulted in an embarrassing loss of face, from protracted salary and creative arguments with Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner to rumblings about Breaking Bad moving to FX, amid rumors that AMC was demanding a shortened (read: cheaper) final season.

I’m a TV critic, not a businessman, and I’m well aware that my priorities are different than the priorities of AMC executives. But I can’t see how it’s a good idea to invest in reality programming that has no ties to AMC’s flagship series. Small Town Security is being developed by producers Ken Druckerman and Banks Tarver, whose biggest success is VH1’s so-bad-it’s-awful Mob Wives. The sky certainly isn’t falling – AMC has already greenlit pilots for two new scripted dramas – but I don’t know any Breaking Bad fans who will stick around to watch a reality show that would seem much more at home on Discovery or A&E.

High-quality television obviously costs money, and if the price of Mad Men and Breaking Bad means filling other time slots with cheap-to-produce supplemental content, I can live with it. But it wasn’t so long ago that the network was investing in genres that no other network would touch, which led to successes like The Walking Dead and failures like the miniseries remake of The Prisoner. I don’t see any of that pilgrim spirit in AMC’s latest moves. That may be good business. But let’s not forget that AMC’s willingness to invest real money in something risky and brave is how we got Mad Men and Breaking Bad in the first place.

I know I haven’t written much about Mad Men this season—I think the show’s more likely to result in one big piece than regular check-ins. But I did spend a couple of hours talking to Huffington Post’s Maureen Ryan and the AV Club and HitFix’s Ryan McGee about what feel like the big three shows of the moment last night for their podcast, which is up here. Check it out!

There’s been a sense, I think, that AMC struck gold with Mad Men, its advertising-in-the-1960s product of an auteur that arrived very fully formed and confident in itself, and the network has struggled to define its identity since. The Walking Dead is a big, gross, violent popular entertainment that’s struggled to maintain its artistic equilibrium this season. AMC and Veena Sud managed the expectations around The Killing poorly, so a totally solid show left its audience feeling hugely betrayed. And Hell on Wheels felt like a cheap Deadwood ripoff, with the addition of a Wronged Confederate and a poorly-executed stab at racial insight. But Deadline has a list of the pilots AMC is apparently considering, and a lot of them sound pretty fantastic:

I hear the six scripts that made the cut this year are: Chris Mundy‘s Low Winter Sun, an adaptation of the New Zealand Gothic murder mystery series, Craig Silverstein‘s Turn, about George Washington’s spy ring, Richard LaGravenese‘s Philly Lawyer, about a law student, Jake Paltrow & Robbie Kinberg‘s Crystal Pines, about a journalist who gets cloned, Jason Cahill‘s F/V Mean Tide, about a Maine lobster fishing family, and Kerry Williamson‘s Sacred Games, an epic story of crime and punishment in modern Mumbai based on the novel by Vikram Chandra.

Concept-wise, I think Turn, Crystal Pines, F/V Mean Tide, and Sacred Games sound most promising. Turn would be both a new kind of period show and an answer to the dearth of Revolutionary War stories in pop culture, a weird omission I’ve noted before. And Washington’s spies were a fascinating group that included women and Quakers as well as your conventional breed of dudely badass, and they ran operations including my personal favorite, the effort to getting Hessian mercenaries to defect en masse by offering them land and getting them snugly with American women they then felt compelled to marry. Crystal Pines would be an awesome opportunity for a single actor to play two roles. The lobster wars portrayed in F/V Mean Tide are a real thing and would be a rich story engine in a novel setting. And I would love so much for a show set in India that isn’t Outsourced. Mad Men stands out because it’s a highly, highly original concept rather than a riff on an existing one. AMC needs to display that confidence again.

The bridge is yours.

-This is a great essay about last night’s Mad Men.

-Thank goodness M. Night Shyamalan wasn’t the final word on the Avatar universe.

-Love this.

-Baby Wookiees win Monday.

-Pretty darn excited for Hysteria:

Essayist William Deresiewicz has a fascinating look at the evolution of friendship between men and women in the New York Times—and a suggestion for why we don’t see these friendships in popular culture:

So if it’s common now for men and women to be friends, why do we so rarely see it in popular culture? Partly, it’s a narrative problem. Friendship isn’t courtship. It doesn’t have a beginning, a middle and an end. Stories about friendships of any kind are relatively rare, especially given what a huge place the relationships have in our lives. And of course, they’re not sexy. Put a man and a woman together in a movie or a novel, and we expect the sparks to fly. Yet it isn’t just a narrative problem, or a Hollywood problem.

This isn’t entirely true, of course: friendships have narratives and experience strains and uncertainties that can be just as impactful and interesting to explore as the stresses of new romantic connections. And one of the hallmarks of the Frat Pack and Judd Apatow is that they treat male friendships with that level of significance. In The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Andy’s growing connections with his coworkers, and the various ways in which they’re alternately respectful and insensitive, are the catalyst for him to develop his love life, and their friendships are almost as important as his first adult romantic relationship. In Wedding Crashers, John and Jeremy are the most important people in each other’s lives, and the movie is about how those friendships have to change when they start treating women as potentially permanent additions to their lives instead of as temporary interludes. I Love You, Man treats the process of finding a best friend as if it’s as significant as the quest for a permanent partner.

And even if you don’t want to do a 90-minute exploration of friendship in a movie, or believe that friendships are inherently less dramatic than romantic partnering (which strikes me as somewhat strange), that’s not an argument against including friendships between men and women on television, where they can be an established part of the background dynamic rather than foregrounded. New Girl, after a rocky start, has settled into a nice dynamic between Jess and her roommates, and has dealt with the sexual tension question by having the characters be honest about the fact that it exists while also being clear that they don’t intend to act on it. One of the many virtues of Don’t Trust the B—- in Apartment 23, which debuts on ABC this Wednesday, is that it features a significant friendship between a man and a woman, the equally funny Krysten Ritter and James Van Der Beek. Peggy Olson and Don Draper are arguably friends on Mad Men, and this season’s Game of Thrones involves Arya’s friendships—or at least alliances—with men. These kinds of stories are far from impossible to tell. It’s not as if men and women who are friends are fictional creatures who have to be conjured into existence.