Mad Men Season 2, Episode 3: Goodbye Mr. (and Mrs.) Chips

POSTED: Wednesday, August 13, 2008, 9:30 PM

Filed Under: TV Mad Men

Oh no he didn't!

amctv.com

After two episodes of presumed marital fidelity, ad exec Don Draper (Jon Hamm) caves big time. Meanwhile, wife Betty (January Jones) is aggressively wooed by a Salingerean oaf (Gabriel Mann) at her riding club. Media buyer Harry Crane (Rich Sommer) makes an uncharacteristic power play. The Utz Potato Chip account is imperiled when its celebrity spokesperson (Patrick Fischler) mortally insults the Utz oligarchs (Jan Hoag and Steve Stapenhorst). After a thorough workout last week, Kinsey (Michael Gladis) and Pete (Vincent Kartheiser) are MIA this week. Joan (Christina Hendricks) and Peggy (Elisabeth Moss) barely surface. Odd, disjointed episode, all in all. But like its main character, Mad Men is all about taking the long con over the short one, so let’s give Matthew Weiner the benefit of the doubt and chalk this one up to long-term plot development.

Here’s a thought: It’s obvious that, circa 1962, Sterling Cooper is getting a lot less cool in the advertising world. There’s no irony and little abstraction in any of the work they produce. And their clients seem increasingly stodgy and provincial. Keep that in mind while watching this week’s big story — Draper’s first clumsy, then sadistic, attempts to save the Utz Potato Chips account from ruin — unfold. Think about that: Utz Potato Chips. This should have special resonance for PA-based viewers. If any further proof was needed that Sterling Cooper was mired in the 1950s, I think the fact that the entire agency is in DEFCON 5 because they are about to lose a York County-based potato chip company should settle the matter.

So what happened? SC has the Utz account. They hire mean-spirited Don Rickles-type comedian Jimmie Barret (Fischler) as a celebrity spokesperson. While filming a commercial in which Barrett, drunk off his ass, extols the virtues of potato chips over beer nuts ("What am I? A squirrel?"), the Utz-owning Schillings (Hoag and Stapenhorst) are ushered onto the set to bask in the celebrity aura they're underwriting. Barrett catches one look at the overweight Mrs. Schilling and unleashes a barrage of fat jokes that are as cruel as they aren’t funny. The Schillings, humiliated, threaten to pull up stakes. Don, charged with getting Barrett to apologize to the Schillings, makes a hash of it, setting out to lay down the law on Barrett’s girlfriend/manager Bobbie Barrett (Melinda McGraw) but ending up getting seduced by her instead.

Draper arranges a sitdown at a fancy restaurant. (Betty, humiliatingly, is used as bait for lecherous Barrett.) During drinks, Don and Bobbie meet up near the bathrooms to make out/negotiate the terms of Jimmie’s apology. Bobbie plays the heavy, saying SC’s contract with Jimmie obligates SC to pay him even if he’s fired, and that if Don wants Jimmie to apologize, it is going to cost $25,000.

Here’s where I admit I was a little surprised. Draper’s response would, by contemporary standards, definitely be considered sexual assault. He does what he does, muttering into her ear "I’ll ruin him." Whether we are meant to understand this as her being overcome by Draper’s masculinity, or simply afraid for her life, Draper’s plan works. They return to the table and, taking a visual cue from Betty, Jimmie launches into an eloquent and borderline sincere apology. The Utz account is saved.

Draper, momentary transformation into Genghis Khan aside, has still supplicated himself to a monster. And Betty has been used — subjected to hours of Barrett’s inane flirtations as a way of softening him up — a fact of which she is all too aware. This leads to some good acting from Hamm and Jones on the way home; both are obviously feeling awful about themselves and the world, but say the exact opposite.

The kill-or-be-killed attitude that's helped Draper rise from penniless white trash Korea cannon fodder to Madison Ave. executive has a very literal component to it — when backed into a corner, he is more than capable of physical violence. Maybe he’d even kill somebody. Who knows — maybe he has?

Not tons more going on here: a goofy, but I suspect not self-contained story about Harry Crane, whose sole distinguishing feature up until this point is that he is slightly less horrible than the other junior execs. (Although if you’ll remember from Season 1, he did get busted cheating on his wife in the anarchic Election Night episode and spent the rest of the season crashing in his office, wandering the SC offices at night like a boxer-wearing, tubby poltergeist.)

Crane finds out cocky, stupid account manager Ken Cosgrove (Aaron Staton) makes 150 percent of his salary and becomes uncharacteristically ambitious. Learning from a friend at NBC that courtroom drama The Defenders has lost all its advertisers due to squeamishness over an upcoming abortion-themed episode, Crane attempts to get makeup manufacturer Belle Jolie, a SC client, to buy up all the ad time for a song, arguing that the controversy surrounding the show and its content guarantee a huge audience of young women. Belle Jolie begs off, but Crane gets a raise and promotion, and not-gay art director Salvatore (Bryan Batt) gets to see the slightly less not-gay Belle Jolie executive Elliot Lawrence (Paul Keeley), with whom he had a brief not-flirtation in Season 1. (In all seriousness, the exchange between the two of them in that episode was one of the show’s saddest, most lucid moments.)

What else? Draper fires his secretary for not covering his ass while he was watching Le Jetée (or possibly Hiroshima Mon Amour). I have been reading a lot of the other Mad Men recaps and, while most of them are really good, I have a bone to pick with some of them about the way they interpret Draper’s forays into art and literature. Many in TV blogland seem to think this is some kind of posturing on his part, like he feels intellectually insecure or culturally behind the times and is trying to keep up. But with whom? And for whose benefit? I think this is missing the point: Draper is self-contained to the point of psychosis. I can’t imagine him needing or wanting anyone’s intellectual approval, particularly not the early-'60s East Village avant garde who he made such thorough mincemeat of in Season 1. On the contrary, this is just another facet of Don Draper’s craft: French New Wave, modernist poetry, post-war American sociology — it’s all just grist for the mill for him, all ideas to be taken and used.

Oh yeah, Betty gets hit on by Franny from Franny and Zooey. Or maybe he was just a talking sweater ...

Roxanne

Posted 2008-08-13 21:45:33

Now I am quietly waiting for

the catastrophe of my personality

to seem beautiful again,

and interesting, and modern.



At the end of the first episode of season II, Draper sends off a copy of Meditations in an Emergency to some unknown person (some former paramour is my guess and it's quite likely Rachel Menken) who's probably in France. Just a guess.

Michele

Posted 2008-08-14 11:24:58

Joel, have you read these Mad Men recaps? They're hilarious.

http://www.unboundedition.com/content/view/7505/50/

Joel

Posted 2008-08-20 09:57:21

Roxanne:

Why France?!

Roxanne

Posted 2008-08-20 16:07:18

I dunno. I actually changed my mind about this. I think the new wave flick he was watching was Joan of Arc and it made a nice bookend to the Defenders episode they pitched to Belle Jolie. 



And, as I recall now, it was Midge he begged to fly off with him to Paris in the first season.

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