Race horses and athletes are often grouped intro strong starters and good finishers and the same distinction can be seen among legendary American TV series – at least if taking home trophies from the Emmy awards is regarded as the finishing line.
Mad Men stormed out of the gates, taking the Emmy for outstanding drama series in each of its first four seasons, amid several other prizes, but has failed to convert any of its nominations into gongs in the past three years.
So one of the main areas of interest when the 2015 Emmy awards are handed out is whether the advertising industry series – which will surely receive several shortlistings for its final season – can make it to the podium and end with a flourish. Or will it be marked down as a show that made most impact early on, similar to The West Wing, which claimed the main long-form fiction prize in each of its first five years, but was left empty-handed in the final two.
A contrasting example would be Breaking Bad, which was a slow starter but good finisher. It was judged best drama series in its two final seasons (2013 and 2014), having failed to take the main prize in its first four years. The Sopranos was also more honoured for its later and final series, and the belated acclaim for these two shows may be explained by the fact that they had daringly unsympathetic central characters (both gangsters of a kind) who needed time to grow on the voters.
The question of whether Mad Men will be given a gold-plated send-off touches on the question of whether awards are best used to recognise originality or to honour longevity. There would be a sentimental satisfaction in Matthew Weiner’s series getting a valedictory gift – a sort of retirement gold watch – but the judges would also have to consider as objectively as possible if the last tranche of the drama matches up to the perky earlier stages of, say, House of Cards or True Detective.
In addition to this difficulty in separating long-runners from newcomers, award panels also have the broader problem of adjudicating who contributed what to a successful production. Is the success of a show due to its writing, direction, acting or technical aspects? In most cases, a hit will come from combined excellence in all these areas but – with prizes available for so many different aspects – jurors are sometimes encouraged to split the ticket between various worthy winners: singling out the script in this, the acting in that, the look of the other.
Anomalies can result from this approach. Simon Russell Beale once joked, after taking a best actor award in a new play that didn’t even win a nomination for its writer or director, that he had obviously somehow managed to give a good performance in a play that was badly written and incompetently staged.
Similarly, a TV historian noting that Bryan Cranston was chosen as best actor for Breaking Bad three times running from 2008-10 but then not again until the finale in 2014 might conclude that he phoned in his performance for half of the seasons before getting his act together again for the closing episodes. In reality, his acting probably came to be taken for granted – or was regarded as too obvious a choice – before a feeling that his achievement across the whole series should be noticed. Jon Hamm may hope for a similar response to his final hours as Don Draper, and the encountering of recent personal difficulties may not harm his chances.
In the case of the Emmys, though, even more precise distinctions are required than on other panels because – unlike many other TV prizes, including the Baftas – nominations relate to specific episodes, with actors and writers (due to the American TV fashion of using multiple scripting teams) being entered for specific storylines. The West Wing, which had a fashion for two-parters, would sometimes nominate only one half of a story, presumably leading cast and crew to fear that they had either lost their way or found it. This year, with Mad Men in the writing and performing sections, Hamm and Weiner may get a lift from the extra emotions surrounding Person to Person, the last episode, but in another category, the concentration on specific scripts may harm the show’s hopes in the main.
Because rules for the drama series category require the submission of six episodes from the run, Mad Men, which divided its final season of 14 episodes across two years, will have had to send the judges all but one of the programmes shown in its final season, therefore requiring a higher strike-rate than its rivals.
However, if Mad Men fails to make a strong Emmy finish, the series could take some consolation from The Wire. Whereas all the other shows that generally feature in surveys of the greatest American TV dramas – The West Wing, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad – have, like Mad Men, done well at Emmy ceremonies, David Simon’s dissection of Baltimore was almost completely ignored during five seasons in which it came to be regarded by critics and the industry as one of the most original and enduring achievements of the medium.
So, if Don Draper doesn’t get his retirement gold watch, he will still have had a more prized career than some greats of American TV.
