Many complained that Mad Men, which concludes this week, was style over substance: all those Eames chairs and hour-glass dresses. The writer Daniel Mendelsohn dismissed it as nothing but “a soap opera decked out in high-end clothes”. Even if this were true – and it’s not – the visuals alone were reason enough to watch. Over seven seasons, designer Janie Bryant proved herself the greatest screen costumier since Edith Head. The outfits were perfectly matched both to period and character, whether it was Joan sashaying in pneumatic-green satin, or Pete’s ever-changing but never-dignified hairstyles and lapels.
But this show isn’t really about the clothes. Nor is it, as some have said, just an exercise in sneering at the 1960s (the casual chauvinism! the chain smoking! Betty’s awful parenting!). It was always about Don Draper – or rather the impostor Dick Whitman, who stole the real Draper’s identity in Korea – an ad man in thrall to his own pretty lies. The show’s creator Matthew Weiner used Draper to explore the great American yearning for second chances. Jon Hamm’s underrated performance got sadder with each season. His brittle Draper was as much trapped by his own invented persona as Kim Novak in Vertigo. There’s a certain grimace Hamm does when swallowing bourbon, as if sickened by his own glamour and womanising. What keeps us with him – just – is copywriter Peggy Olson (the magnificent Elisabeth Moss), the only person at Sterling Cooper who could hold her own in a modern workplace. Peggy is the future, and she looks on this ruin of a man with grace, as one workaholic to another.
The finest moment so far of this final season was in episode 7 (“Waterloo”), set during the moon landings. Don watches the ghost of his former boss, the eccentric Bert Cooper, go into a dance, singing “The moon belongs to everyone / The best things in life are free”. There are tears in Draper’s eyes, but you know that he isn’t quite sold on the noble sentiment. He is still falling, as in the credits, for his own ad-man hype – and so are we.
