Revisiting Mad Men's "The Crash"
Interesting television wasn't so long ago
In January, The Last of Us aired an episode, entitled “Long, Long Time,” that sent the internet into a tizzy. “Long, Long Time” is the third installment in the show’s first season and serves as a semi-bottle episode that broke from what the show had been building towards over the first two hours.
To recap, the episode centers on Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett’s characters falling in love amidst the end times. Over a period of years, we see the two survivalists living their best domestic lives together—fixing up the neighborhood, hosting gettogethers, and—most importantly—drinking wine. That is until Frank, played by Bartlett, is diagnosed with ALS. Knowing he’s on the edge of death, Frank asks Bill, Offerman’s character, to assist him in suicide. Death with dignity. But Bill can’t imagine a life without Frank and so he too decides to leave the world behind.
There’s something heartwarming and wrenching about the whole thing. It comes out of nowhere (at least to those not familiar with the game upon which the show is based), offering moments of tenderness after spending the first few hours engrossed in high-octane misery.
These elements don’t necessarily set it up to be a visionary or groundbreaking episode of television, merely a good to great one in a very conventional sense. “Long, Long Time” exists in a lineage of shows and movies that portray the life and times of two lovers—from first encounter to their last night together and everything in between. Love through the years is an easy way to remind one of their own mortality and to get on living. In that way, the episode does in an hour what Up managed to accomplish in the first five minutes.
And yet the reaction upon airing would suggest that we had just experienced an Important Moment in Television.
A “major contender for the best episode of 2023.” A “masterful love story for the ages.” The “best episode of TV that will be broadcast all year.”
Not to mention tweets like this:
As I said, it was a good episode. And some people seemed to really enjoy it.
In reality, “Long, Long Time” is a prime example of pop culture inverting itself; ideas that are reversed-engineered with audience reaction serving as the starting point. Something that seems daring, but really isn’t.
There was never any risk that the episode wouldn’t go over well. Offerman and Bartlett’s performances are special, but more importantly, “Long, Long Time” steers head-on into popular opinion: it’s de rigueur seeing gay couples on television these days.
The worst case scenario was a predictable, toothless standoff between those that thought it was great television and a cohort of easily-angered Rotten Tomatoes power-users.
Why bring this up? In part because there was a time before this. When episodes weren’t designed to win over Twitter just so Stephen Colbert would talk about it. Not so long ago, the internet didn’t have the power to color everything from television episodes to campaign speeches, when culture didn’t exist in some feedback loop, even when the internet was still hyper-present. In short, the tail wagging the dog.
Ten years ago, Mad Men aired its sixth and perhaps, most divisive season. Season six finds Don Draper at his most Tony Soprano; he’s vindictive, he’s openly content with being a bad husband and father, and takes pleasure in making others as miserable as he is. It’s also a season that underlines with thick, red ink that people don’t change. There’s no great awakening. We make mistakes and then repeat the process over and over again.
Roger Sterling’s views on life in the season premiere act as a through line for how the season unfolds:
“What are the events in life? It’s like you see a door. The first time you come to it, you say, ‘Oh, what’s on the other side of the door?’ Then you open a few doors. Then you say, ‘I think I want to go over that bridge this time, I’m tired of doors.’ Finally you go through one of these things, and you come out the other side, and you realize, that’s all there are, doors.”
Even by Mad Men’s dour standards, season six is especially bleak.
But then, out of nowhere, came the season’s eighth installment, “The Crash;” an episode remembered mostly for depicting everyone in the office high on speed. To refresh your memory, the premise is that Don and company are operating on fumes. General Motors is running SCDPCGC (“a mouthful”) into the ground with deadlines and there’s more work yet. Realizing that the office is in need of a collective second wind, Jim Cutler offers to fix everyone up with his doctor friend, who has in his possession a serum that promises a 24-to-72-hour boost of “creative focus, energy, and confidence.”
What follows is a sidewinding, funhouse weekend at the office. Scenes are cut and spliced together to keep the audience at bay, just as untethered to reality as the characters are. We’re never really sure when exactly it is. Is it still Friday? Maybe it’s Sunday? At one moment, it’s the morning, by the next turn dusk. There’s no logic to any of it other than trying to replicate whatever experience speed induces.
It’s at times winking and self-aware. Don dismissing his colleagues with lines like “I don’t have time for art!” Or John Mathis’ line “You’re pretentious. You know that?”
At another moment, the show highlights Aaron Staton’s (Ken Cosgrove) tap dancing skills.
Through a series of flashbacks, we learn that Don was, in effect, raped. An important character development that helps to unlock how to interpret Don’s sexual trysts throughout the entirety of the show.
And then just as the episode reaches a fever pitch, the show ratchets up the absurdity by introducing a b-plot that involves a Black woman (Grandma Ida) who manages to break into the Draper residence. It’s part horror-part humor as we see the Draper children interact with someone who we—and they—are not quite sure what to make of or what is capable of. Even when drugs aren’t present, the episode still maintains its off-kilter energy—capped off with the line “Are we negroes?”
At the same time, we also get wonderful, quiet moments that define Mad Men’s prose. Peggy’s “I’ve had loss in my life. You have to let yourself feel it” in response to learning about the death of Stan’s cousin stands out.
All of these observations serve to underscore the hodgepodge nature of the episode. A whole lot of nothing that adds up to something? And maybe that’s the point. That a show didn’t have to serve some prevailing, consensus worldview (even if it was the correct, empathetic worldview) in order to exist. Moreover, it didn’t need to be appreciated immediately or ever. It could simply exist to satisfy those that worked to create it. And maybe that was enough.
Unlike The Last of Us’ “Long, Long Time,” “The Crash” does not seem to care how it is perceived. It exists to amuse and interest the writers room. Emily St. James made this very point when the episode first aired in 2013, speculating that it was a Mad Men episode about writing an episode of Mad Men—obsessing over your job to come up with the perfect pitch.
Time has been kind to the episode, but upon first airing, was met with confusion and only a smattering of positive reactions.
To make sense of “The Crash,” some argued that the episode—and season six in total—was Mad Men’s take on Vietnam; much like the United States in Vietnam, the employees of Sterling Cooper were locked in a death-spiral that they couldn’t get out of, with General Motors serving as the catalyst for such misery. Whether or not this premise carried any water was immaterial; the show offered viewers a petri dish in which personal theories could develop.
Mad Men spent a lot of time ruminating. As the show aged, it became far more introspective and less interested in traditional plotting. Episodes began to operate as short stories, vignettes that reflected on mortality, family, feminism, masculinity, and career. When taken together, they offered sweeping accounts of the human condition and spirit (while chronicling America’s cultural transformation throughout the 1960s).
It seems inevitable then that the show would eventually hit the pause button to let its characters exhale—expelling whatever frustrations that were getting bottled up along the way. It’s notable that Joan Holloway, the office’s ballast, is missing entirely from the episode. Instead Jim Cutler, a pied piper with ulterior visions for the firm, is given the keys to the kingdom.
“The Crash” is not the best episode of Mad Men. I’m still not sure if it’s a good episode of Mad Men. But that’s not really the point. I’m glad it exists because it represents what television used to be like. Cut from the same cloth as Twin Peaks’ "Zen, or the Skill to Catch a Killer" and The Sopranos’ “The Test Dream” (co-written by Mad Men’s Matthew Weiner), “The Crash” caught viewers off guard, it made them uncomfortable, it maybe even caused some to hate the show temporarily for being needlessly pretentious.
This becomes particularly obvious when you discover that the fever dream was for naught. In the end, Draper is no closer to a creative breakthrough than he was before the serum kicked in. Company leadership and by extension, the viewers, are left with a mess of half-baked ideas and dead-ends.
So what’s the point of contrasting these two episodes? Mostly because I’m not sure when we’ll get back to this style of television. At least this style of television that can exist within the world of entertainment that is intended for broad-ish consumption. “The Crash” may not be the go-to episode of Mad Men nor the episode that first comes to mind when you reflect on the show, but it is the episode that explains its beauty and why something like Mad Men will likely never be made again. It doesn’t stand for anything other than itself. It’s didn’t go for easy social credit points. It existed on its own terms and hoped viewers would come along for the ride.
The feedback loop I mentioned at the top is concerning because it eventually snuffs out creativity. You can see how the mechanics work when critics and creators sync up in worldview: critics come to some consensus on what’s good for the times (not in smoke-filled rooms, but tacitly through Twitter and from reading each other’s blogs), creators and studios pick up on those beliefs and proceed to pump out telegraphed content that they anticipate will be well-received. It’s an efficient system, that is until the well runs dry. “Long, Long Time” isn’t the end state, but we’re getting there.
It seems obvious at this point studios feel that this is the secret to survival (i.e., renewed subscriptions to their streaming services) as margins continue to shrink; make low-risk bets by focusing on what people already like, not what they may like. And under no circumstances, make something that people may not like at all.
People are getting dumber and as they do their taste degenerates. Also, I think you meant "for naught."
I feel like this same thing is happening with "viral" moments in TV shows, a la, whatever the dumb scene was in Stranger Things that featured the Kate Bush song. I feel like writers now are like, "What song can we insert (or thing can we do) here that will make this viral" rather than organically creating something that simply fits the world of the show.