TV Watch: In the "midseason finale" of "Mad Men," Bert Cooper sings and dances!

"One man may seem incompetent, another not make sense,
while others look like quite a waste of company expense.
They need a brother's leadership, so please don't do them in.
Remember, mediocrity is not a mortal sin."

-- J. Pierrepont Finch (Robert Morse), in How
to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying

by Ken

Okay, so it wasn't "Brotherhood of Man." (Composer-lyricist Frank Loesser, wherever you are, would you please stand up and take a quick bow?) It was still special.

"The Best Things in Life Are Free," sings Bert.

I don't feel at liberty to go into the detail of Bert's song and dance, so as to avoid piling on spoilers for people who haven't yet watched last night's Mad Men "midseason finale." And think on that a moment: a "midseason finale." We all know that this was the last of the seven episodes that make up "the first half" of Season 7, with the remaining seven episodes, the "second half" of the season, promised for . . . well, 2015. Actually, since Mad Men has been doing 13-episode seasons, the two halves of Season 7 really do add up to a single season, more or less -- but a two-year "season"?

Anyway, in order to steer clear of further spoilers, I'm not going to go into the circumstances of Bert's rendering of "The Best Things in Life Are Free." But let's face it, isn't this what we've been waiting for ever since we met Mad Men's advertising éminence grise? A song, a dance, maybe a full-fledged production number?

I tried to figure a way to get in a picture that includes a pair
of Bert's trademark socks. We can't get everything we want.
(Wait! Look at the "Best Things in Life Are Free" shot above.)

I was happy to be caught up with Season 7 in time for last night's "finale." As I believe I've mentioned, my re-viewing of the first six seasons of Mad Men was interrupted partway through Season 6 by an unexpected televisual hijacking. I started watching the DVDs of Gilmore Girls, a show I'd never paid any attention to, figuring that esconced on the WB it must be a show for teenage girls. But within a couple of episodes I found it taking over my life, and I hardly came up for air until I'd downed all 153 episodes spread over seven seasons (which ended in 2007).

Then, thinking it might be interesting to look again at the first episode or two, I did that, and quickly knew there was no point fighting it. There was no possibility of stopping until I reached Episode 153 again. At least in theory, a test I used to apply to possible DVD acquisitions was whether I could count on watching them more than once. In fact, especially during my recent DVD (and Blu-ray) acquiring binge, I've stockpiled a huge quantity of stuff I have yet to watch even once. Gilmore Girls has already passed its two-viewings mark, and I realize I'm in constant peril of stumbling into viewing no. 3.

(For some time now I've had a future post called "A love letter to Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino" in "draft" status atop the DWT working-posts list, which I expect has been driving Howie just the least bit crazy, though by now he's familiar with the phenomenon of posts that, over a long period, I aim to write, and sometimes eventually do.)


From Season 3, Episode 7, "Seven Twenty Three": "Would you say I know something about you, Don?" asks Bert, who of course knows most of the terriblest thing there is to know about Don.


HAPPILY, THE DVR DID ITS JOB WITH MAD MEN

So by the time I polished off Gilmore Girls 153 the second time, I was able to go back to the start of Season 6 of Mad Men, then zip right through Episodes 1-6 of Season 7. Or should I say zap my way through Season 7? After going through the 78 episodes of Seasons 1-6 blissfully commercial-free, I experienced quite a jolt returning to the real world of basic cable. I went so far as to watch last night's episode in real time, with unzappable commercial breaks!

And the almost-immersive viewing of the 85 Mad Men episodes to date has been an invaluable experience. I was stunned by how much I didn't remember, or remember completely, and how much I probably never really grasped the first time through, for all sorts of reasons. One obvious reason is that preknowledge of the characters made it a lot easier to sort out developments as they developed, and to appreciate how carefully they were developed, and consequently to follow all sorts of plot lines more accurately than before.

One thing that intrigued me is that the progress of the series no longer seemed to me the steadily downward, darkening movement it had seemed taken in season by season. Mostly it seems to me that the first time through, we just knew less about the characters. The second time through, for example, the marriage of Don and Betty Draper (Jon Hamm and January Jones) seems clearly doomed almost from the time we meet them. And the second time through, what had seemed so clearly a descent into meltdown on Don's part didn't seem to me any such thing, really. Yes, some of the pieces of his puzzle were rearranging themselves -- for him as well as us. But even his supposed hitting of bottom, in the famous Hershey's presentation, where he actually tells a true story from his early life, is not just an instance of truth-telling (albeit under not ideally appropriate circumstances) but an act that enables the even-more-desperate-to-get-away Ted Chaough (Kevin Rahm) to have the suddenly and improbably coveted Los Angeles job.


THE ULTIMATE SIN: NOT FITTING IN

Who picked out Harry's glasses?

Here I have to give series mastermind Matthew Weiner all kinds of credit for the direction(s) he has chosen to take Mad Men so far in the final season. I know a lot of people have been expecting Don to have to pay for the past sins of his we learned about gradually in the early seasons. Now in fact he is being undone by what appear to be much more serious sins -- not just telling the truth, but not fitting in. Weiner and his team have given us two characters in particular who live by the crucial importance of fitting in: Harry Hamlin in his creepily empty-suited performance as Jim Cutler (the first "C" of CGC, the agency with which SCDP merged so suddenly and unexpectedly in Season 6 that it was ages before the new agency even got a name; whoever picked out those glasses for Jim should get an Emmy just for that), and Allan Havey giving a performance that somehow manages to be simultaneously vaguely comical and understatedly savage as Lou Avery, Don's singularly uncreative SCP replacement as creative director during his forced "leave."

It's not until after Don has attempted his comeback that all-knowing Bert Cooper points out, exasperatedly, that no one comes back from leave. And when someone has committed a sin like Don's, the sin of not fitting in, he should surely know that any future he may have should be someplace else.




UPDATE: TO SEE AND HEAR BERT SING AND
DANCE, CHECK OUT THIS FOLLOW-UP POST

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