Pilot episodes are veritable wildcards. While complete misses are rare, very few pilots manage to reflect a show’s full capacity, and in some occasions, a show’s lack of merit. The Sopranos’ pilot was representative of what we would see of the series over its next six seasons; Seinfeld’s demonstrated the raw materials at the fingertips of Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld, but as an episode was unrefined and craggy. 30 Rock’s pilot, like The Sopranos, was surprisingly accurate. The pilot for Mad Men is more difficult to judge. It is a fine episode, certainly amongst the best first outings ever produced, but Mad Men has surely departed from some of the tropes Matthew Weiner established in the debut episode.
Among the challenges inherent to period piece drams is establishing the world which the characters inhabit. Don Draper lives in a time only fifty years separate from our own but the differences between our world and his are numerous and obvious, not merely limited to aesthetic, but also to social attitudes and political mores. The pilot episode’s approach to representing the world of 1960s New York is a radical break from the subtleness and understated tact Mad Men would demonstrate in later episodes and in later seasons.
The pilot takes the Martin Scorsese line of attack to introducing the audience to a period piece setting: that is, ensure the environment is loud and vast, and paint a lavish image, with the goal of pulling on a nostalgic heartstring and making the world so romantic that the audience cannot help but fall headfirst into it. It is not solely a Scorsese hallmark, but it is one so practiced and well executed by him (see Casino and Goodfellas) that his name immediately springs to mind. Loud old-timey music, a ton of movement on screen—have couples dancing classically to that old music, if at all possible—and opening dialogue that is different from our modern language: this is part of the shopping list that institutes a world lost to us, and maybe a world better than ours.
Mad Men’s pilot follows these cues, but all of this noticeably vanishes in later episodes and even in the three subsequent season premiers that reset some elements of the show for new viewers. The pilot opens in a bar. Loud old music is playing. The room is smoky and filled with businessmen. Immediately, a classic archetype is pitched our way: the dapper, middle-class, white Don Draper is served by an elderly black busboy. The two discuss cigarettes for a time before the bar’s manager approaches Draper and asks if the black busboy is bothering him. Race relations isn’t just implicitly brought up; it is explicitly mentioned, ensuring it is very clear in our minds that cultural (if not institutional) segregation still exists. Later in the episode, the camera zooms in on a calendar so the audience can see the date. And in several scenes throughout we’re reminded that this is a time when men could speak freely at women, as Don calls his new secretary “honey” and “sweetheart.”
Each of these techniques vanishes in the first season and is all but forgotten by the subsequent volumes as subtlety suddenly becomes paramount to Weiner and his team of writers. Rare are the occasions where the audience is reminded of the setting. Only when we see old advertisements and old appliances do we realize what’s happened: we’ve submerged ourselves into this different world, and only seeing things we recognize can make us aware of that, like the novel moment where the office gets a Xerox machine, or like the show focused on the assassination of President Kennedy. But the majority of the time we’re in that world, and we’ve forgotten that it’s a different place from ours. The fact that we’re in the 1960s is lost when we’re watching Draper spiral into alcoholism or when we’re watching Sterling lose the firm’s most vital account. We’re not hit over the head with nostalgia as we are in the pilot.
The same kind of subtlety permeates right through the series. A number of black laborers appear and engage in rather distant chatter with our protagonists, but the issue of race is never explicit like in the pilot. Rather, it is implicit: the audience squirms in their seats because they expect something uncomfortable to occur, and because they know about contemporaneous racial tensions. But crucially, none of this is ever acted out—we are extrapolating it in our minds. Indeed, the only time when race is explicitly mentioned is when Kinsey dates a black woman. Sally Draper, a child, finds the interracial coupling bizarre, and Joan will couch a statement about the relationship later on. (Lane later dates a black girl but the interracial factor itself is not a topic of controversy.) Similarly, Don Draper will never again address women unknown to him as “honey”—that mode of dialogue is left for sleazier characters.
But what is most remarkable is when the pilot successfully augurs what Mad Men will become. Take the camera work that became a mainstay of the series, such as the frequent shots of the back of people’s heads (especially the back of Draper’s head), novel if only because we don’t see it done elsewhere. The template for the final scene of almost each episode is also carved out: Don arrives home, the camera at the top of the stairs casting its eye down at the door. Then, the final shot, always impactful: Don pauses in a room and gazes distantly and ponderously as the camera dollies back through an open door, enclosing Don in the door frame. That sight will be repeated time and time again, each as striking as the first.
The brilliantly handled twist with Betty at the end, where Don comes home to his wife after we’ve seen him with another woman earlier in the episode, essentially encapsulates their relationship for the rest of the series. It’s not because Don will be adulterous. It’s because in this scene, and for the entire series, it’s clear that Betty loves Don and admires him and is in some degree awestruck by him, and that will never change, ever present in the final episode of the fourth season.
It’s also interesting to consider how weak Don is in the pilot. For forty-five minutes he wallows in a pool of failure, and maybe in a pool of self disgust. He’s intemperate at the pitch meeting with Rachel Menken and impotent at the pitch meeting with Lucky Strike. He only succeeds after seeing his coworker crumble. Near the show’s end he admits defeat to Rachel Menken and struggles when she poses him abstract questions about life—questions he’ll never truly be able to answer. His sole coup comes when he arrives home and his wife is none the wiser about his exchanges with two women: the extramarital sex at the beginning of the day and his date with Menken at the end. He has succeeded in deceit. In a few short scenes, the pilot has traced the Don Draper blueprint for four seasons to come.
Mad Men’s pilot does all the right things: it hits a home run on the things it needs to get right, and on the things it can afford to miss it leaves room for improvement. The show is better when it’s subtle and less hamfisted about its period piece setting. If you’ve watched the series through to the latest season, you’ll appreciate how canny the pilot can be in setting out the personalities of the main players. It gets some things wrong—the character of Pete Campbell will be developed straight out of the snarky grave in which he’s wasting away here—but the episode does a neat job of unmasking the many faces of Don Draper. Matthew Weiner has said he didn’t have the series planned out at the inception of the pilot. He’s done a good job of sticking with it, but more importantly, the pilot has done a good job of holding up and tracking with the show. This, then, is a very good opening for an extraordinarily good television show.
