MAD MEN (2015)

There was always something of a litmus-test element to Mad Men: whether or not you really fell in love with the show depended on your hunger for cynicism. The healthier your appetite, the deeper your affection for Don Draper. And in no episode was this more true than its (in this writer’s opinion) finale to end all finales, Person to Person. In it, our antihero is in the process of, well, a complete meltdown, having maybe quit his job, maybe abandoned his family, definitely abandoned his car, and decamped to a hippie commune in California. The beauty of the finale is not in how it tied up loose ends – which it did with all but its central character, with most of them getting a satisfying ending, if not a happy one (apologies to the Draper-Francis family) – but how it left Draper’s own trajectory openended.

Unless you’re a cynic. In Mad Men’s final scene, Draper is sitting cross-legged on a hilltop as a hirsute hippie leads him and a group of flower children in guided meditation. “A new day,” the hippie suggests. “New ideas. A new you.” Draper closes his eyes, the camera pans in, and, as a smile of complete peace spreads across his face, a song begins: I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke. And the full ad plays. And that’s how it ends!

It was an absolute masterstroke from writer Matt Weiner – Draper had been working for ad firm McCann Erikson, the realworld counterpart of which did in fact come up with Coca-Cola’s famous 1971 Hilltop ad. And he’d been hotly pursuing Coke as a client for nearly the entire series. The timing lines up – Mad Men so deftly wove real-world history into its narrative throughout its run – but so did the character trajectory. Here was Draper, not actually finding a new purpose, a new mantra, a new him. He was embedded, researching, stealing new ideas, to make new money. You can change your circumstances, Weiner seemed to be saying, but wherever you go, there you – in all your genius, in all your self-interest, in all your cynicism – are. It was a series conclusion that looked and sounded joyful, but was, just barely below the surface, utterly, unflinchingly, crushingly bleak. Like the perfect ad.