I’ve watched AMC’s Mad Men from its beginning since I’ve worked on the
fringes of the Advertising Industry. I minored in Advertising in college
and planned to enter the field. What I did do was enter the Animation
Industry and as an employee of an animation production company I worked
on many national TV commercials. I’ve helped animated such characters as
the Jolly Green Giant, Charlie the Starkist Tuna, the Keebler Elves,
The Quick Bunny, the Carl’s Jr. Starboy and a dozen others so watching
how advertising is portrayed on TV has always interested me. It’s the
reason I watched “Thirty Something” and “Bewitched” so Mad Men has been a
favorite for years.
Some recent other shows I watched that I felt
really dropped the ball with their series finales were Dexter (he fakes
his death) and Sons Of Anarchy (he gets hit by a truck, really?). When
this last season of Mad Men began (the second half of the last season) I
groaned as once again Don Draper takes the show off the tracks into
left field somewhere for no apparent reason. He’s done this a couple
times in the past where he’s gone to California to visit the real Don
Draper’s widow or has sex with a teenage girl as her parents smile.
Weird little non sequiturs that seem to lead nowhere and are rarely
mentioned again but now I understand the series as a whole it makes a
whole lot more sense.
If you view the entire series run of Mad Men as the story of how the
iconic 1971 Coca Cola commercial “Hilltop” came to be created, then
everything becomes clearer. After all, how did that famous spot showing a
group of young people all sitting on a hilltop singing, “I’d Like To
Buy The World A Coke” come from a 44 year old Madison Avenue advertising
exec who would have grown up in the pre-hippie / Love Child era? What
kind of a journey might a white, middle aged, high power executive type
from the 1950s have had to go through to end up with such a Zen inspired
spot? If that was the intent of Mad Men from the beginning then Don’s
idiosycracies were an important part of the story and his excursions
into the heart of America such as his hanging out with Craig Breedlove
(?) trying to build his rocket car, Spirit Of America to break the land
speed record are not just Don trying to get away from the hustle and
bustle of New York City to clear his head, nor a fact finding tour
of Middle America to see what makes the common man tick these days but
rather it’s Don realizing that to change people’s lives (by selling them
things) he himself needs to live life. It’s his getting out and away
from time to time that fuels his imagination and puts him in touch with
his audience, to become one with them. Certainly without his finding his
inner bliss through meditation he never could have dreamt up that Coke
commercial just as without going through his divorce would we have come
up with the Kodak Carousel concept.
As has already been pointed out, the receptionist at the Big sur retreat
where he was forced to surrender himself to the program after his
“niece” abandoned him there, was dressed the same as one of the hilltop
singers shown in the actual 1971 commercial that ended the series
suggesting, strongly, that Don Draper did return to New York and created
the Coke spot. But was Mad Men about the creation of that commercial
from its inception? The actual creator of the spot worked for the same
ad agency Don ended up with but that could have been written into the
show for the last season but what about the alliteration of both their
names; Don Draper and the actual creator, Bill Backer? Bill Backer was
44 when he created the Coke spot and Don was about 35 when the show
began so he too, was in his mid-forties at the end. Personally, I’d like
to think it was planned from the beginning but either way it turned out
to be perhaps my favorite TV series finale of all time.
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