“Hold fast to dreams/For if dreams die/Life is a broken-winged bird/That cannot fly.” African-American poet Langston Hughes published these poignant words in 1930, but they didn’t appear in countless yearbook inscriptions and on dorm room posters until the ’60s and ’70s, when pursuing one’s dreams became the cultural imperative. Following your personal dream meant different things to different people, but it commonly involved rebuking the unified “American dream” everyone had previously agreed upon: marriage, family, a home (one you owned, in post WWII America) and a car. And as Americans became more focused on their personal states, the ones they lived in became distinctly less united.
In “Christmas Waltz,” the latest episode of “Mad Men,” we find out that cars are part of the dream for ad agencies, too – a sign that they’ve arrived, just as owning a car was once a sign of achieving adulthood, something that the staff at SCDP also hasn’t done yet. Instead, like teenagers, they’re stealing money from their corporate parents’ wallets, driving other people’s cars too fast, napping when they should be working, drinking too much, throwing tantrums (and other things) and having sex with near-strangers. And just as it did in America as a whole, this behavior is taking its toll on their personal unions – or will do so before long.
We start off with a Union Jack who’s been unfaithful to a lady by giving “her portion” to a younger and sexier country – one that refused to pay taxes to her forebears long ago. Soaked by the ruinous tax rates of 1960s Britain — and unlike the similarly transplanted Jaguar XKE — Lane’s failed in his dream of escape to a new life in the new world, and is instead still yoked to the same two queens, only one of which is willing to forgive and forget his failings. If he’d only followed the advice offered later by Lakshmi, “Tell the truth; that always works,” he might have found a way out. Surely Don at the least, and probably Roger too, would have understood the marmalade Lane finds himself in and helped him get the money he needed for the Taxman. But Lane’s both British and old-fashioned; a fatal combination in this situation. Like others of his generation, he can’t admit he has a problem and ask for help – a self-reliance that will seem increasingly quaint as the self-help generation begins expecting everyone to aid their self-actualization.
As he’s always done in this group, former beatnik, civil rights activist, and Sterling-Cooper casualty Paul Kinsey leads the way as an early convert to one of the “alternative” religions beginning to capture the imaginations, wallets, and entire lives of people feeling emptied out rather than filled up by mid-century American life. Ostensibly seeking to turn Harry Crane into a Hare Krishna, he invites his former co-worker to a spiritual gathering at which a Charlie Manson look-a-like strums the sitar and young women try to lure men in, just as they did in other cults during the ’60s.
“Don’t pretend this isn’t strange. That’s why I wanted you to see it,” Paul advises Harry – a quote that sums up a decade of passing strangeness that can’t be explained to those who didn’t see it firsthand. While drugs, orgies and religious cults may seem familiar terrain now, along with their attendant risks, those who tried them when they were new and unusual were more often fascinated by the sense of liberation they imparted – a feeling bolstered by the disapproval of “squares,” such as peers like Harry who lived much as their parents did.
Yet Paul’s too smart or too square himself to be fully taken in – he may have shaved his head, given away all his possessions and changed his name, but he’s hit upon a truth that will later be known as “no matter where you go, there you are.” He’s depressed to find that not even his required-to-love-everyone guru likes him, that his monkey mind won’t calm down and that he’s still burning with worldly ambition despite having worked his way (down) through the entire alphabet soup of ad agencies. And his instincts are good, even if his timing and talents are bad – he spots the cult potential in “Star Trek,” even if he can’t see that that juggernaut “Bewitched” (a show about an ad exec with a troublemaking wife) is about to take it down. In the short run, the hacks will win out over the imaginative innovators, but time will be on Roddenberry’s side, if not Paul’s. (Whether the housewives win out over the ad men is of course another story, and another series.)
Having told the truth about his feelings, Paul is rewarded with lies from Harry, who nevertheless proves himself a true friend by not only financing but directing Paul’s dream, urging him to flee the sticky web of Lakshmi for that bright California sunshine that’s always helped Don. Channeling nearly identical words to those that Don used to rouse Peggy from her torpor while in a mental hospital, Harry tells Paul that, “This failure, this life, it will all seem like it happened to someone else” – a belief in reinvention that was increasingly embraced by Americans shedding marriages, family and careers in ways unimaginable even a decade before.
Peggy herself has both the best and worst advice for Paul: suggesting that Harry tell him, “he has to write a better script,” she mysteriously switches to “then he shouldn’t be doing it” when Harry says that even the terrible script they read was hard for Paul to produce. Writing a better script for their lives is precisely what people like Paul were trying to do in that era. It was also harder than they thought it would be — the reason many gave up sooner than they should have. As someone who worked herself into a new life story, and who works hard at her career rather than relying on innate talent, Peggy should know better than to advise giving up so easily.
Like his former employee, Don faces reinvention, needing to move from faking work while napping to making work that wakes clients up. He’s excited not by a car (which he says does nothing for him) but the prospect of the success that landing it as an account would confer. While Roger pickles himself into incoherence in honor of Pearl Harbor, and Lane can’t give a speech that the staff understands, Don gives a rousing one that marshals the troops like Patton – accomplishing a Christmas miracle by making them smile at the prospect of working through the holidays. (But then maybe they hate spending them with their families and are glad for the excuse.)
Having taken Megan’s rejection of advertising as a personal rebuke, Don’s been sulking like a child who claims he’s bored and has nothing to do, and, oh yes, his favorite playmate has moved away (as Megan did by resigning). Challenged first by Pete, who denigrates his laziness, and then by Megan, who scolds him for his sullen defensiveness, he makes good on his promise that “I’d live here if I thought that (pursuing Jaguar) was more than a pipe dream.” The re-discovery of his dreams is spurred in part by a nightmare of a play in which advertising is portrayed as so poisonous that people have to puke it out in order to survive, and in which an actor defiantly proclaims his separation from cultural influence by stating that, “The TV was one thing but I was a person.” Once again, it seems that Don finds this kind of opposition motivating, just as he at first excitedly takes Megan’s anger as being one of their power games leading to great sex — before she bluntly informs him that “that’s not what this is.”
What this is — and what the “this” is – is exactly what people like Paul are trying to figure out, even if they’re stumbling in doing so. By contrast, that old slickster Don feels he can sum up and justify his profession in a single sentence, “People buy things because it makes them feel better,” without realizing that Americans are discovering that consumerism does no such thing, even if they’re not about to entirely renounce the material world as the gurus advise.
Instead, like Joan, they may simply resist the old ways while groping for a new one that remains scary and undefined. Joan won’t let her baby-daddy become a sugar-daddy, and she at first follows Lane’s tactic of refusing to admit she needs help from anyone when Don reaches out to her. As he’s known to do with the ladies, Don quickly breaks down her resistance and whisks her off for a morale-boosting trip to showroom and barroom. In both, Joan’s as much on display as that “most beautiful car in the world,” with men itching to take her for a test drive. But she only has eyes for her designated driver, Don, as he lends an ear to her fears that no one will want a divorced woman with a baby.
Joan’s mother may have produced a daughter who never depends on the kindness of strangers, but she did teach Joan how to be admired. And that’s exactly what Don does for an afternoon, while safely hiding behind Joan’s belief that he’s madly in love with his sexy, young wife (which he is but in a more weary and complicated way than Joan knows). Quoting Bobbi Barrett’s observation that he likes to be bad and then go home and be good, Don nevertheless does the opposite: He does good with Joan and then goes home to Megan where he’s chastised for being bad.
Even as he and Joan flirt deliciously, letting out the latent attraction that fans of the show have been tantalized by for years, he follows Joan’s lead in drawing the line at physical contact. “God, you’re irresistible,” Joan laughs while resisting him with seeming ease, turning down his offer to dance because of “that look” on his face. Even though she claims to miss the kind of trouble that Don alludes getting into with the opposite sex, she coolly evaluates the man at the bar that Don points her towards, defining him by his occupation just as women of her generation tended to do, “Who do you think he is? Advertising? Insurance? Lawyer?” before noting that he probably has an attractive wife at home whose only sin is being too familiar to be desirable any more.
“So you think it’s all him?” Don asks with some surprise, to which Joan responds, yes, because his wife can’t give him what he wants. “He doesn’t know what he wants,” Don argues back, but Joan is having none of it. “He knows. It’s just the way he is. And maybe just the way she is.” Don and Joan share a lack of belief in the power of people to change, other than by shifting partners – as Don advises her to do, glibly touting divorce as a chance to move on to someone better. The idea of moving on to being someone better seems to elude Don, despite his obvious attempts to do just that with Megan. And if he’s unable to see his own agency in that and take credit for it, he’ll be equally unable to take responsibility when things go wrong, including if those roses for Joan were more than just an affectionate gesture (and a joke about her movie star allure). Both Don and Joan are teetering on the edge of adapting to the social changes around them, but both are just old-fashioned enough that writing an even slightly better script is hard for them.
“I want to fly, but I think we’re going to drive,” the banker Walt says to Lane about his upcoming vacation, a statement both about the grounding of aspirations as well as the reality of family life. Complaining that his wife “calls me during the day and she’s peachy, but when I come home, she’s blue,” he fails to connect the dots the way Joan did in realizing that absence makes some hearts grow fonder, while presence can be maddening. When you like your spouse better in theory than in practice, your marriage is in serious trouble. Although she avoids the proverbial rolling pin, Megan looked chillingly like Betty drinking her wine and watching a drunken Don eat his dinner, raising the likelihood that this “perfect” match is headed to a reckoning. And since this episode has Don declare that he didn’t want to deal with an unhappy female employee as well as respond, “Not my morale,” when Lane declared, “Nothing like a surprise for morale,” I think we can expect Don’s comeuppance to be a sudden and painful shock.
“They’re projections,” Harry says to Lane about the predicted first quarter earnings. “They’re derived from reality, but they’re hopes and dreams.” In that, as in his actions with Paul, he shows a clarity that the other characters lack in this episode. Projections are what we see when we look at other people, and far from being real, they’re merely reflections of our hopes and dreams – including our hope that the dreamy new person in our life will change everything, and painlessly. Don’s had that hope about Megan, but in her truthful way, she keeps disabusing him of the notion that it will be that easy. As with Lane’s forged check, problems can be papered over temporarily, but the accounting occurs eventually, and often at the most inconvenient time.
And when you’re dealing with someone’s dreams – as Don is with Megan — the cost of standing in their way can be devastating. As Langston Hughes said in another memorable poem that had a renaissance in the 1960s, “What happens to a dream deferred?/Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun….Or does it explode?” The decade was defined by explosions of various kinds — both the literal bombings both at war and at home, and the figurative blowing up of family life and social norms. With just three episodes to go, the lives of these characters seem far more likely to be blown apart rather than brought neatly together by season’s end.
The four major networks, ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox, trotted out their new fall shows this week. All of next season’s new comedies, dramas and reality shows, the vast majority of which will be flops, got shiny trailers, two to three minutes culled from the first episode of the series, which is, for now, the only episode that exists. These trailers were made to entice advertisers into parting with some of their money, but they are also an occasion for TV obsessives to behave like fashion police, i.e., to make rash, bitchy, wildly subjective judgments based on very little information. I love this week so much.
This year, about 20 new shows will premiere in the fall, with another dozen waiting in the mid-season wings. There are dramas about haunted luxury apartments, islands armed with nuclear arsenals and the making of Vegas. There are procedurals starring Sherlock Holmes, Jersey girls turned lawyers and a Mob Doctor. One show has Mrs. Coach playing a country singer, one has Kelly Kapoor falling into a swimming pool while riding a bicycle, and another has Kevin Bacon chasing serial killers. There are two sitcoms starring gay people, one about a family who lives next door to aliens, and others featuring Matthew Perry, Lily Tomlin, Dane Cook and a screeching monkey. If each network had at least one show last year about a sexually active, provocative, sassy woman — the lady sitcoms — there is no such equivalent trend this year. There is just a lot of TV, some of which will be good, and most of which will be bad. Here are my thoughts on what look to be the best and worst shows of the upcoming season, network by network.
CBS is the most stable and highest-ranked network in the land, a position it has held for many years by eschewing any and all concerns about both coolness and quality. CBS does not put on risky, ambitious shows some small portion of the Internet will fall in love with and loudly plead for, whatever the show’s ratings. That is a move for losers like NBC. CBS, instead, puts on things that work, and the things that work on CBS are usually polished, ultra-competent procedurals and comedies that make me want to gouge my eyes out, but that are the most popular in America. So, arriving on CBS this fall: “Elementary,” starring a tattooed Johnny Lee Miller as a modern-day Sherlock Holmes and Lucy Liu as Dr. Joan Watson, his drug minder; “Made in Jersey,” about a Snooki turned lawyer and made good, starring a charming British actress (Janet Montgomery, whom CBS insisted I would like, and, aggravatingly, I really, really did ) putting on a very thick Jersey accent; and “Partners,” a sitcom about two best friends, a straight guy and a gay guy (played by the delightful Michael Urie), in serious relationships, a sort of progressive premise for CBS, until you see the trailer. CBS is stretching itself this year with one big, ambitious show, with a bland name. “Vegas” stars Dennis Quaid as a good guy and Michael Chiklis as a bad one in 1960s Sin City. There is a lot of “buzz” around this program, but all I could think when watching was that in the ‘60s, shaved heads were not a thing (ahem, Mr. Chiklis), and that CBS will find a way to make this boring.
Worst: “Partners”
Best: “Elementary”
If you ask, Fox will tell you that it, not CBS, is the most stable and highest-ranked network in the land, and if you just care about people under the age of 49, it is. Since it ain’t broke, Fox isn’t fixing it, putting just three shows on this fall, and holding its extremely creepy, high-profile, Kevin Bacon-hunts-a-serial-killer-with-acolytes drama, “The Following,” for mid-season. Coming in the fall is Mindy Kaling’s poorly named “The Mindy Project” (on the show, she plays a character named Mira), which looks good, and “Ben & Kate,” which is not as cool or buzzy, but I thought looked better. Nat Faxon and Dakota Johnson (daughter of Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson) star as the titular siblings, one an overgrown man child, the other a single mom. The trailer is very, very sweet, which would make it a better fit with “New Girl,” that most emo of shows, than the spiky, sardonic “Mindy Project.” The only other show Fox is debuting in the fall is the drama “The Mob Doctor,” about a doctor (“My Boys’” Jordana Spiro) who has to do healthcare-related favors for the mob. I can’t bring myself to dub this “worst,” a little because Spiro is very likable, and a lot because “The Mob Doctor” is clearly the best titled new show of the season.
NBC has been a disaster for years now, and each fall, in the hopes of climbing out of its sorry position, it orders a ton of new shows. This year, it ordered 12, and, unfortunately, none of them look that great. One of the dozen is “Next Caller,” a sitcom starring Dane Cook as a misogynist shock jock forced to work with a female co-host. This show is already a punching bag, likely to remain the season’s go-to example of the crappy sitcom, basically because it stars Dane Cook being a dick. While it’s hard to argue with this logic, by far the most horrible-looking show coming to NBC in the fall is “Guys With Kids,” a multi-camera comedy about three dudes with babies and ladies and no funny lines whatsoever. I’m also not particularly jazzed over the drama “Chicago Fire,” which looks almost exactly like a more melodramatic “Third Watch.”
As for best, well, there’s a lot of “could be OK” on NBC’s schedule: there’s “Go On,” about Matthew Perry in a grief group; Justin Kirk in “Animal Practice” as a pet-loving, people-hating, lady-shagging veterinarian; and Ryan Murphy’s new sitcom about a gay couple and their surrogate, “The New Normal,” which I would be much more excited about if I hadn’t been burned by Murphy so many times before (and if there wasn’t that bad Mariah Carey joke in the promo). That leaves the J.J. Abrams-produced “Revolution,” set 15 years after all the electricity in the world has gone out forever. This may just end up being another irritating, never-ending mystical conspiracy show, but I’m a sucker for anything post-apocalyptic.
Worst: “Guys With Kids”
Best: “Revolution”
Ratings-wise, ABC is not in a much better state than NBC, except it has two new shows I can’t wait for. In “Nashville,” “Friday Night Lights’” Connie Britton stars as an aging country singer who has to figure out the next step of her career while dealing with an obnoxious, successful Taylor Swift-type played by Hayden Pantierre. It’s very, very soapy, but it involves Mrs. Coach singing and saying wise things with a Southern lilt and lots of sequins, and, therefore sounds wonderful to me. Then there’s “Last Resort,” created by “The Shield’s” Shawn Ryan. It stars Andre Braugher as the captain of a submarine who disobeys an order to fire a nuke on Pakistan. He, his crew, and his sub are then pursued by the U.S. military until they land on a tropical island, turn on the sub’s nukes, and start politicking. This is an original, far out premise, plus “Felicity’s” Scott Speedman is in it, and I really missed his mumbling.
Whereas NBC’s unpromising shows seem merely blah, ABC’s least promising shows look to be potentially awesome, fascinating misfires. It is the network that aired “Work It,” after all. (ABC does have one merely bad and boring looking sitcom, “The Family Tools.”) First, there is “The Neighbors,” ABC’s highest-profile new comedy, about a family that moves into a suburban community populated by aliens. The family can tell their neighbors are aliens because when they clap their hands over their heads, they transform into green aliens. It’s a very 1980s premise with a single-camera comedy execution, and no good jokes. Then there’s “Zero Hour,” starring “ER’s” Anthony Edwards as a conspiracy theorist drawn into the mother of all conspiracy theories after his wife is kidnapped. The trailer involves clues packaged in the backs of clocks, Nazis, possessed babies, and various other artifacts left over from the “Alias” or “DaVinci Code” sets. Can’t wait.
At the Fox Upfront on Monday afternoon, the head of programming “welcomed” Hulu and Netflix to the original programming game, with all the threatening good cheer of an amped-up high school senior getting ready to pound on an incoming freshman’s face. Sure, the more good original programming the better, Fox suggested, but making hit TV is hard and developing an audience is even harder — these online upstarts should expect to get demolished by their network rivals for a long time to come. Or as the head of programming put it, “Welcome to the NFL.”
But just mentioning Netflix and Hulu, two companies that have thus far rolled out exactly one original scripted program each to not much fanfare, is a compliment of the “It’s better to be talked about than not talked about at all” variety. Hulu and especially Netflix, which will begin airing new episodes of Fox’s former show “Arrested Development” sometime later this year, are on the playing field. Since one of the major distinctions between Hulu and Netflix and broadcast TV is that there’s no proper time to watch their shows, now seemed as good as any to catch up on the two existing series and see if Fox and its brethren have anything to worry about.
Hulu’s “Battleground” is a 13-episode comedy set behind the scenes of a Wisconsin Senate campaign and executed in the mockumentry style of “The Office.” Neflix’s seven-episode “Lilyhammer” is a comedic drama starring “The Sopranos’” Steven Van Zandt as a wise guy who ends up in Norway. Both series are professional, solid and unembarrassing. And even though I stayed up way past my bedtime one night finishing the enjoyable “Battleground,” both it and “Lilyhammer” are the TV equivalent of cautious toe-dipping, Netflix and Hulu’s proof that they can make polished products audiences will recognize as television.
“Battleground” is a well-constructed, low-key series that’s about 75 percent as good as something great. The dialogue is smart, the approach to politics is pleasantly non-histrionic, the characters are likable and so is the candidate. If the broad, idiotic Jordan — the son of the candidate’s husband — feels like a Dwight Schrute knockoff, the rest of the series counterbalances with an assiduous streak of Midwesternness, unshowily getting down to the business at hand, which happens to be putting together a competent, amusing television program. (One of the main characters, a nerdy, nice, newbie staffer who gets the girl by staying nerdy and nice, is a personality type that could only exist in the Illinois-Wisconsin-Minnesota tri-state area. More like him, please.) If you’ve run through episodes of “Veep” and “The West Wing” and “Tanner 88” and you still have an itch to scratch, “Battleground” will do it.
Netflix’s “Lilyhammer” is not nearly as charming. Van Zandt plays a mobster who requests witness protection in Lilyhammer, because he liked the look of it in the 1992 Olympics. Once in Norway, a country full of snow and reindeer sweaters, electric cars and polite police chiefs, he figures out how to put his gangster skills to use in a new environment. In the first episode, a lone wolf — and that’s not a metaphor for a loner, but an actual sheep-eating wolf — gets a pair of cement shoes. The show feels like a really long indie movie that somehow got distribution, OK reviews and no audience, and now kicks around on your suggested Netflix streams for eternity.
But if the short, funny “Battleground” is both better and better suited to a computer screen than the longer, less funny “Lilyhammer,” Netflix’s strategy still makes more sense than Hulu’s. The great hurdle for both Netflix and Hulu is inserting their series into the conversation. There has to be a subset of people who feel about political comedies or displaced mobsters the way I do about British costume dramas — which is to say that they hunt down programs fitting this description, and watch the hell out of them — but that’s not most people. With thousands of TV shows available to audiences through legal means, and almost all the TV shows ever available through illegal ones, a brand-new series that’s not half bad isn’t going to jump to the top of anyone’s Netflix queue if people aren’t talking about it.
“Lilyhammer” isn’t great, but it is nominally ambitious (it is, in fact, another one of The Fauxpranos), and ambitious TV is the kind that gets people chatting and binge watching. Netflix’s next shows — “Arrested Development” and the David Fincher-Kevin Spacey collaboration “House of Cards” — should get lots of attention, and be a lot better than “Lilyhammer.” Meanwhile, Hulu’s model, to make something solid and small and premiere an episode of it every week, seems totally reasonable and not nearly flashy enough to get its shows to stand out in a very, very crowded field.
There is another way for Hulu to go, and it doesn’t involve spending heaps and heaps of money on famous people and canceled but beloved TV shows. And that’s to make something strange. “Battleground” and “Lilyhammer” and all the shows that Hulu and Netflix have in the works are exceedingly normal, shows that would fit any TV executive’s idea of what a TV show should be. This seems sensible, as well as small-minded and skittish. Netflix and Hulu aren’t TV networks, and they should revel in that. (It is not, if you hadn’t heard, such a good time to be a TV network.) Why aren’t they putting on the crazier, weirder shows, cheaper series with odd perspectives and strange time stamps, that are good enough to get people talking and that no network, or even cable channel, could ever put on? Hulu and Netflix want respect, when all they need is buzz, even the buzz of a small, dedicated audience. Netflix and Hulu aren’t just TV, they’re the Internet. They should stop being so boring.
Rumors have been swirling for weeks that Britney Spears would join Fox’s “X-Factor” as a new judge, and yesterday it became official. At the Fox upfront, the annual presentations underway this week in which the major networks sell their new shows to advertisers, and then ply them with alcohol and vast buffets, Britney and Demi Lovato were introduced as the reality competition’s new judges, joining L.A. Reid and Simon Cowell, who appeared on the show last year. Lovato, the 19-year-old former tween star who has already had her own public difficulties with drugs and eating disorders, excitedly told the crowd she was “psyched” to be joining the show. Spears, in a smokier voice than the one she used to have, also expressed her excitement, capably delivering the line that had been written for her. Spears was onstage for all of two minutes, but it was enough to spark my imagination: What is an entire season of Britney Spears talking going to be like?
Thanks to Paula Abdul, the bar for speaking coherently as a judge has been set remarkably low. Paula was one of the original judges when “American Idol” began 10 years ago, and she made the jump with Cowell to “X Factor” last year, where she continued to vend her particular brand of addled kindness, never saying anything mean or insightful, and often saying it in spacey and strange ways. Spears is, of course, way more famous than Paula Abdul, and if she sits on the panel and says nice, meaningless things to the contestants each and every show, she will have earned her money. (It’s basically what the booted Nicole Scherzinger did all last season of “X Factor,” and just by virtue of being Britney Spears, Britney will be better at it.)
“X Factor” doesn’t need a hyper-articulate ballbuster to do this job and do it well. The time of sharp, critical insight on the singing shows — which initially seemed so crucial to “Idol’s” massive success — has passed. If viewers regularly lament how dull and plodding the judging rounds are now that even Cowell has tempered his honesty, “Idol” remains the biggest show on television with a judging panel that consists of Steven Tyler, Jennifer Lopez and Randy Jackson, a group as likely to insult a singer as call a newborn baby ugly.
But even if all that’s required of Spears is a season’s worth of banal compliments, that will add up to more sustained speaking than Spears has ever publicly done before. Rarely, if ever, has there been a person as famous as Britney Spears who talks so infrequently. Her most famous moments are all gestural — dancing in music videos, performing on the stage at some MTV awards show, shaving her head, bashing a window. Long before her breakdown, she displayed an uncanny tendency to speak in linguistic white noise, to say sentences that contained almost no content, just lots of y’alls and “you knows” and “oh my goshes” and a basic mood of sweetness, excitement, gratitude, eventually disconnect, and more recently, in her conservatorship years, anxiety and discomfort.
If this doesn’t make Spears a perfect judge for “X Factor” it should make her a perfect character for “X Factor.” The drama of Britney — how she will be, what she will say, and how she will hold up — is a story line at least as compelling as the one that will play out with the performers, if not far more so. We’ve been watching her for 13 years, not merely half a TV season. It’s possible “X Factor” will be as good for her career as “Idol” has been for Jennifer Lopez’s, but it’s more likely it will be uncomfortable and upsetting, a full season of watching a zonked-out Spears nervously navigate a live TV show. But we Americans owe Britney Spears a pension and worker’s comp for pain and suffering risked for our entertainment, and I’m happy a major corporation is paying it out (to the tune of $15 million). However “X-Factor” goes for Britney, I can’t wait to see what she says.
“I don’t like going in with two ideas – it’s weak.”
A strange statement coming from a man with a dual identity and often hidden motives, but then “Dark Shadows,” the latest “Mad Men” episode, is rife with competitive doubles, if not actual evil twins. (Just like in a soap opera, wink wink.) Don and Ginsberg have dueling SnoBall campaigns, Peggy reminds Roger she’s supposed to be his secret sharer rather than that schlemiel Ginsberg, Megan struggles to be friends with both Sally and Don, Henry’s torn between two candidates he’s worked for, and everyone seems to have at least two wives – even if Pete’s second one belongs to another man. Unlike the SnoBall fight with Ginsberg that he rigs, Don wins the wife competition fair and square by having three, even if one was in name only. As Betty tells Sally when she works on her family tree, “They only care about the names anyway.”
So does a prospective new client, Max Rosenberg, who’s impressed that WASPy Roger Sterling has a wife named Siegel. He wonders if she’s related to someone he knows, leading his wife to gently remind him that they’re not related to every other Rosenberg, without adding the electrifying reason that’s a good thing. As Roger puts it to the client, they wants SCDP to sell Manischewitz to “a different kind of people” – after all, groups of people are different from each other, aren’t they? (North Carolina sure thinks so.) Even Jews are further subdivided by Roger into “Fiddler on the Roof” cast or audience members, a coded way of describing how assimilated they are.
“Different” is the polite code that Roger uses with the client, but with his man Ginsberg, he straight-talks about selling the product to “normal people – like me.” (Isn’t it great that we’re long past white males defining “normal” as being just like them?) Cultural ventriloquist Roger secretly uses a Jewish copywriter to produce an ad campaign to sell a traditionally Jewish wine to gentiles, before adding what Bert calls his “finesse” to it. That’s code for privileged WASP sheen, as when Roger talks boats with Max’s thoroughly assimilated son, who’s moved up from his father’s steerage class to Roger’s yacht class.
Roger’s double-talk extends to that “Semitic wife” of his who Bert’s unaware has already been circumcised from Roger’s marital staff, telling her that while on LSD she promised to help him any way she could. Jane one-ups Roger’s lie by double-talking her way into a second apartment, complaining that the old one has too many memories (and mothers-in-law) attached to it. “I feel like I can’t start a new life until I start a new life,” she argues, giving Betty some competition for self-actualizing platitudes – or bad soap opera dialogue. (It’s hard to tell the difference at times – unlike how easy it is to tell the difference between people — at least if you’re Roger.)
Jane shares with Betty an inability to take responsibility for her own acts, blaming Roger for ruining her new digs by digging her a bit too much after the client dinner, even though she starts to stop him before going ahead with their little housewarming. “Now this is no different than the last place,” Jane pouts about the apartment she’d considered “perfect” up to that moment, cluelessly conflating her emotional state with the situation she finds herself in.
If only she’d join Betty at that fount of philosophical wisdom, Weight Watchers, she’d have all the answers. Gleaning not only diet plans but life lessons from the weekly meetings, Betty uses them to complain about how very hard her life is and how proud she is of not overeating in response. Turning inside out the facilitator’s pre-Thanksgiving advice to not overeat but instead “fill ourselves with our children, our homes, our husbands, our health, our happiness,” Betty stuffs that old bird Henry with her newfound wisdom. “It’s so easy to blame our problems on others, but really we’re in charge of ourselves,” she advises primly after he complains that he “bet on the wrong horse and jumped ship for nothing” in leaving Nelson Rockefeller for John Lindsay, since Lindsay (unlike everyone else in this episode) is choosing not to compete.
In marrying, both Henry and Betty have bet on the wrong horse, and each is coping with it in their own way – Henry by secretly feeding himself what he misses in the dark shadows of the night, and Betty by embracing a strict diet while helping herself to a heaping plate of revenge. Her transparent attempt to turn Sally against Don and Megan fails only because women know what games their gender plays. Having seen Megan partly undressed through a window, Megan in turn sees through Betty, physically holding Don back from the angry call that would have made Betty smile as much as that loving spoonful of stuffing she savors. Having chided Megan with “Who’s the child here?” when she says she was trying to respect Sally’s wishes, Don quickly realizes that he’s the one who’s reacted childishly and apologizes – showing once again how he’s changing, in large part because he has a wife who’s leading him in a new direction.
Unfortunately, this maturity isn’t duplicated at the office, where he competes with the far younger Ginsberg to prove whose SnoBalls are bigger. But there’s never really any contest between the juvenile Ginsberg, who channels the child’s desire to throw a snowball in authority’s face (including the “pig,” which will soon be code for the cop in his ad), versus the manly Don, who channels the devil himself to chuckle, “This could change everything.”
Like Jane, Don wants a new life, and after trying to change everything at home, he now senses that he needs to do so at work, especially after having looked at the portfolio of the year’s ads that Joan presents and realizing he has nothing to contribute to it except his anti-tobacco letter from a year before. “We’re still suffering for it, might as well get something out of it,” he decides, an approach that Ginsberg would probably joke is his people’s motto and that could double as self-help advice for Betty and Jane.
Goaded by this lack of product and the sight of Ginsberg’s name on so many ads, Don feels inspired to create for the first time since he married Megan, and riffs his way into a devilishly good campaign that he sells “the hell out of” to the client. “Even me,” are the words Don puts into the thirsty devil’s mouth as he devours a SnoBall – a sentiment echoed by Ginsberg, who’s amazed that even Don can come up with something that good after not writing an ad for so long.
But Ginsberg’s grudging admiration turns to mere grudge when he finds out that Don ruthlessly edited him out of the friendly and fair competition he believed they were having. Apparently he needs the same disillusioning speech that Roger gives Peggy after she says he only cares about himself and he retorts that she’s just the same because, “That’s the way it is, it’s every man for himself.” Roger’s masculine phrasing was the norm at the time but nevertheless underlines Peggy’s objection to the idea that choosing Ginsberg for Manischewitz was a no-brainer. “I’m sick of hearing people think that way. I’m not an airplane either. I can write for anything.”
While Ginsberg makes a joke about Roger assuming he’s Jewish, Peggy’s genuinely angry at being categorized, having felt the impact of that thinking in negative ways (being denied accounts or having to work hidden in the background) while so far Ginsberg has benefited from being Jewish while also getting “non-denominational” work due to being male. Having earlier declared that he needed a penis working on Mohawk, Roger apparently doesn’t care if it’s circumcised — just as Jane points out that he’s suddenly OK with letting people know he married a Jewish woman. Here the show accurately portrays the fact that religious and even racial barriers often dropped before ones that kept women from competing equally with men in business and other pursuits.
The result is that the women are left to compete with each other, as both Betty and Sally do with Megan (and Megan does with her acting friend, Julia). Betty’s visibly jealous of Megan’s relationship with her children, as well as envious of Megan’s youthful beauty and Don’s love for her, which is underscored by a romantic note he’s scrawled on the back of Bobby’s drawing. In revealing Don’s first platonic marriage, Betty hopes to poison several wells – making Sally angry at both Don and Megan for hiding the truth, and casting Megan as merely the latest in a string of wives and therefore unimportant. (We can only assume Betty sees herself as different since she alone gave Don children, as when she explains to Sally that on the family tree Henry and Megan “get a branch off of us because we’re your parents,” showing the primacy of blood relationships to her, with everyone else mere appendages.)
Competing with Don for Megan’s love, Sally argues that she was friends with her first, and scowlingly demanding that Megan not betray her secrets to Don. Both Megan and Don tell Sally she’s just a little girl, but she only objects to Don categorizing her this way, leading him to disclose the hard truth that “you should realize your mother doesn’t care about hurting you, she just wants to hurt us.” Earlier Megan had taught Sally the actor’s trick of creating tears by keeping your “eyes wide open and think(ing) about something that makes you sad.” But Sally chooses to keep her eyes open to the truth while not getting sad but even.Proving she deserved the A+ she got for working on her family tree, Sally goes right to the root of the problem, axing Betty’s attempt at revenge by telling her that everyone had a love fest sharing the merry wives of Whitman.
Not so merry is Pete, who’d love to share the wife of his train buddy, and who sucks up to a New York Times reporter only to find the flattering profile he’d expected about “hip” agencies has omitted SCDP and turned into a “bullshit piece on the usual assholes” in which the writer “compares them to philosophers.” One man’s philosopher is another man’s asshole, of course, as the shelves of self-help books can attest — and those two identities also tend to shift as the times and fashions change. (As the out-of touch Bert shows when he tries to correct Pete’s use of “hip” to “hep.”)
Pete himself is the designated asshole of SCDP, and both Bert and Roger compete with him by secretly wooing Manischewitz, for reasons that Roger explains to Ginsberg in dark shadowy terms indeed: “When a man hates another man very, very much sometimes he wants to know something is his even if in the end he has to give it up.”
Where things end up is precisely the question in any story, of course. As Ginsberg says when he sees the Pop Art painting in Roger’s office, “I like the connect the dots. What does it end up being?” What each character on “Mad Men” will end up being – enlightened or disillusioned, successful or defeated, happy or bitter – remains undefined, the dots waiting to be connected once they realize they have the power to do so. Each seems to be stumbling along unaware, from Ginsberg not realizing what the poem he’s quoting from means, to Don believing that competing with Ginsberg doesn’t matter to him, to Roger not understanding why he feels the need to take everything for himself, to Betty who’s grateful for what she has only to the extent that she can feel superior to others.
Like Don, they each need to find a light bulb to dispel the dark shadows and see both themselves and other people better – how we each are different, and how we are all the same.
“Never work with children or animals” is an old W.C. Fields chestnut that, for a while in the ’90s and ’00s, everyone outside of children’s entertainment seemed to be holding sacred. Child actors were off on their own in a parallel entertainment universe created by Disney and Nickelodeon, while adults held down the fort in dramas and reality shows. There were some notable exceptions, like Haley Joel Osment and Christina Ricci, but by and large, children were almost entirely absent from grown-up entertainment.
Things are very different today. Kid-targeted movies filled with teenage actors like “The Hunger Games” and the “Harry Potter” franchise have found a huge adult audience, while actors like 15-year-old Chloë Moretz (who stars in the new movie “Hick,” opening this week) and the Fanning sisters are given prominent roles in serious dramas. On TV, children have become a regular part of many casts, from sitcoms (“The Middle,” “Modern Family”) to dramas (“Shameless,” ‘The Walking Dead”). Child actors, once a sign of cheesiness and unprofessional conduct, have become integral to the success of a large number of critically respected and commercially successful entertainment properties. And not only that, many of these child actors have gotten really, really good.
Think of Kodi Smit-McPhee from “The Road,” holding his own next to Viggo Mortensen. Or Emma Kenny’s Debs on “Shameless,” capable of moving from a funny scene — yelling “Eat my ass!” at a video game — to the heartbreaking moments she shares with her unappreciative father, slipping him beer or covering his passed-out body with a blanket without getting any thanks. Or even Aubrey Anderson-Emmons, the new Lily on “Modern Family,” only 4 years old but emphasizing the weirdness rather than the cuteness of the 2-year-old she plays. (When she was cast, other cast members talked about how good of an actress she was, which seemed strange to say about a 4-year-old, but she’s proved it this season.)
The rise of the quality child actor (coming, it should be noted, considerably later than the rise of “quality” TV) can be traced to two general phenomena. One is that scriptwriters and directors figured out how to use child actors effectively, emphasizing a naturalistic style that let them fit in with their costars and lose all the groan-worthy signals that a movie was just for kids. But the other is the emergence of that very parallel entertainment universe. Nickelodeon and Disney didn’t just create hugely successful TV shows and movies; they also created a reason for more and more child actors to come to California, to learn their craft and to be able to fill those new, cheese-free parts.
Why were child actors so reviled throughout the ’80s? Here are some names that might jog your memory: Michelle Tanner. Jennifer Keaton. Willis Jackson. Child actors seemed either designed to run onstage and say something cute to elicit an “awww!” in unison from the studio audience, or to smirk and hack their way through the broad teen comedies filling mall multiplexes. While directors like Stephen Spielberg and John Hughes were able to elicit compelling performances from younger actors, their technique didn’t seem to take and derivatives of their successes seemed to share more with the B-movies of yore than they did with “E.T.” or “The Breakfast Club.” (It didn’t help that a lot of those “kids” were being played by adults, either.)
It’s no surprise, then, that anyone backing a TV show or movie intended to be seen as serious and high-quality would do everything they could to keep kids out of it; even good shows focused on kids couldn’t survive on network TV during the dead zone between the mid-’90s and early ’00s, as “My So-Called Life” and “Freaks and Geeks” could attest. It’s a style of acting we still see today: think poor Jake Lloyd playing young Anakin Skywalker in “The Phantom Menace” in such a cutesy way that it rendered the movie nearly unwatchable. Or most of the actors on Disney and Nick shows, for that matter. (Though at least the kids are playing themselves; previously many “teenagers” were played by adults.)
Sometime during that fallow period, though, producers figured out how to not only capture that Spielberg magic, but even improve on it. There are times (see above, or here) when the acting in Spielberg’s kiddie flicks is so unaffected that it comes close to breaking the fourth wall. Young actors are now placed in fantastic situations (wizard school, vampire wars, Upper East Side prep schools) and expected to convincingly embody a real character — and they’ve become very good at it.
“Over the years, the acting style has changed,” said Harriet Greenspan, a casting agent and acting instructor in Los Angeles who has worked with a number of kids’ shows. “It’s become a lot more real. Thirty years ago, acting was acting. We look for kids that aren’t acting anymore, that are more real.”
The general path of child actors has always been commercials to TV shows to movies, but there was a long-standing block at that second level: There simply weren’t very many TV shows child actors could work on. Most “children’s entertainment” was cartoons or educational programming staffed by adults. Cable changed all that. While the first shows for tweens are generally thought to have aired on NBC during its Saturday-morning block of “Saved by the Bell” and its spinoffs, cable created a venue for kids to watch themselves acting like kids — and, unsurprisingly, it turned out they really liked it. (Cable also created the split, in its way: If the kids were off watching tween shows, “family hour” shows didn’t have to feature cute kids to get the parents to watch.) This marked an important shift in how kids were portrayed.
“Nickelodeon first came up with its ‘Kids Rule’ slogan quite purposefully in the early ’90s,” Dave Moore, a media expert at Temple University, wrote in an email. “This necessarily transformed kid actors from subservient to adult programs to perceived ‘rebels’ acting out against authority.”
Both Disney and Nickelodeon slowly built up universes of programming and stars that spanned media from TV to music to movies, a world with kids playing kids to an audience of kids. The acting there was frequently as broad as you might have seen on any ’80s sitcom, but that wasn’t the important thing. “Child actor” isn’t a career anyone decides to pursue; first you get a gig, and then you make a life of it. The emergence of so many more roles for younger actors created a much larger pool of actors other projects could draw from. By the time a child actor is being asked to play an 8-year-old, he or she is likely to have more experience now than ever before.
“The trend of ‘grooming’ child actors from a young age has probably been facilitated in an age with more media exposure sooner,” Moore noted. But this has not always been a positive development.
“It’s a kids’ world out there,” said Greenspan. “So many families are picking up their lives and moving to California because of their child’s career. Of course, kids get bad advice — they get one role and the parents pack up and move, and sometimes it’s months or years before they get another gig.”
Exploitation has always been a concern when it comes to child actors; while California has strict rules about how long kids are allowed to work per day, it can’t control the bad decisions parents might make when their kid isn’t working. Bogus “talent searches” and managers ostensibly trying to discover the next big child actor or model pop up regularly in cities small and large, and most of these are scams. Nor has the fate of child actors generally been smooth.
All that said, the return of younger characters to mainstream entertainment has been a welcome one. In the last decade, both comedies and dramas have gotten a lot better at showing us adults who are recognizable humans, not just collections of showbiz gestures assembled into a numbing whole. While that sophistication in storytelling techniques was happening, though, children were largely left out, as if adults wouldn’t be interested in seeing compelling portrayals of kids (even as they cropped up in shows like “Malcolm in the Middle” or movies like “The Sixth Sense”). Now, Chloë Moretz can give us a dark comedic take on a character her age while Helena Bonham Carter does the same; Kiernan Shipka shows us how girls like Sally Draper deal with the socio-historical shifts of the ’60s just as Elisabeth Moss does the same for young women; and if Chandler Riggs’ portrayal of Carl on “The Walking Dead” sometimes makes you root for his death, well, he’s right there alongside Dale and Lori. On the children’s shows of Disney and Nickelodeon, kids have been portrayed from their own perspective for the last few decades. Now, adults are getting to see kids as real humans, too.
Michael Barthel is a PhD candidate in the communication department at the University of Washington. He has written about pop music for the Awl, Idolator, and the Village Voice.
More Michael Barthel.
Jon Hamm in "Mad Men" 
Connie Britton in "Nashville" 
A still from "Battleground" 
Britney Spears (Credit: AP/Evan Agostini) 
Jessica Pare in "Mad Men" 
Chloë Moretz in "Hick" 
