Did Don Draper Have a Character Arc?
A conversation about Mad Men
Below is a transcript, lightly edited, with some highlights from my conversation about Mad Men with my friend Greg Owens, the Creative Director of GAS™ Music.
A reminder that I’ll be at The Expat launch party in NYC on Saturday. It’ll be nice to relax a little and attend someone else’s book event. RSVP here. If you see me around, come say hi.
Greg: Today, once again, I'm with preeminent cultural critic and hopefully someone I can call a friend of mine, Rob Henderson.
Rob: Of course we're friends. Great to be here, Greg.
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Greg: Rob and I decided that we were going to do a podcast a while ago where we take a critical eye to some landmark TV shows. The Sopranos is one of them. We'll touch on a bit of that today, but I've not finished it, so there'll be a bigger one later down the line to talk just about The Sopranos. We're going to talk about Mad Men, perhaps a little bit of delving into The West Wing. The reason I mentioned that we had this plan is because there is a sort of hypothesis I have about why Mad Men is so popular and why Don Draper is so relatable despite the fact that he seems like such an alienating character.
Rob: Don is disconnected from himself and his emotions for many reasons. Because of his profession, emotion is commodified to some extent. If he experiences a powerful emotion, the gears start moving in his head, and he starts to think, "How can I use this feeling to sell soap or cigarettes or Coca-Cola to people?" When you detach from your own emotions in that way and constantly try to figure out, "What is it about this emotion that I'm feeling that can be used to sell merchandise to other people?" that in itself may be undermining his ability to authentically feel anything.