Mad Men first aired when I was a freshman in college. It wasn’t to my taste at the time; my appointing viewing was generally limited to the Jersey Shore which sparked a lifelong love affair with reality television. (This newsletter will probably talk about reality TV a lot so buckle up.)
Even though I didn’t watch Mad Men, the aesthetic effects of the show bled down to my try hard fashion guy brain in obvious and subtle ways. I had a collection of sterling silver clips that I fastened to measuring tape-thick ties. I took suiting seriously, or at least as seriously as a 21 year-old frat guy could. I bought a very cheap “bespoke” suit on a trip to India with my brother. It was preposterously tight, and no please don’t try to find pictures of me wearing it.
The show’s seven-season run did a lot for fashion generally and men’s tailoring specifically. Even though the show’s costume designer Janie Bryant leaned into era-specific trends, she also put Good Clothes on screen in a way that competing shows weren’t. Did you see the fits on Lost? Trash!
There’s also the J. Crew’s Ludlow suit, a corporate smelling salt of a garment that almost singlehandedly saved the company from disaster until it, uh, didn’t. The line came out one year after the show’s debut and provided a countervailing wind to a global recession that wrecked men’s suiting sales for most retailers. There’s no evidence the two are related since go-to-market schedules for marquee products like the Ludlow are often on much longer timelines, but it was a hell of a coincidence and everyone who had $700 to spend on a suit looked a lot better for it.
As a cultural force, Mad Men had about the same impact as any hit show. A woman I went to middle school with went semi-viral on Halloween for dressing as a very specific incarnation of Betty Draper complete with a nightgown, BB gun, and cigarette dangling at 45 degrees. (Honestly, she ate.) But, like, people dressed as J.R. Ewing or Erkel or Carmela Soprano or Bob Ross when those characters were in the pop culture zeitgeist. And yes, Trekkies are real and those people who went on Sex and the City tours happened. Typically, we try to inhabit characters we identify or find interesting because it gives us the sensation of another life or fills in the rows that we’ve left fallow for whatever reasons.
Our current generation of prestige television—Succession, Ted Lasso, and The Bear to be sure; Insecure and The White Lotus to a lesser degree—feel different. If we think of shows like Mad Men like a stage play, where we understand the people we’re watching as actors inhabiting their characters, then shows like The Bear might be better thought of like documentaries or even home movies. Modern fans seem to think of characters as their actual friends, dreaming up scenarios of how they could have helped them navigate a scenario or getting extremely mad online when criticisms about a fictional character’s behavior are lobbed on Twitter.
I’m thinking of the family dinner flashback episode from The Bear. (Season 2, Episode 6. “Fishes.”) The show has been pretty universally lauded from that middle 50% of tastemakers who, when they’re all lit up like some carnival game, unlock the “cultural moment” door. I’ve watched it. It’s fine! It owes a lot to the paranoid claustrophobia of the Safdies, but for the most part it’s a fine television show. But the breathless coverage of that particular episode felt detached from reality. Inside Hook called it “an instant classic,” Vulture gave it five stars.
To me it felt like trauma porn for people who liked The Body Keeps the Score a little too much. The dynamics on screen were all ratcheted up to 11 for the entirety of the hour-long episode, which made everything feel cartoonishly abusive. Everyone filled their roles like it was a check list of damaged goods: Jamie Lee Curtis’ alcoholic, martyr synrdome’d matriarch; Jon Bernthal’s attempt to cling to power through pill fogged bullying; Bob Odenkirk's desperate effort to drag his insane family out of the gyre by using his stepdad strength. You could almost feel the writers shopping for the spare parts of traumatic archetypes without considering whether they actually fit together in any particular illuminating way.
Art doesn’t need to reflect reality in order to be effective, of course. But what chewed at me was viewers’ ostensible identification with scenarios like that dinner table as if they were getting the source of their PTSD piped straight into their TV. Read the responses to Will Menaker’s glowing tweet about the episode, it’s just a bunch of different versions of “I feel seen.”
This is where I tell you that I recognize each of the episode’s little trauma-forged figurines from my own life, though I am not Italian so the familial derangement is probably a little more muted. And this is also where I say that I don’t want to deny anyone the opportunity to see themselves in a piece of art, no matter how ham fisted the imitations or selective the memories. What “Fishes” does in a particularly irritating way is use our current, understandable obsession with personal trauma as a schematic drawn with buckshot.
Then there’s that goddamn potato chip omelette. The omelette was one of the more clever flourishes on the show. As a friend in the cookbook industry said, the show was practically begging you to make it and post it to social media thereby placing giving you some purchase in a world you desperately want to inhabit, where “yes, chef” and “no, chef” can be said without a hint of irony. But of course all the omelettes come out looking like garbage, an edible reminder that our lives aren’t just made up of smash cuts and ASMR sound editing.
But people want to be comforted by their television sets. Our third places have been replaced by social media platforms where we absorb and litigate the most minute pop cultural moments 24 hours every day. It’s driving us all totally insane because it is both more satisfying on a moment-to-moment basis than going to church or a book club or something and it’s the fabric we have left. I’m not going to go all Bowling Alone here, but we’re in a famine of community, honey!
There’s an intersection with stan culture here, of course. Those weirdo armies of BTS or Taylor Swift or Nicki Minaj fans who, instead of frothing at the idea of interacting with their given messiah as an object, are instead obsessed with daydreaming about how they’d hang out with their celebrity bestie and also telling people on the internet that they’ll ruin anyone who registers even minor critiques of said imaginary friend.
There are feedback loops at work. Social media rewards obsession both because posting consistently (read: constantly) rockets you up the algorithm rankings which in turns boosts engagement and because the wall between fans and figures has transformed. Traditionally, the barrier between someone who loved a band or show or celebrity and the actual figure of their affection was long and broad: fandom was mediated through magazines and publicists and genuine distance. The last decade has seen that wall become something like a miracle metal: impossibly thin but still impenetrable. Social media has given people the false sense that they can almost touch their idols, which apparently drives everyone with SSRI prescriptions into a frenzy. Here’s the BBC’s Rachael Sigee on that topic from a 2020 piece on celebrity:
Simply offering up unfettered access isn’t enough anymore. What should be intriguing – a glimpse into the inner sanctum – has been diluted by a celebrity culture that has been built on false intimacy. “The distance between a celebrity today and us, is much less than before, say...1970,” says [London’s City University] Professor Rojek. “Then, if you looked up to Marlon Brando or whoever it was, they were like gods. People may now think Beyoncé is a god but she is much nearer to us than 30 or 40 years ago... We’re drowning in media access to celebrities.” For the most part, we’ve already seen into their bedrooms, heard about what they keep in their fridge and know what they like to watch on Netflix.
What’s especially mind frying is that posting does work sometimes. Taylor Swift has been known to leak stuff to her most dedicated social media communities, and Nicki Minaj deploys her “Barbz” on people being rude about her paying for her child rapist brother’s bail fees.
Those interactions push celebrity and fan closer together in a tantalizing way, and it’s those parasocial relationships are increasingly becoming a replacement for actual communities. We’re so desperate for something to latch onto that we start to the inhabit the worlds we see in front of us, blurred boundaries and all. The communities around us have been dismantled brick by brick. All we have left is bad TV.
Some music
Reneé Rapp gets you to about 80% of the way to Olivia Rodrigo which is pretty cool.
A piece of clothing
I do not care if someone tells me that Karu Research is biting Bode, bring me as many embroidered things as you can carry. My kingdom for more embroidery.