Mad Men season six left off just before the world-beating year of 1969, the year of Woodstock and Manson and the moon landing. It's the late '60s as greatest-hits medley. And compared to Mad Men season one, the tune is as jarring as "Tomorrow Never Knows" sounded on Don Draper's hi-fi. The style, the fashion, the politics have changed. They're all but unrecognizable. And that was all but inevitable.
As TV's New Golden Age ages and the willingness to expect the unexpected (within certain antiheroic parameters) increases on the part of audiences and networks alike, plenty of shows start differently than they mean to go on, should they get the chance. Vince Gilligan famously conceived of Breaking Bad's common-sense-upending central character arc �� protagonist becomes antagonist, aka "Mr. Chips becomes Scarface" — at the very beginning, baking it right into the title. And thanks to the existence of novelist George R.R. Martin's source material, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss (to say nothing of Sean Bean's agent) knew full well that the repeated killing of main characters would make Game of Thrones season four a very different beast from Game of Thrones season one.
Mad Men through the years: The posters show Don's growing obsolescence.
Mad Men is different, because its "hero" is exactly the same. Take a look at the poster for the first half of the final season: There's Don, the same black hole in the image he's always been since the posters and opening credits for season one made him TV's most famous silhouette since Hitchcock. It's everything else that's changed. That clean, crisp black-and-white-and-red-all-over iconography has literally been overwritten with swirling (and kinda sloppy, if the complaints of pretty much every artist and designer I know can be trusted) psychedelia from legendary "I Love New York" originator Milton Glaser.
That process of evolution by erasure has played out on a much larger scale within the show itself. Gone is the ring-a-ding-ding Rat Pack nostalgia of the early seasons, when the stylistically conservative consensus of the Eisenhower era seamlessly transitioned to the Camelot glamour of JFK, Jackie, and Marilyn. The sharp suits and fedoras, so influential on men's fashion, advertising, magazines (ahem), and so forth, are now earth tones and Nehru jackets, long hair and loud ties. Square jaws have been obscured by beards bushy enough to house old Mary Jane smoke the way caves provide shelter to hibernating bears. The freaking Beatles are on the soundtrack, in full acid-freakout mode (even if some pretty raw capitalism was required to secure them).
But most importantly, the secretary-pool sexism of the office and my-blue-heaven hypocrisy of the suburbs that early Mad Men worked to examine and critique are now getting pulled out into the street and shouted at by the world of Mad Men itself. Assassinations, sexual revolutions, civil rights, race riots, Vietnam, feminism, rock and roll, protest politics, recreational drugs above and beyond cigarettes and martinis — this is the culture in which Don Draper now exists, a world where looking like Cary Grant and Grace Kelly and acting like Ozzie and Harriet hold far less power. It's not just we enlightened present-day viewers who think so — it's the kids at the agency, it's Sally Draper, it's Don's second wife, it's even Don himself. Don tinkers around the margins — a joint here, a fixation with nowhere-man imagery in his failed ad pitches there — but it doesn't matter. He's a dinosaur in a tar pit filled with Brylcreem.
And hey, people love dinosaurs! Dick Nixon just got elected president! That unyielding black silhouette is still there, after all, and Don can make his look and vibe work, even if his jackets are uglier during his off-hours. But now that the subtext is the text, now that Mad Men's storyline has caught up to the countercultural moment that would eventually lead to works like, well, Mad Men, the show's original aesthetic appeal has been tossed out the window like so much suicide foreshadowing. If you were the kind of Don-bro able to turn off your brain and just enjoy early Mad Men for its lush portrayal of a jocularly misogynist time when men were men, women were women, and everyone looked amazing (even if they smelled like ashtrays), brother, you're out of luck now. It's like if David Chase had gotten so fed up with the "Who's gonna get whacked?" side of The Sopranos' audience that he spent the last few seasons chronicling Tony Soprano as an honest-to-God waste management consultant. It's enormously gutsy. And while Matthew Weiner (who, unlike his mentor Chase, at least allows his non-Dons to evolve) couldn't have known he'd get this far when he spent years lugging the unsold Mad Men pilot around in his briefcase, it was a certainty if the show ever succeeded. Mad Men was designed to self-destruct.
