Will Peggy get the promotion that is her rightful due? Will Bobby ever stop being an idiot? AMC's Mad Men is poised to bow out, and one of the questions the final seven episodes should answer is this: will Don Draper always be an ad man?
Back in season one, Don assures Roger Sterling, his boss, that he won’t defect to a rival agency, because if he ever leaves, “it won’t be for more advertising”. Roger is sceptical. “I’ve worked with a lot of men like you and if you had to choose a place to die, it would be in the middle of a pitch.”
Don replies: “I’ve done that. I want to do something else.”
But does he want to do something else? Does he need to?
If Don ever walks away from Madison Avenue, it seems unlikely to be because other people have shamed him into thinking that advertising is shallow, harmful or not truly "creative". Throughout the series, he is seen to have little time for people – mostly either proponents or victims of the rising counterculture – who suggest as much.
An early indication that not everybody approves of what he does for a living comes when girlfriend Midge pejoratively explains to her theatre student friend that Don works in advertising, because “we all have to serve somebody”.
The man wonders how he sleeps at night. “On a bed made of money,” Don says. Viewers understand that he isn’t actually motivated by money and that the comeback is more a reaction to what he regards as fecklessness, hypocrisy and pretentiousness.
Later, hostility to his profession comes closer to home and he is heard describing his new father-in-law, Emile Calvet, as “a communist . . . a socialist or a Maoist or some ideology that makes him hate me and what I do”.
Again, the unearned claim to profundity by people who call themselves artists, and their simultaneous rejection of advertising, is seen to irk him. Megan, his young and thoroughly modern wife, takes him to a play in which an actor expounds on how beer ads make him sick. “The mighty theatre punches the audience in the face with its subtle message,” is Don’s snarling review. Megan’s recent rejection of advertising as a career has already damaged their brittle marriage.
Anti-consumerism has an even more direct effect on the personal life of Don’s protégé Peggy Olson, whose journalist boyfriend Abe tells her that her activities are “offensive to my every waking moment” and she’ll “always be the enemy”. Viewers are invited to think he’s being ridiculous, not least because he’s lying on an ambulance stretcher at the time. “Are you breaking up with me?” is how Peggy translates the rant.
Two seasons earlier, she is seen refusing to budge when her Life magazine photo-editor friend Joyce insists she must be "working on something else", not just advertising. Peggy, bemused, maintains that copywriting "is writing".
One agency employee who is "working on something else" is account executive Ken Cosgrove, whose sideline as a short- story writer elicits both jealousy and admiration from colleagues. Roger, failed author of ludicrous memoir Sterling's Gold, instructs him to quit and concentrate on his day job, but Ken, while outwardly agreeing to "leave the writing to the writers", merely ditches one pseudonym for another.
Mad Men has never just been about an advertising agency, but advertising itself. Don, a creative director of some repute, is a character projected by a man, real name Dick Whitman, who once seized upon the opportunity to reinvent himself, entering the 1960s deep in the grip of his facade.
While at first he is determined to stop his past life from ripping his new one apart, later he seems more comfortable with the idea of starting over again, perhaps even as Dick, and too bad if that unnerves the people close to “Don”. He tries to convince himself he would be happy to live without the agency, even without Manhattan.
But more recently still, having been put on leave as punishment for dying (metaphorically) in the middle of an important account pitch, he has been desperate to get back to what he knows best. He persuades rival Ted “I’m done with advertising” Chaough not to give up, because “you don’t want to see what happens when it’s really gone”.
It's so heartfelt a speech, that it's now impossible to envisage Mad Men wrapping up with Don choosing a new career. He might start the novel he jokes about writing, he might opt to drink less and be a better father and he might revert to being more Dick than "Don", but - like Peggy - he's surely not going to betray advertising for some other industry or art.
