Mad Men

Spoiler alert: this breakdown contains crucial information about the plot of the episode.


As head writer on a show that has been on hiatus for 17 months, Matthew Weiner faced a huge story challenge in the opening two-hour episode. And it’s not yet clear whether he solved it or not.


The vast majority of TV shows have a tremendous advantage when it comes to creating narrative drive, in that they have clear, achievable desire lines. Cops solve crimes, lawyers win cases, doctors cure diseases. Desire, the hero’s goal in the story, is the object of measure in any TV episode.


But one of the main reasons Mad Men catapulted above all other TV shows when it first appeared is that it wasn’t constructed around a lead character with a clearly achievable goal every week.
Don Draper is an ad man, and his goal from one episode to another is never the same. Instead of repeating the same story every week, Mad Men could make every episode totally new, its own work of art, through a complex story weave of multiple characters with ever-changing goals.


This is great for story and character complexity. But it wreaks havoc on narrative drive. Instead of a single, propulsive force, a Mad Men episode is a crosscut among ten or more storylines, all happening simultaneously. The more you crosscut, the more you move sideways, and the less narrative drive you have. Result: you lose huge chunks of your potential audience.


Matthew Weiner has been more than willing to make that bargain in the past. But now he has to write a two-hour opening episode for an audience that hasn’t seen the show for 17 months. He doesn’t have the benefit of a single clear desire line to kick-start the massive story engine. And he is hemmed in by certain events that have happened to his characters at the end of the last season. Don is engaged. Joanie is pregnant, by agency partner Roger Sterling. Don’s ex, Betty, is married to someone else and never comes to the office where all the action is. And the actress who plays Betty is pregnant, so she can’t be in the opening episode anyway.


What all this means is that Weiner essentially has to do two hours of crosscutting to re-establish the various weaknesses and problems of his huge cast. He begins with Don already married to his new wife. That’s probably a good idea, because there wasn’t much he was going to get out of stringing that engagement along. But until now Mad Men was built on the contrast between Don selling the American Dream at work while living an unpleasant, and occasionally nightmarish lie at home. At least in this first episode, Don is relatively happy at home and a no-show at work. So the narrative must be carried by others. The problem is who.


Joanie is stuck at home with her new-born. This highlights the contrast that she and Peggy have always represented on the show of talented women who are held back by their gender. But as long as she is paralyzed at home by her problem, she can’t provide a driving desire for the episode. She finally takes action when she brings her baby to work, and the episode immediately catches fire with two excellent scenes. In the first the various women in the office take turns holding the baby, with Peggy wanting nothing to do with it. Then she has a nice bonding moment with financial partner Lane Pryce, who assures her that the office is falling apart without her. But this comes fairly late in the episode.


Peggy doesn’t have much to do here except feel frustrated coming up with a winning ad for beans. That leaves Pete, a pushy little whiner who is even more obnoxious than usual in this episode. He battles Roger for a bigger office that befits the success he has achieved in bringing clients to a firm that is having serious money problems.


Given the immense challenge Weiner faced in coming up with this first episode, we should probably be amazed that it was as good as it was. Now that he has taken care of all the set-up work for this season, he may be able to take the show in some exciting new directions as Mad Men takes on 1966. But for writers who love the craft, this episode points up lesson #1 in television: it all starts with desire.

Story in Television

The best writing coming out of the American entertainment industry is in TV drama. The competition from film isn’t even close. For decades, TV has been film’s little brother, patronized by the “real” talent as the place where you go when you can’t make it in the big leagues.

But in the last ten to fifteen years, TV has shot past film and become the home of the best and the brightest. While the big studios have competed over which new superhero will give them the next tent pole, the cable channels, and to a lesser extent the networks, have nurtured writers who have given the world an extraordinary number of original, deep, and compelling stories whose high quality extends, in many cases, over many years.

There are many reasons for this phenomenon. First and foremost, writers, not directors, control the TV medium.
The auteur theory, one of the worst ideas to come out of the 20th century, put the director in charge of American, and world, cinema. What the auteur theory misunderstood is that the quality of film and television is not based on them being visual mediums as being incredible story mediums. Because writers control TV, they make story, not spectacle, the key element in the production, and audiences have shown again and again that story is what they crave.

The multiple episodes that constitute a TV season, and the fact that these episodes must be written by writers on staff, means that TV writers go through a training regimen experienced by no other writer in the world. To get onto a writing staff you have to be highly skilled. But your training has only just begun. Until a writer has worked on a TV staff, he or she has no clue how intense the pressure is to produce great writing in a fraction of the time. With the non-stop deadlines of a TV season, it is not uncommon for a staffer to write a high-quality, shootable script – approximately one half of a feature film – in one week!

The result of this crucible of storytelling is that TV writers learn the craft fast and they practice that craft week after week, on the run. Plus, unlike their screenwriting brethren, TV writers get to see what they write up on screen, often within weeks of writing it. This feedback is invaluable, and found in no other story form.

All of this leads to a key point: if you want to be a working writer, and the very best writer you can be, turn your sights to television. TV, like film, is tough to break into, even more so since the Great Recession of 2008. But the fact that TV is run by writers means that if you learn the craft of story, especially as it is practiced in TV, you have a much better chance of being hired by people who ply, and appreciate, the same craft.

The crucial element here is: story as practiced in TV. TV has surpassed film in American entertainment not just because writers control the medium, but also because only in the last ten years have writers learned to take advantage of the unique powers of the TV medium itself. For years each episode in a TV season was a complete story, known as a “stand alone.” The episode problem was introduced in the opening scene – a crime, a law case, a disease – and it was solved at the end of the hour. Notice this limits the TV medium to being a mini- movie, repeated 24 times a season.

But once TV writers, and cable and network executives, realized that the true canvas of the TV medium is the season, not the episode, TV finally came into its own as a story medium that could dwarf the power of film. (The pioneer here was Steven Bochco with Hill Street Blues, but this process really kicked into high gear with The Sopranos.) The 90-120 minute unit of length in film suddenly jumped ten to fifteen times. And the storytelling model shifted from the two-hour commercial film to the 19th century novels of Dickens, Balzac and Stendahl, where complexity of plot hit its apex in the history of storytelling.

Instead of a single hero completing a single plotline in a two-hour film, you had a huge cast of characters working through multiple storylines, known as a serial, over a 13-24 episode season. You also had the possibility of creating a story world that had so much detail the show could believably stand for an entire society. The result was masterpieces like The Sopranos, The Wire, Lost and Mad Men.

To master story as it is practiced in television, and have the best chance of breaking into this medium, you have to study the top TV dramas and tease out the story problems that writers of these shows solve day in and day out. Ability to solve story problems quickly, and with originality, is the single most important quality of a professional television writer. Let’s take a look at some of today’s best dramas.

AMC’s The Killing is a Crime-Detective story, and Crime-Detective is the most popular genre, not only in American television but throughout the world. When you are trying to break down the story beats in a particular show, it is always a good idea to start with the show’s genre. The unique story beats of a particular show are usually an outgrowth of the inner workings, and the inherent restrictions, of its genre.

The Killing is based on the Danish series, Forbrydelsen, and the tag line for its first season was, “Who killed Rosie Larsen?” That tag line, and the show’s setting in the gray and rainy Northwest, recalls the one-season wonder, Twin Peaks, whose tag line was, “Who shot Laura Palmer?” The tag line tells you the primary desire line of the show, what the hero(es) want, and desire is one of the three or four most important story elements of a show. In 99% of all crime stories, “Who killed X” is the desire in a particular episode. In The Killing (and in Twin Peaks), this is the desire of the entire season. In other words, The Killing is a serial, not a stand-alone crime show, and that makes all the difference.

This means the writers must create, and service, a huge web of characters, many of whom had the motive, and opportunity, to kill Rosie. Since the killer will not be caught at the end of each episode, the show will necessarily have a slower pace and will deprive the audience of a satisfying solution at the end of each hour. This episode-ending solution is the primary draw of the stand-alone show. So the writers have a huge story challenge: how do we work through the vast array of suspects in a way that both gives some shape to each episode while also sequencing us to the real killer at the end of the season?

Some of the solutions the writers use include cross-cutting among many story lines, not just the main investigation line, greatly increasing the number of false clues (also known as red herrings), and focusing suspicion on a new wrong suspect every one or two episodes.

The failure of the writers to definitively name the killer at the end of the first season raised howls of protest, since the show’s story structure makes the final revelation of “who done it” even more important than usual. Of all the explanations I’ve heard for this “mistake,” the one that makes the most sense to me has to do with the biggest story flaw of a serial detective show whose desire line extends over the entire season. Once you tell the audience who killed the lone victim, what makes them tune in at the beginning of season 2? This is precisely what killed Twin Peaks.

Boardwalk Empire, an historical epic combined with the Gangster genre, is designed to take advantage of the big-canvas story complexity of the TV medium, as seen in The Sopranos and The Wire. An epic is a story in which the fate of a nation is determined, or illustrated, by the actions of a single person. And there’s the main story problem: how do you connect the huge cast and multiple story strands of an entire society to the desires of a single man?

By choosing gangster Nucky Thompson, head of the Boardwalk Empire at the beginning of Prohibition in 1920, to be the fulcrum character, creator and show runner Terence Winter has a natural hub for the story wheel. Nucky is a king in a democracy, and his desire to sell illegal booze to a thirsty nation unifies all the smaller desire lines in each episode and over the course of the season.

With Mad Men taking the year off, The Good Wife is the best-written show on television. This accomplishment is remarkable given that it is a network show, which typically means more interference from executives and the need to please a broader audience base. The Good Wife, a legal drama, uses the primary story strategy found in most American dramas today: combine the crowd-pleasing simplicity of the stand-alone with the critic-pleasing complexity of the serial. Alicia Florrick, the lead character, tries (and usually wins) a case each week. But she must also navigate the political and personal currents that come with being in a cutthroat law firm and having a husband who cheated on her and recently won the race for District Attorney.

This means that The Good Wife is really about situational ethics, about whether a good person can balance conflicting moral challenges and remain clean in the real world. The story challenge for the writers then is two-fold: come up with an ingenious way Alicia can win the weekly legal case for her firm while also slowly tightening the vice of her moral jeopardy as the season progresses.

Over the first two seasons, the writers have met these challenges with flying colors, primarily by weaving multiple conflicts from opponents both within and outside the firm. But it’s the emphasis on moral conundrums that really sets the storytelling of this show apart.

Mad Men has been the best-written show on television since its debut (with four straight Emmy wins for Best Drama). Like Boardwalk Empire, Mad Men is an epic historical drama, with multiple characters and story lines, all focused around an emblematic main character, in this case ad man Don Draper. Once again the central story challenge for the writers turns on the desire line of the show, or lack thereof. The reason the vast majority of shows in the history of television involve cops, lawyers and doctors is that these characters all have a clean, quantifiable desire line – solve the crime, win the case, save the patient. But Mad Men is set in a business. So what’s the desire for the episode, or, for that matter, the season? The goals in the ad business are ever changing, and all the major characters have their own personal, often hidden, agendas.

Without a unifying desire line, the show’s creator, Matthew Weiner, has created a totally new TV story structure, one based on the contrast between American ideals and reality. Don and his fellow mad men (and they are almost all men) are in the business of creating and selling the American Dream. But when they go home to their suburban families, we see an actual life not filled with freedom and promise but defined by limits and lies.

The story challenge for the writers is, first, to set recognizable frames for each season, based not a clean desire line but on how each of the major characters moves between slavery and freedom in modern America. Within each episode, the trick is to come up with a story sequence that highlights the contrast between the Dream these characters sell and the harsh reality they live.

These are just a few of the myriad story challenges writers must solve when working on a writing staff today. Make no mistake: for show runners, it’s all about the story. TV drama is the most exciting game in entertainment right now because the medium has finally found itself as an art form. If you want to play in this high-speed, high-stakes game, you have to show that you have mastered the craft of the TV story. Then everyone will be begging you to play for their team.

Mad Men

Mad Men is one of the best-written and most ambitious TV shows in some time. It is worth close study, not just for learning how to create a well-structured show but also how to write one that is truly original and potentially groundbreaking.

Story world, or arena, is one of the key structural elements in any TV drama (see the TV Drama Class for how to create this element, as well as the other essential structural elements of a successful show). It is where the story takes place and it usually exists within some specific arena that not only delineates a recognizable unit but also has a set of rules, activities and values that defines the characters.

One of the strengths of Mad Men is its story world. Instead of the usual arena of cops, lawyers, or doctors, Mad Men takes us into a Manhattan advertising agency in 1960. Besides being totally unique in TV, this story world is extremely detailed. And the detailing isn’t simply a matter of the set design, which is fabulous. It is written into every episode. The writers weave all manner of cultural icons of the late 50s-early 60s, including TV shows, ads, and fashion.

This has two great advantages. One is the pleasure of recognition. If you were a kid at that time, as I was, the show is a virtual time machine. And even if you weren’t, the authenticity and texture immerse you in the world and make you feel that “You are there!”

The other great advantage is that this past world tricks the audience into believing that this is how it really was back then. The first thing we notice when we see all of these details is how much the world has changed. Everybody smoked back then. The men were in charge and the women were all secretaries and housewives. That sets up the kicker. By first thinking how much we’ve changed, we then realize, with even more impact, all the ways we haven’t. This story, set in 1960, is really about today, or more exactly, the ways that human nature only puts on a new skin and the same fundamental challenges of creating a meaningful life must be faced by each of us, every moment of every day.

Another structural element that immediately jumps out at you if you want to create a TV show or write for one is the desire line. In Mad Men the desire that structures each episode is fairly nebulous, and that’s probably going to cut into the show’s popularity (I hope I’m wrong on this one). Desire is the main reason almost all TV shows are set in the cop, lawyer, and doctor arenas. These jobs give their shows a simple and repeatable desire line that tracks the episode every week. Catch the criminal. Win the case. Save the life. But of course this is extremely limiting. Most people don’t spend their daily lives solving crimes, prosecuting bad guys, and saving lives.

So while the desire line on this show may be more nebulous, it is far closer to what most Americans do in their daily lives. These Mad Men are in the business of selling, which, as Arthur Miller pointed out long ago, is the archetypal American action. But they aren’t selling a particular product. They’re selling desire, some image of the good life that, because it is a fabricated ideal, is always just out of reach.

Writer Matthew Weiner’s brilliant conception for this show is to connect the selling of desire to America to the personal and work lives of the ad men themselves. The ad men want the image of the good life in America that they are selling to be true, even if they intellectually make fun of the poor suckers out there who buy it. Main character Don Draper is handsome and talented, with a beautiful wife and two cute little kids. But he has some secrets he’s keeping – like a mistress in the city – and he feels a terrible void he has no idea how to shake. Draper is a master at manipulating desire and creating facades, so when he tries to live the promise for real, the “good life” falls apart in his hands.

We are in Far from Heaven and American Beauty territory here. And the second episode even had Draper give his own version of the Existentialist credo of Sartre and Camus that was seeping into pop culture during the late 50s (how’s that for a sweet detail on a TV show?). We’ll have to see whether Mad Men can extend beyond a few episodes without imploding. Besides the lack of a clean desire line, the subject of hollow suburban existence will make it extremely difficult for the writers to develop the show over the long term without beating a spiritually dead horse. In the meantime, I’m going to sit back and enjoy some great dramatic writing, and nowadays TV is the only place you’ll find it.