The Ending of Mad Men's Fifth Season: Cinema, Serial Television and Moments of Performance

Abstract

Certain television dramas of the past thirty years have often been described as ‘cinematic’ for displaying stylistic tendencies historically associated with feature films. This article argues that describing such shows as ‘cinematic’ misrepresents movies and television serials as artistic mediums, and tends to obscure their distinctive achievements. Against this critical tendency, the article accounts for the ending of Mad Men's fifth season not in terms of the series' ‘cinematic’ style, but in terms of how it handles images of faces and places to carry and express the special burden of history and future available to long-form serial television.

Inter(acting)

“…Attending to this theme, Elliott Logan considers how seriality can shape critical approaches to television performance, especially our involvement with it, embedding this key concern in an article that poses the question ‘How do we write about performance in serial television?’ (2015). Writing elsewhere about Mad Men (AMC, 2007–2015), Logan suggests that ‘the long-term, ongoing presence of performers and their characters on-screen, and the interactions of that presence with the shifting places, spaces, objects and histories that constitute the world in which they live’ is of crucial importance to developing critical engagement with serial television’s medium specificity (Logan, 2014: 46). While there has been a great deal written about serial television, and especially the drama serial, performance has not figured as a prominent aspect of its complexity, with key contributors to such appraisals, like Glen Creeber (2004) and Jason Mittell (2015), attending more consistently to the achievements of writing and character.…”

“…While there has been a great deal written about serial television, and especially the drama serial, performance has not figured as a prominent aspect of its complexity, with key contributors to such appraisals, like Glen Creeber (2004) and Jason Mittell (2015), attending more consistently to the achievements of writing and character. Logan, in contrast, centralises the performer’s role in ‘building-up of various layers of history’ praising ‘the way Mad Men handles this concern through expressive synthesis of screen performance and space, which relies for its impact on a deep intimacy with the series’ internal history’ (Logan, 2014: 47).…”

“…Whereas for film, synthesis can be conceptualised as a tight relationship between the ‘combination, interaction, fusion’ of elements, the patterns of television take on a different quality as the shape of the text has the potential to grow and expand over time, its internal relationships forming part of a much larger whole, developing and even reshaping in the process of making. However, as Logan (2014) illustrates, the opportunity for performance, and performance analysis, created by this longitudinal development, need not be conceptualised negatively in terms of a ‘thinning out’ of expressive coherence but rather an accumulating and layering of expressivity. Following this direction, rather than use the concept of synthesis in an effort to fit television into preconceived notions of successful performance, this article intends to use it as a catalyst for approaching the particular ways in which performance responds to television and its aesthetic qualities.…”