Let's remind ourselves that Mad Men characters aren't real

Some thoughts on Mad Men (SPOILERS!)  and fans perhaps getting too possessive of TV characters...

"The Other Woman," the most recent episode of Mad Men, has prompted a fascinating discussion about character consistency on TV dramas. The question is whether Joan Holloway Harris (Christina Hendricks), a major figure on the show since it started in 2007, would "really" agree to a questionable plan that helps the firm and, not incidentally, gets her a partnership. It was a shocking turn for a character who's always exuded confidence and poise, and some critics didn't buy it. Time's James Poniewozik protests that Mad Men, "at its best, is dedicated to the idea that action should proceed from character, not from [creator] Matt Weiner’s invisible hand." He adds:

Joan isn’t “women.” She’s a woman. She isn’t “someone.” She’s a specific character. Indeed, one thing that elevates Mad Men from so many lousy ’60s dramas is that it treats its characters as idiosyncratic people, not stand-ins for social forces and demographic groups. Her actions have to make sense because they are what she would do, not anyone else.

NPR's Linda Holmes is even more thorough in picking apart the how "every step [of the episode] defies not just ordinary-person logic, but the internal logic of these characters and how they behave and have behaved." She adds:

There may be women for whom finding out that the men they work with see them as potential prostitutes might create in them the impulse to become prostitutes — a sort of "I guess if this is what they think of me, I might as well." I just don't believe that's Joan.

Holmes is right that it took a lot of contrivance to get Joan into that hotel room with the Jaguar representative, and I have to assume that Weiner and company thought about this very carefully before deciding it was worth it. And I can see her point that the more Peggy's more empowering story in "The Other Woman" might have been diminished by being paired with Joan's dilemma. (Holmes objects to this season of Mad Men because "rather than finding natural convergences between otherwise unconnected stories, all the personal stories in an episode are explicitly and forcefully about the same thing.")

But I cringed at what may be Holmes' most damning statement: "Not only did I not like this episode, but because it made me believe none of these people ever had any actual respect for Joan, I now like other episodes less."

I don't know if I could ever say that about a series — in essence, that I have less respect for the work of writers, directors, and actors because of a decision made long after many of them had anything to do with the show. And I worry that this attitude, which treats writers and actors as servants of the characters rather than their creators, limits storytelling. This concern only grows as a TV show ages and (if it's good) tries to avoid repeating itself.

My concern has a lot to do with the competing notions of a TV series as one long novel versus a collection of short stories, something I've mentioned in my Top 100 Sitcom Episodes posts. I think the pendulum has swung too far toward "novel," even though it's the rare long-running series that has the same creative minds lasting all the way through. (Community, for example, is no longer one of the exceptions.) Even treating seasons as separate entities, which The A.V. Club's Todd VanDerWerff does in his positive review of "The Other Woman," allows for more narrative possibilities than the insistence that our initial perceptions of a character must never be violated.

Maybe the prostitution storyline was too sordid or soapy for your taste. But if it is a worthwhile plot, how else could it have been handled?

• The story could have been given to a guest star, perhaps playing one of the secretaries at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. I doubt that Mad Men airer AMC, actress Christina Hendricks, or the person in charge of watching the Mad Men budget would have liked this option. And I suspect that there would be complaints from viewers and critics if a lot of screen time was given to a new (and almost inevitably "underdeveloped") character. There are already complaints (from Linda Holmes, among others) about Don's new wife Megan taking time away from old fan favorites Joan and Peggy. (Linda Holmes is not impressed by the newer character: "This season has been very Megan-heavy, but she nevertheless remains, for me, poorly defined.")

• A new character could have been given Joan's story but little or no screen time. Instead, the episode would focus on how the regular characters instigated and reacted to the situation, with Joan taking a moral high ground. Then the complaints would be that the woman who actually had to make a difficult choice had no personality or opportunity to share her point of view. (Or maybe this form of objectification would be appropriate for the story, if heavy-handed.)

• The idea of pimping out Joan could have been quashed immediately by Don, Roger, Lane, Ken, et al. Then we could get a lot of talking and moralizing about Pete's outrageous proposal. This would be boring, but it might make for a more popular show (in the tradition of M*A*S*H and The West Wing, which flattered their viewers by saying that the characters they identified with really were noble and flawless). This would have also isolated Pete as the show's token villain, another boring-but-often-popular move.

• Pete could have been the one who had to spend the night with the Jaguar guy to get the account. This would have been ha-ha-bizarre in a David E. Kelley way, and viewers might get a kick out of Pete's humiliation, but such an episode wouldn't have been very enlightening about gender politics in the 1960s workplace. 

I'm not saying that every good story idea has to be wedged into a TV series at any cost to character consistency. But I think "The Other Woman" earned its place, and the thoughtful discussion of the episode even from its detractors makes me think it worked as good television.

One more point: It's generally more interesting to watch — and, consciously or not, identify with — characters who have intelligence, self-awareness, and the ability to deliberate before they act. That's a strength of shows like Mad Men, The Good Wife, Friday Night Lights, Deadwood, etc. But good storytelling often demands that they be willing to do things we would reject out of hand as impractical or immoral. We like stories that give us a chance to see what might happen if we followed through on some fleeting thought, like stealing money at work (another "but he wouldn't do that!" plot on Mad Men) or having an affair with someone else's spouse. (Or creating a serial-killer hoax, as on the last season of The Wire.) When our favorite characters, as opposed to simpletons or stock villains, do these things, the stories can be much more powerful.

TV characters are storytelling tools, forced to embarrass and disgrace themselves for our entertainment and enlightement. In a way, they're all prostitutes from the moment they're born.

UPDATE: Also read Jaime Weinman's take on the "would she really do that?" question. He makes a good point about the accelerated narrative on shows like Mad Men: "it’s not like you could put it past any of these characters to behave the way they do, but having them act that way within the space of about two minutes of screen time probably contributes to making it seem a little unreal." (I would add that this is a hazard of cramming several storylines into an episode, which is now practically mandatory on sophisticated TV.) Weinman also mentions an advantage of the series format, which is how Joan's "near-mythic" status, built up over several years, in a way made the storyline more plausible. That is, it explained how other characters could feel that "she, and only she, can rescue this deal."

Comments

[Tony]

I was really put off by Linda Holmes's very thoughtful but ultimately unconvincing piece. It felt like a long justification for feeling icky about a plot turn that, well, we were supposed to feel icky about.

Regarding your suggestion that Pete could have been the one to prostitute himself, a commenter on AV Club, I think, pointed out that Don had a different reaction back when Sal rebuffed the advances of the cigarette company scion: He wondered why Sal didn't just go through with it.

[Christina]

You're being very unfair to both of those reviews. Both of them explicitly say that Joan having sex for a partnership could have been done successfully, if it were done differently. I don't think pretending that your alternate suggestions are the only other options is fair play.

[Robert David Sullivan]

Tony: I remember that about Sal. Don may have been buying into the stereotype of gay men (and maybe men in general) as willing to fuck anything. This might also be part of the gender politics of the time: Men have sex for pleasure, women have sex to get something.

[Robert David Sullivan]

Christina: I didn't mean to suggest that those reviews are invalid or badly reasoned. But I think they raise an interesting question of whether we can become too protective of TV characters. That doesn't necessarily mean that Poniewozik and Holmes are wrong in this particular case.