(Imagine Stephens and Draper sipping martinis together at the bar, or Betty and Samantha twitching their noses over coffee…)Īs the curtain goes up tonight on season 6 of Mad Men, I feel as giddy as everyone else that my nearly year-long wait is finally over. It was in the script* of a 1965 episode of Bewitched, a popular TV sit-com whose lead male character, Darrin Stephens, also worked in a Madison Avenue advertising agency. In this particular case, whatever as a slightly dismissive interjection probably isn’t, in fact, a complete anachronism in ’60s American English. But there are a handful of writer-linguist-historians who almost certainly do know, and who would argue persuasively whether or not that particular use of that particular word would have been prevalent in the dialogue of early- to mid-sixties ad men.
And I’ve no idea if he ever has done, in that way, since the Madison Avenue drama first graced our TV screens back in 2007. “Whatever.” Can you imagine Don Draper saying that? In that valley-girl passive-aggressive kind of way? I can’t either.
She is expressing her sexuality out in front of everyone.Yes, Mad Men is fallible. That she has her own personality and Don can’t control it. So where is the show going to go? Well, whether you realize it or not in that episode, you just witnessed the major conflict in their relationship. I think people thought that the whole story was going to be about him hiding his past from her, but you find out right there and then that she knows it all. No one knew at that time she was going to become an actress, so what better time to show her do this song for him, in front of all his “friends.” I mean, it was story: this is who this woman is. She is throwing the surprise party - which means he has no say in it. That she was younger, that she had a different set of rules, that she was more fun-loving, that she was extroverted, and that Don’s intense, almost-pathological privacy was going to be broken by this woman’s personality. What I thought was, it’s one of the old saws of all entertainment - the surprise birthday party - and I loved the idea that this woman was very different from the people at the office. And I kind of wanted to give her a character moment, especially if the whole season was going to be about their relationship and what it meant to Don - to sort of introduce her to the audience and to the other characters through her personality. And the audience didn’t know anything about her. For me, the origin of the idea was that Don had proposed to this woman, and the audience didn’t even know if he was going to marry her.
It wasn’t the major thing, but it’s certainly where some of it came from. We’d been off the air for 17 months - against my will - and I really wanted to make sure that we gave the audience some bang for their buck. MATTHEW WEINER: It would be a lie to say there wasn’t a showmanship aspect to it.
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