For Pete’s sake!

Pete Campbell.

What an American name.

Pete is the epitome of Mad Men, and the epitome of what life was like for the men of 19060’s America.

The last episode of the first season of Mad Men, ‘The Wheel’, highlighted the pressures that the men of that era found themselves under and how men, like Pete Campbell, felt the need to keep their issues bottled up and to themselves.

Sure, Pete may have shown himself to be a chauvinistic and self-centred ad man throughout the first season, but it is important to recognise the fragilities that lie below the exterior of evert ‘tough man’ of the 1960s.

Pete is known as the smart-arse Madison Avenue type.

But beneath this exterior lies another type of man.

Have a look at this video from earlier in season one and see how Pete acts when he is in the home. There is an attempt by Pete to be the alpha male in the house, but the we can sense an underlying uncertainty and want in his voice. He wants to be recognised as a man:

Pete is telling his wife what to do, bossing her around as if she is a malleable toy, yet the motive behind his bossiness is a complete juxtaposition to his antics. He is insecure about his place as a writer, and the competitiveness inside him governs that he should be considered a better writer than his work colleague – Ken Cosgrove.

Now we come to the crux of Pete’s year at Sterling Cooper.

in ‘The Wheel’ we are presented with Pete’s ongoing paradoxical situation rght at the start of the episode.

In order to be a strong 1960s man, Pete needs to bring in accounts to Streling Cooper. But to do that, in this episode at least, he will need to suck up to his Wife’s father, a denigrating exercise for Pete, to say the least.

The most pertinent line of the opening exchange between Pete and his father-in-law, Tom, is when Tom says “The only family and business you should be mixing is the production of a child.”

Further on in the episode we find out that Pete has successfully brought in the account of Clearasil, his Father-in-law’s company. He tells the boys in the office that he has brought in this business as though it was all his own hard work, but the dramatic irony we have as viewers is the knowledge that he has stooped the being slave to the whims of his father-in-law in order to gain an advantage at work.

It is for this reason that Pete Campbell is the epitome of the American advertising men depicted in the show. We have seen what Don is combating in his personal life, but through Pete we get an idea of what the other, second-tier boys are up to. Through Pete we can just imagine the personal lives of men such as Harry Crane and Ken Cosgrove.

One of the last events involving Pete is his ‘reward’ for bringing in the Clearasil account.

He is congratulated by Don on bringing in new business, but the irony is that while Pete is thinking the congratulations are all for his good work, the congratulation by Don is also a self-directed one because of the fact that he always knew the family would be worthwhile in the long run.

Once again, while Pete believes he has earned the praise of Don, Don is really just using Pete as a malleable toy.

The reward Pete gets is an Ayn Rand book.

The irony is not lost here, as Rand was an advocate of a psychological system known as Ethical Egoism, which says people should choose to do what is in their own self interest. If anything, Pete is a psychological egoist (a person who doesn’t chose, but just does things in their own self-interest), but either way, we can see the link between Rand’s philosophy and Pete’s own ethics.

Pete will probably never read the book anyway, because it doesn’t interest him.

When did bold become beautiful?

Big Love is a not a great show, nor is it a soap opera.

Big Love highlights the idea that not every ‘quality’ serial is automatically loved by everyone.

And one of the key factors in the reason why I don’t enjoy Big Love, but can appreciate it’s quality, is it’s subject matter.

The fact is that with more and more shows tageting the HBO market of high-end drama, producers, writer and directors are all striving to find unique subject matter to define their show and distinguish it from all others.

The danger with make a show so novel is that it will immediately alienate a whole host of viewers who simply do not find that subject interesting.

The fact is that just because I absolutely adored The Sopranos, does not mean that the subject matter of gangster-come-psychologically damaged father does not immediately appeal to my Mum in the same way that Big Love does.

But they are both quality dramas which are quite distinguishable from soap operas.

Both are only once a week, soap opera’s are every day.

Both have complex plot lines, soapies have convoluted and often irrelevant tangents.

The icing on the cake is that both have reasonable outcomes and endings. Soaps have what is commonly known as ‘Deus ex machina’, the contrived and generally unbelievable outcome to a problem which seemingly had no solution.

Think of the problems in The Wire. The problem in actually getting that wire tap. It took episodes and episodes to resolve.

The same with The Sopranos. The number of episodes in the first season to figure out who the rat was.

They were legitimate problems with legitimate solutions.

The difference on soap operas is that while an episode may end in drama and have a cliff-hanger conclusion, there is often the easy option of bringing someone back to life, or let them escape from jail etc. to help the writers out of their block.

Mittel suggests that the success of the soap opera in the 1980s led producers to experiment more with serialised content, and test viewers on whether or not they would have the week-long attention span required for that type of TV.

But that’s where he concedes the connections end:

I don’t think the contemporary primetime narrative complexity that I write about has much in common with or influence from soap operas, except through their common connections to 1970s and 1980s primetime serials. They are distinctly different in production method, scheduling, acting style, pacing, and formal structure. In reading interviews with, and talking to, primetime creators, I’ve never seen any reference to soap operas as a point of inspiration or influence. Likewise, there is almost no crossover between creative personnel between daytime and primetime drama.

Jason Mittel, 2009, ‘More thoughts on soap operas and television seriality’,

I agree with Mittel and his differentiation of the two television forms.

So what if my Mum likes Big Love and I don’t?

Sure, we may not like some of the primetime narratives on our box, but that doesn’t make them soapies.

 

After work brain training

Let me just start this blog entry by saying that the time I spent in southeast Asia watching Friends throughout last year will be the basis for much of my argument. Although much of the viewing was done in glorious sunshine, and in unceremonious states of hangover-related disrepair, that classic sitcom will prove to provide some pertinent points.

But I will start my argument at home.

When we arrive home from a long day at the office, or a day full of activity at uni, or hard work on the training track, we want to relax, so we turn on the TV. Sometimes we watch our shows on out laptops in bed as an even more relaxing exercise.

But are our favourite shows still relaxing and enjoyable?

As my friends and I turn to more ‘high-end’ dramas in our search for the television’s pinnacle, we are finding more and more often that each episode of these cinematic TV shows are in fact very complex and not always very relaxing.

With the narrative complexity involved in all the modern day HBO series’ or FX instalments, television is moving away from the well-worn path of insular and isolated episodes, with plot lines and character-driven episodes losing ground on the leaders.

But, in this man’s humble opinion, the best episodes of any television show are always understandable in and of themselves.

That is not to say that television shows such as The Sopranos, Breaking Bad or Mad men are not worth watching because their story lines are too complex (Incidentally, I enjoy all three aforementioned shows). Rather, they are much more enjoyable to watch when the focus of the episode is on a plot line which does not rely too heavily on previous episodes.

What I mean is this – would they ever be shown in an Asian cafe ad nauseum as Friends is? The answer is no, because they rely too heavily on the audiences own ability to recall information from past episodes (and probably because they would not set the right mood for any vacating Westerners).

My point is, the best episodes may be complex, but they are also the episodes which don’t rely too much on other episodes.

Most people would be able to sit down and watch a sitcom and enjoy it without having any prior knowledge of the show.

The above clip is funny regardless of whether or not you watch Friends.

Mitell argues that the progression of complex narratives invites the audience to engage with a TV show, and to create a kind of fictional relationship with the characters and plot scenarios.

Narratively complex programming invites audience to engage actively at the level of form as well, highlighting the conventionality of traditional television and exploring the possibilities of both innovative long-term storytelling and creative intraepisode discursive strategies.

In what he has said in his article, Mitell has not purely focused on the storytelling, but also the ability for a TV show to grab somebody’s attention on an episode by episode basis.

To be engaged overall is obviously an objective most people have when committing to a programme, but we also don’t want to be left in the lurch waiting for next week’s instalment. It was always a bugbear of mine to be attached to a show only for the end of the episode to leave you on a knife’s edge.

And that does happen in Breaking Bad, but if you look at this clip below, you will understand why the show is so much better when the any understanding of the scene can be derived purely from what you’ve seen in the preceding 40 minutes.