Cloves and Fedoras: Ty has a few issues with critics proclaiming the Mad Men finale as great television
If you have not seen the Mad Men series finale DO NOT READ(come back when you are ready). This review is full of episode spoilers
Last night was the much anticipated series finale of Mad Men and in my opinion, it fell completely flat. Lots of spoilers coming, so beware.
This particular episode of Mad Men was like any other episode in the series, not a finale. Most of the episode took place in a hippie commune where the people there all talked about their feelings, it was very boring. There was also the three phone calls that Don Draper(Jon Hamm) made to the three important ladies in his life, Peggy Olsen(Elisabeth Moss), his daughter Sally(Kiernan Shipka) and his ex wife Betty(January Jones). This was interesting, but it came and went. I felt like you got little to no closure with these calls and then it was done. Then back to the boring hippie commune. There was also Joan's(Christina Hendricks) closing story. Very fast and very unexplained. First, she took the buyout from the new company, goes on vacation with her much older boyfriend(Bruce Greenwood), does cocaine for some unknown reason and then starts her own production company. Very unfulfilling. Then Peggy and Stan(Jay R Ferguson) fall in love with each other very predictably. Pretty lame. Pete(Vincent Kartheiser) and Trudy(Alison Brie) got back together and he took the job that Duck(Mark Moses) offered him in the previous episode. Who cares. Roger Sterling(John Slattery) and Marie(Julia Ormond) stay together and presumably get married and live happily ever after, because now Mad Men is apparently a romance show and not a hard drama. And poor Betty, smoking a cigarette just waiting for the lung cancer to kill her. I felt the worst for her, in fact she was the only one who I felt any feelings for in the finale. But the icing on the crap cake that was this finale was the final shot of Don Draper sitting in the hippie commune meditating, close up on his face and then pull back to the show the famous "If I Bought the World a Coke" commercial. Of course Matthew Weiner decided to give Don a happy ending because what does every drunk, wife and girlfriend cheating, workaholic a hole deserve? Apparently a happy ending. The fact that Matthew Weiner said, prior to the finale, that he doesn't owe anyone anything was very apparent watching the finale. He only cared to stroke his own ego and say look how smart I am and how dumb all of you are who don't get it. He's an a hole as well.
Reading the reviews the day after made me even more angry. Publications like the AV Club and Uproxx saying how genius it was, come on, you didn't get it either, you just want to sound like a pompous intellect and spoiler alert, it's not working. You sound like a bunch of wannabes. This was an emphatic thud of a finale and real fans of the show deserved better.
Let's just say, Matthew Weiner owed us more.
Ty
Ty is the Pop Culture Editor for Seed Sing. He enjoys good television, and does not enjoy indulgent series finales.