Mad Men

Mad Men's first season ended tonight. The confirmation of a second made me grin with giddy enthusiasm; the date of summer 2008 barely dented that smile, since I knew that would the likely date anyway (and I'm used to long waits from Battlestar).

It's interesting that while I've fallen in love with Mad Men over the past thirteen episodes, it wasn't until tonight, after it had ended, that I began to realize how truly transcendent it is as a television show. I submit that it is not just the best new show of the year, which I think is without question, but I think that it may be the best television show I have ever seen, better even than my golden babies of Firefly and (gasp) Battlestar. Both those -- and other brilliant first seasons I might name, like Veronica Mars' -- had their ups and downs, with the downs simply being greater than nearly everything else on television and the ups being some of the best productions ever put to film. But with Mad Men -- and perhaps this is just the rose-colored glasses of post-finale bliss -- has never hit a wrong mark.

It is sublimely, sedately, sensuously, serenely perfect, characters and setting and plot interacting in some intricately woven web glistening with jewels of dew in the now-setting sun. It accomplishes so much with so little -- its fastidious attention to detail befitting a period piece (despite some liberties taken in "Nixon vs. Kennedy") would have been enough to make it interesting, but it adds on top of that some of the best characters ever to grace a television screen, beautifully written and acted, each fully-formed and distinctly human, with their own virtues and vices, triumphs and failures -- and these characters, so human, are elevated to the universal, struggling with the same issues that still plague our society and have plagued humanity since the beginning, and does not provide answers. It is content to simply watch as these characters act, some finding success and some finding failure, but always with a certain grace.

That, I think, is what puts Mad Men so ahead of every other show, the crowning jewel of its perfection: its pacing, to put it crudely. Mad Men is the first television show I have seen to evoke the long-shot art cinema with takes lasting into minutes; as opposed to Battlestar, which infamously used shaky-cam cinéma vérité techniques to suggest realism in space, Mad Men's shots are steady, long, composed, calm, evoking the emphasis on surface stability even as storms rage in the depths; they represent Don Draper's increasingly desperate attempt to maintain his artifice as the cool man always in control even as his life disintegrates around him, they represent Pete Campbell's foolishly obvious attempts to appear the young genius on the rise, they represent the entire era's and all of mankind's focus on protecting the exterior while we are destroyed inside.

Battlestar takes us into the real world, but Mad Men takes us into the real people. It needs no shocking revelations, no last-minute cliffhangers of doom, and even its moments of greatest crises are handled with serenity. In Battlestar, we are aware from the beginning of the precariousness of the situation, and that, in a way, weakens it; in Mad Men the audience is a participant in the characters' delusions, and the disintegrations in the wake of their failures are all the more poignant because the camera maintains its serene observation, apparently unaffected and unmoved by the deep suffering before it. We can only watch in horror, apprehension, fascination, at the people so close and yet so distant.

I didn't think I'd ever love a series more than Battlestar. Brilliant character drama combined with space battles and robots? What could be better? Apparently, a bunch of sixties ad men. I'm glad I was wrong.