What a perfect ending for Mad Men (Sky Atlantic, Thursday). After 92 episodes Matt Weiner, its creator, wraps up his zeitgeisty dissection of the American dream with a love letter.
He writes it both to his intriguing, memorable, TV-gold characters, who get fairy-tale endings of the sort admen devised on storyboards, and to his viewers, who get a magically uplifting finale.
I challenge anyone not to have a grin as wide as the one spreading over Don Draper's face in his final scene, as Mad Men cuts to the Coca-Cola's landmark 1971 "Hilltop" ad, with its blissed-out cast, Coke bottles in hand, singing how they'd like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony.
Don has spent the latter half of this seventh season trying not to be “adman Don” by divesting himself of the life he created, finding his way back – literally, as a hobo – to becoming Dick, the Everyman he used to be.
As he has moved farther from New York on his road trip it hasn’t been pretty (or even, sometimes, very interesting) to watch him become a deeply self-involved, sweaty, red-faced mess.
In Thursday’s finale, arriving at a hippy ashram in California, Don finds his true self: he’s an adman. It’s as simple as that. Sitting cross-legged and chanting “om”, Don has his head back in the game, white shirt on, hair back to its signature style.
He smiles not only because he has an answer to Peggy’s plea in their last phone call – “but don’t you want to work on Coke?” – but also because he has found a way to fix Coke (not himself) in a commune where the guy in the kaftan gives the sort of pep talks about creativity and imagination that Don used to give Peggy.
Surrounded by nature, love and perfect harmony, Don finds inspiration for an ad to flog the world’s biggest brand.
It's classic Mad Men cynicism, and as soon as he unfolds from the lotus position you know he's on his way back to McCann Erickson.
Screwball comedy
Peggy, the archetypal mid-century single career girl, meanwhile finds love with Stan, her solid colleague – where else would she find it? Her life is in the office – in a screwball scene of lovey-dovey declaration that would be at home in any syrupy romcom.
Joan splits from her sleazy beau and sets up a production company. Pete and his reunited family step on to a Lear jet, off to their fabulous new life with his job at the luxury aircraft maker. Blinded by the bright loveliness of the scene, you remember only later that several series ago we learned he is terrified of flying.
And Roger, with his ridiculous moustache and his new wife, are in Paris, ordering champagne and lobster. All the romantic cliches are ticked.
The only bitter-sweet scene involves Betty in her dark suburban kitchen, smoking through her lung cancer – it’s not the time to remember that Don’s breakthrough ad campaign in series one was for Lucky Strikes – while Sally washes up, preparing to take on her dying mother’s role.
Weiner worked on The Sopranos, the final scene of which left viewers first slacked-jawed with shock and then furious that it didn't make clear what had happened to the Soprano family.
For Mad Men he has given us a series of happy endings, fantasy narratives of what happened to the Madison Avenue family. It was a less brutal device than The Sopranos' cut to a black screen.
Still, when you pull at Mad Men's neatly bow-tied endings you start to wonder if, like so much advertising, we're being given what someone thinks we want to see. You wonder if we're being sold a dream.
You could go back and look for clues in previous episodes. Mad Men is over, but it's a TV classic, and there's still plenty of viewing left in it.
Bemused to be watching
Midway through
Jonathan Strange &
Mr Norrell
(BBC One, Sunday) I am bemused to be watching it at all. What I thought was going to be lavish, literary and grown-up – it’s an adaptation of Susanna Clarke’s novel, which is all those things – turns out to be more like the kind of high-quality children’s drama the BBC screens over Christmas.
There’s a strong cast, and the CGI is spectacular: a scene where the magician Mr Norrell (Eddie Marsan) makes the statues in York Minster come alive is, well, magical.
The period detail – it’s set in London around the Napoleonic Wars – is perfect, what with all the wigs and carriages. The BBC must have blown its annual candle budget in the first episode alone.
It's not just that magic is now more associated with children's drama. (Played differently here, it could have been Gothic and terrifying.) It's just that the tone of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell as directed by Toby Haynes (The Musketeers) is so uneven: Marsan plays it entirely straight while everyone else, including Bertie Carvel as Strange, acts as though they're in a Restoration comedy. It's not so much strange as boring.
Essex dream
What a monumental dream house the artist, transvestite and British media luvvie Grayson Perry built – and what a terrific documentary about it in
Grayson Perry’s Dream House
(Channel 4, Sunday).
Perry was commissioned to design a house in Essex, where he’s from, and on a scrubby bit of land he creates a wondrous temple – the build is followed from the drawing stage to the reveal.
Being Perry, a decorative artist who creates intricate backstories for his work, he devises a complex story for this one. It’s a homage to Julie, an Everywoman whom he imagines from birth to death. Elements in it chart her life, including beautiful artwork and sculptures for the interior, while glazed terracotta tiles cover the entire building. (The designs appear to have been influenced by Celtic Sheela-na-gigs.)
The result is more eye-popping than the sight of Perry, in full slap, scaling the scaffolding in his tight skirt and orange platform shoes.
As an arts documentary Dream House is a fascinating exploration of the way an artist approaches a project and the process of making work. It's also an interesting view of Essex beyond, as Perry says, the fake tan and the hot hatches.
tvreview@irishtimes.com
