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" Season seven of Mad Men begins with a pitch. Freddy Rumsen, played by Joel Murray, looks straight into the camera. &amp;quot;Are you ready?&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Because I want you to pay attention. This is the beginning of something. Do you have time to improve your life? Do you have exactly thirty seconds to hear from Accutron watches?&amp;quot; Over the course of six seasons, Mad Men has turned into a show about many things \u2014 about social and cultural transformation, about our continued obsession with the sixties, about consumerism and the collapsing nuclear family, about the decline of New York and the rise of Los Angeles. But the seventh season begins with a return to the original subject: advertising. And that is how we know Mad Men will end in tragedy. In Mad Men, advertising and tragedy are the same. Don Draper is the central figure of the tragedy, of course, and in season seven we find him in his typical mass of contradictions: utterly tormented and utterly confident, the perfect insider and the perfect outsider, a radical creative who is completely conformist, a brilliant fool, a kindhearted monster, a nostalgic who hates the past. And for a character with so much intensity, he doesn&amp;#039;t develop much. The world changes around him. When we first see Don this season, he has arrived at LAX and is looking for his wife. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m a Man&amp;quot; by the Spencer Davis Group plays while Megan, clad in a forget-me-not-blue micromini, emerges in slow motion from a Jaguar E-Type convertible (the car Enzo Ferrari himself described as the most beautiful car ever made). It is maybe the best single shot of the entire series \u2014 the consumerist version of Botticelli&amp;#039;s Birth of Venus. But you can&amp;#039;t help noticing that Don&amp;#039;s hair is jet-black. He is wearing the same kind of gray suit he would have worn six seasons ago. He has a feather in his hat. He looks old-fashioned but not old. At first it strains credulity \u2014 no man who lives the way Don lives and who has kids doesn&amp;#039;t have gray hair. Then it makes perfect sense: He must dye his hair. We have entered the period when Don is running away from his age and what age means in the consumerist frenzy of the late sixties and early seventies: total cultural irrelevance.  At the center of Mad Men has always been Don&amp;#039;s gift for the campaign; his deep psychological problems, whatever they may be, fed his enormous talent. The nature of that talent was a fundamental mystery \u2014 clients paid for it, everybody else wanted to figure it out. Unlike other advertising men onscreen, Don isn&amp;#039;t Cary Grant&amp;#039;s louche comedian in North by Northwest or Richard E. Grant&amp;#039;s monster in How to Get Ahead in Advertising. Don is a talent and he likes to see his talent appreciated, particularly in the form of money. Even without the reward, though, Don needs to use it. This season shows that more clearly than ever. Even though he has been fired from the firm, Don still develops pitches. He still figures out ways of selling things to people. (To tell any more would be a genuine spoiler of a very clever narrative trick.) He can&amp;#039;t stop himself. He cannot exist without advertising. Which is why his tragedy is indistinguishable from the tragedy of advertising itself. Freddy&amp;#039;s pitch at the beginning of the episode ends with a catchphrase perfect for Accutron: &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s not a timepiece. It&amp;#039;s a conversation piece.&amp;quot; This is the way the best pitches have always worked in the world of Mad Men. Your product isn&amp;#039;t X, it&amp;#039;s Y. Women don&amp;#039;t want to be one of a hundred in a box, they want to be an individual. It&amp;#039;s not a wheel, it&amp;#039;s a carousel. Lucky Strikes aren&amp;#039;t unhealthy, they&amp;#039;re toasted.  What Don does, as an advertising man, is figure out what the past is and what the future is, so he can place himself and his clients exactly on the fulcrum, at the heart of the present. Every affirmation is also a rejection. The future is built on the ruins of the past. Don builds it, through his campaigns. That process is joyful. Amazingly, it&amp;#039;s even fun to watch happen on a television show. But the act of advertising contains within itself its own destruction. Everyone becomes the past. Everyone eventually loses the thread. And at the beginning of season seven, we can see it happening to Don. We&amp;#039;re watching him become the past. The episode ends with Don literally out in the cold, overlooking a crumbling New York from his balcony. (The show&amp;#039;s penchant for heavy-handed symbolism is becoming a bit too heavy.) This is the fate that was always waiting for him. This is the fate that awaits anyone who lives by figuring out the nature of the moment. Eventually, the moment passes. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a32820/mad-men-tragedy/>