Indeed. And there is a major difference in how it was presented - the Miller Lite guy was trying to get people to imagine this random Heartland guy and asking how can they get him to switch what he drinks. Don would have invoked a random guy but then asked deeper questions of what that guy really wants out of life and how they can sell him that idea through the product.
Which is the way advertising was heading throughout the 60s and would fully enter by the 1980s.
The irony of the show is that Harry Crane is Cassandra. He was absolutely right that television was the pinnacle of importance. He was absolutely right that systematizing buys was the way to go. He was absolutely right that computers would create understanding of market segmenting. He was absolutely right that advertising was not about insights. And he got mocked for that every step of the way by the people on the show and by the people who commented on the show.
All the boutique agencies with their beards and pot and special snowflakes would be run out of business (or taken over) by the giant agencies by the mid-1970s or so. They would appear over and over again (Chiat/Day had a good run until the owner snowflaked it into the ground, an amazing story) but advertising works by repetition, not creativity. Don Draper is a romantic character, as thoroughly outdated in the modern world as Philip Marlowe. His time was 1960, when he temporarily was in the core of society and so could speak for it. The Beatles crushed him. The sixties exposed him. He became an utter outsider trying to slam his square beliefs into their round holes. Business is just as soul-crushing as the hippies said, just as much a lie, a shallow perversion, and a plague upon society. Money is the root of all evil. That’s just as romanticized a fiction from the opposite point of view, but we’re dealing with fiction. That’s the arc of Mad Men. No happy endings. Those are for advertising.
It’s sort of like Moneyball, isn’t it? Don is like the old-school scouts, and Harry is Billy Beane.
I see what you did there.
I shoulda been a copywriter.
I think Matthew Weiner once said that Pete was also often right partly because he read the research reports. I remember him advising a client to buy ads in African-American magazines. The audience was untapped and the ad space was cheap.
Harry Crane is probably the character who I always want to see more of, but always hate to see more of because his evolution into sleazebag.
Finally, an episode as good as those of old. This season has been a bit of a bust, but this ep made up for it. Joan’s confrontation was excellent. Peggy and Roger’s goof at the old digs was amusing. And Don seems to be having a middle-age, what-does-it-all-mean crisis; he seems ready to disappear over the horizon for good.
Don’t forget also, I think the choice of having a research guy deliver the presentation was highly symbolic by Weiner. Don’s always had an antipathy towards research since Season 1. He believes even good research can only tell you about what things are, not where they can go.
Don had to endure research in the first couple of seasons because they were being imposed from above. Once he got his name on the door, research slowly disappeared from his life. Now that he’s no longer in charge, research has entered his life again.
Yeah! A few episodes ago it came up in the thread about which male character one would want to date. I was going to say Harry because I’d be in to all of his TV connections, and he doesn’t seem like too bad of a guy. The very next episode he totally sleazed out on Joan and that was the end of that for me.
Harry has been sleazy for quite some time.
I’d be very surprised if Don committed murder. But I could imagine an ending in which someone Don is with–someone with a life Don can see himself living–dies. And when that man dies, he and Don happen to be at the top of a big drop: maybe a canyon rather than a skyscraper. Whatever it is, it just has to be high enough so that the face of the person who falls all that way and crashes at the bottom will be smashed beyond recognition. All the authorities will have to go on will be the wallet and ID in the guy’s pocket.
Of course that would be a contrived ending. And there is the problem of what life the other guy could have, that Don might plausibly think he could inhabit.*
But it’s not out of the realm of possibility, I think, that Don’s story might be wrapped up that way. Showrunners traditionally gravitate toward those ‘His Adventures Continue’ sort of endings. Giving Don getting a fresh start, with the satisfying call-back to both the opening credits and to Dick/Don’s own Origin Tale, might be the way Weiner has planned this out.
…Or Weiner may have Don offer his services to the Army, and let him be killed in Vietnam, possibly while saving the life of Glen Bishop. (I do hope that’s not the planned ending…:eek: It’s another ‘full circle’ ending, but it would be pretty hard to take.)
*It would have to be a life without ties, because otherwise Don would look like a complete jerk in depriving the guy’s loved ones of knowledge of what really happened to him. Weiner was careful to make Dick/Don’s decision back when the real DD was killed into something that Dick Whitman didn’t plan or plot or contrive. The situation was engineered by Weiner so that the audience would have sympathy for Dick’s decision to go along with the deception and imposture.
And it would have to be that way again.
As for what the guy does to earn a living, it would have to be based on Don’s own demonstrated skills. Something to do with persuasion and selling…maybe something that ties into a phenomenon important to us in 2015, so we could think ‘hey, maybe someone like Don really DID contribute to this…’
The more I consider this possibility, the more I dread that this might indeed be the show’s ending.
Weiner will want to showcase his kid’s Acting Talent (as he sees it), and therefore I bet we haven’t seen the last of Glen. And having Don sacrifice himself, in a military setting, would bring it all back to that crucial moment when the real DD died while Dick Whitman lived.
Weiner might even set it up as a fall: Don pushes Glen out of the way, taking the bullet (or whatever), and therefore goes over the edge of the…I dunno, open door of the helicopter. Down, down, down.
I am really hoping to be wrong.
:smack:
Head-smacking the dread? Really? 
More seriously: sure, the scenario I posted is Wild Speculation. But that Wild Speculation is based on the twin observations that Weiner is supportive of his son, and that Weiner is unlikely to end his story with Don happily riding off into the sunset, King of Madison Avenue.
What is it that you question? Do you doubt that Weiner plans to give his son more screen time? Or do you doubt that Weiner is setting up Soul-Sick Don’s doing something other than simply going back to work as an ad man?
How old is Don Draper supposed to be at this point? I think he’d be too old to go to Vietnam even as a volunteer.
A Korean War vet who was a commissioned officer in the Corps of Engineers? I should think they’d be glad to have him volunteer for service!
On the show, it hasn’t even been twenty years since the end of the Korean War. There were plenty of vets still in the service then.
He turned 40 a few years ago. No more than 45 now. But I think he’d have problems trying to go back as Lt. Draper; he doesn’t have the real one’s military skills.
Except as you pointed out elsewhere, he’s gotten used to being “pampered” for years. Even his secretary make a crack about him “roughing it” by living at the Plaza Hotel.
Yeah, but the Army doesn’t know that. And yeah, his lack of skills (military **and **engineering) would become obvious once he reupped.