Mad Men needs fixing and I know how

Draper. Don Draper. (Image via Wikipedia)

Mad Men’s makers may not know it requires rescuing but it does. It’s gone from fascinating to a little on the dull side this season.

Things have settled into a predictable pattern. Don Draper will keep having extramarital affairs and Betty Draper will keep getting bored with her boring life and resentful over Don’s secrecy and his insistence that needs to be at the office all night when in fact he’s six houses away banging the schoolmarm or whoever it is next time.

At the office, the mad boys and girl will keep sweating to come up with bright ideas for selling Maidenform bras or Hilton hotels, hoping to win a flicker of approval from Don.

Yawn.

The atmospherics of Mad Men are terrific, of course, and the writing often high level, so we need to find a way to revitalize the show.

I have. What Mad Men needs is violence.

Brutal, raw, unrelenting violence. That’ll give it the zing it’s slowly losing.

The Law and Order franchise keeps going forever because people get killed and molested. Hospital shows gush blood amid the romance and lawyer shows do murder, guilt and innocence and all that jazz.

Violence provides not only your visceral thrills but suspense. Will Melvin get killed or will he not? And if so, when? How? By whom?

You can have a good movie without violence because it lasts only 90 minutes and it has an ending. Endings are satisfying. Things get resolved. Catharsis occurs. A TV series just goes on and on and the characters just keep doing the same things. After you know their personalities well, there’s little surprise. Things run down.

Unless there’s blood and advertising isn’t bloody. Once in a while, you can lop off someone’s foot in freak lawn-mower accident but it’s not enough.

So next season Mad Men should take a drastic turn. Sterling Cooper should no longer be an ad agency but a spy agency posing as an ad agency.

I suppose it’ll be a bit of a jolt for the viewer at first but hey, it’s not like these were ever real people. It’s fiction. We’ll swallow anything if it’s done well. Besides, these are desperate times.

So the agency is now an outfit like UNCLE or SMERSH or KAOS. Everyone in the office is armed to the teeth and expert in martial arts, leading to many gunfights, car chases and karate fights with lots of furniture flying around. Bombs go off. The agents get sent to exotic locales to do dirty deeds. People get assassinated, kidnapped and tortured. Enemy agents try to infiltrate. Colleagues go rogue and have to be eliminated.

Leading man Don Draper is perfect for the switch. With his cruel smile, his conservative suits, his highballs, his wham-bam flings and the ‘60s setting, he’s always seemed vaguely James Bondish. Now he’s in charge of counter-intelligence. There’s a mole in the office who’s been killing secretaries (who aren’t really secretaries at all but intelligence analysts). Don suspects everyone. Is it the cynical Roger Sterling Jr.? The not-so innocent Peggy Olson?  Or maybe Bert Cooper, who’s only pretending to be a harmless old eccentric. Personally I think it’s that slimy little bastard Pete Campbell and I hope Peggy garrotes him after luring him into her office for a bit of fellatio.

The plots practically write themselves.  What if a secret rump group in the agency is plotting to assassinate JFK and Don must find them and stop them? Of course he doesn’t know that right after he succeeds, JFK will be assassinated anyway by the mob, the CIA, the Cubans, Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson all working together. The irony!

This thing is gonna work. Trust me, people.