Golick is Mad! Mad, I Tell You!

IT'S A LITTLE logrolling, since I'm now writing about a piece Jill wrote because I wrote about a Maureen Ryan interview in the Chicago Tribune with Matthew Weiner -- but lay all that aside, for now.

Go read as Jill lays out the perfect intricacy of Mad Men's story construction:

Now that I’ve seen a whole season and lapped up Weiner’s every word, I’m in a bit better position to dissect his story telling style.

The episodic stories are unveiled in a series of sequences; groups of scenes that tell little stories. Together these sequences take you some place unexpected and yet inevitable. Each sequence is it’s own entertaining little story, filled with character revelations and detail that may or may not feed into the larger picture of the episode. There were somewhere between 14 and 19 of these sequences in the episodes I dissected with the help of the episode guide.


The sequences do not drive the story forward as they do in so many other series. Instead, they come at the story sideways, like a bank shot in a game of pool. The story beats aren’t as obvious as they usually are, but they do connect up with the larger story.

Like the Simpsons and the Sopranos, the opening moments of a Mad Men episode don’t telegraph the ending. We start one place, end up some place very different.

Massive spoilers if you haven't seen the end of the season yet.

I'll go out on a limb here and say that though I can understand not liking Mad Men, I cannot understand anyone who wants to be a TV writer not liking it. So there.