Don Draper 101

My college course on Mad Men taught my students to be smarter TV watchers.

It can teach you, too.

By Anne Helen Petersen

The final exam was to answer one of two deceptively simple questions: Who is
Peggy Olson? or Who is Don Draper?
Mad Med photos courtesy of AMC. Blackboard by Zhudifeng/Thinkstock.

If you were an incoming freshman at my college this fall, you had dozens of
courses available to usher you into the life of the mind. You could take Intro to
Psych and figure out why your roommate is so weird. You could take Intro to
Microeconomics, just to show everyone who ever told youd never learn
anything useful at a liberal arts school. You could enroll in Feminist Jewish
Mysticism to provide cocktail party conversation starters for the rest of your
adult life. Or you could take Mad Men: Media, Gender, Historiography, with me,
and make your friends wonder exactly how you got your parents to pay for you
to binge a show on Netflix.

I dont doubt that some of my students viewed the class as an easy A before
arriving on the first day. But by the end of the semester, they knew you can
pack a lot of academic rigor into a class about one cable drama series. Because
a Mad Men class, like so many other single-show-centric classes popping up
across higher ed, offers a potential model for a mode of television criticism that
is at once engaged, historicized, and appreciative ... while also thoroughly
invested not only in analysis, but critique. Proof, in other words, that fandom
can be smart and self-interrogatingand that media consumption can be as
academic and intelligent, albeit in different ways, as an econ class.

People are always amazed that you can teach an entire course on a television
show. Dont you get bored? they ask me, or Dont you run out of things to
talk about? But professors teach entire courses on Paradise Lost and The
Canterbury Tales, on the work of a single director (The Films of Clint

Eastwood and The Films of Hitchcock), author (Roth, Joyce, Nabokov), or

philosopher. Whether or not Mad Men equals these texts in artistic merit is a
bloody battle for elsewhere, but the hand-wringing over classes devoted to
contemporary pop culture is misplaced: Not only is there enough Mad Men
proper to fill an entire course (more than 78 hours of it and counting), but a
wealth of cultural history spirals forth from every episode, ripe for discussion.

So heres how we did it.

Each student signed up for a Netflix account; before each class, theyd watch
between two to five episodes assigned by me. Theyd also read an article or
book excerptthe vast majority of which were written at or around the time in
which the series is set. For an understanding of the divide between Dons
suburban and urban lifeone of the many roots of his unhappinesswe read
Revolutionary Road, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, and Meditations in an
Emergency. For a notion of Peggy and Joans life in the city, The Best of
Everything and, later, Sex and the Single Girl. To make sense of Kinsey and
Midge, Norman Mailers The White Negro; for Bettys ennui, The Feminine
Mystique; for Sterling Coopers milieu, David Ogilvys Confessions of an
Advertising Man.

Those assignments shouldnt be all that surprising; some, such as Meditations

in an Emergency, even served as focal points within the various episodes. Yet
reading these works gave students a larger sense of what was percolating
outside the narrative bounds of the show: Even if Peggy never read Sex and the
Single Girl, she was firmly positioned within a culture that increasingly
reproduced the attitudes toward sex and consumption articulated by Helen
Gurley Brown. Put differently, these texts made culture, and culture made our
characters.

All but two of my students entered as nonfans: In my experience, college

students like to watch things that help them wind down after a night of
studying (The Mindy Project, Archer, and Scandal are current favorites) not
ponderous 42-minute quasi-existential contemplations on American identity. In
the beginning, many of them admitted to difficulty in embracing the show. It
didnt binge as easily as something like House of Cards; it felt, in one students
words, very long. And so it isat least at first. Being in a class, however,
forced students to power through the natural inclination to go for something

snappier and sexier. After all, so many of the best things in lifecoffee, beer,
mushroomstaste weird until, one day, they taste amazing.

Oftentimes, deep in love with a show, we just dont read the things that
threaten to puncture our enjoyment. But my students had to.

Which is pretty much what happened about a month in. Suddenly I had
students emailing, tweeting, and knocking down my office door to talk about
plot points as they happened. They devoured the 50s and 60s primary texts
not necessarily because a professor told them they were good, but because
they unlocked the characters, their milieu, and their motivations, which only
further affixed them to Mad Men proper.

Theres a danger in any class devoted to a single author or text turning into an
endless fan cluba danger that, a month in, I felt acutely. If a show were
worthy of such sustained attention, it would follow that it would also merit our
unadulterated love, which was precisely what I was beginning to sense from
the majority of the class. But Mad Mens not interesting because of its quality;
rather, its quality because of the ways it invites us to think of narrative,
identity, race, gender, class, memoryand how all those things contributed to
what became 1960s America.

To consider those questions, visiting those 50s and 60s texts wasnt enough.
Thus, in addition to reading more recent texts that contextualized various
cultural trends of the 60s (Thomas Franks The Conquest of Cool, for example,
or Lizabeth Cohens A Consumers Republic) we also questioned the way Mad
Men itself does history. How does the show addressand ignorerace? How
does it illuminate the Jewish experience, give short shrift to the AfricanAmerican one, and almost completely elide the existence of other races? And
what does the makeup of the writers roomand that of showrunner Matthew
Weinerhave to do with the answers to those questions?

We didnt necessarily arrive at answers so much as develop strategiesand

identify traps to avoid. Because when you love a period piece, its easy to
excuse its faults in the name of historical or narrative accuracy. The blatant
racism, misogyny, classismthats the point. Theres some merit to this
argument (I loved Willa Paskins recent application of it to True Detective) so

long as were constantly talking about the absencesof characters of color, of

fleshed-out female charactersinstead of simply forgetting them.

Which is why we read Mad Mens Postracial Figuration of a Racial Past, a

superb essay by historian Kent Ono that not only expands the critique of Mad
Mens racial politics to include its treatment of Asian-Americans but effectively
undercuts the claim that Mad Mens depiction of racism is, in truth, an antiracist act. Characters of coloreven relatively well-developed ones like Carla or
Hollisbecome foils to elucidate the actions of white (main) characters. Its not
just the setting that segregates and devalues them but the narrative itself.

Onos stunning argument deflated many of my students who, by the end of

Season 2, had fallen hard for the Mad Men universe. Onos argument wasnt
entirely novelpeople have been critiquing Mad Mens racial politics all over
the Internet for yearsbut, at least in the context of the classroom, it was
unignorable. Oftentimes, deep in love with a show, we just dont read the
things that threaten to puncture our enjoyment. But this essay was assigned,
and necessary for a writing project, and the focus of an 80-minute class
discussion: Even if a student disagrees, she still had to hear the arguments
most compelling points hashed out, elaborated, made visible and vivid. The
classroom forced the students, as viewers, to engage with counterarguments in
depth, at length, and with thoughtfulnessthe very inverse of much of what
the Internet asks of them on a daily basis.

For 24 students, the Mad Men class modeled an engaged, historicized, selfreflexive approach to the media we love. Their final exam was to answer one of
two deceptively simple questions: Who is Don Draper? or Who is Peggy
Olson? Instead of articulating what they loved or hated about the show, they
were forced to consider the how and the who, the cultural and narrative and
aesthetic forces that produced characters whose place in television history is
already secure.

Im certainly not the first person to teach a class this wayThe Wire, The
Simpsons, Law & Order, The Sopranos, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and dozens of
other television texts have been taught as standalone classes from Oberlin to
MIT to SUNY Oswego. No two classes are the sameeach is inflected with its
home discipline (media studies, history, politics, sociology) but in various

ways, they all offer a simple recalibration in the way we think about our
television: not whether or not we like something, but why.

And even if youre not in college, you can still experience this intense, deep
engagement with a show. My syllabus is online, but you dont even need a
reading listalthough I guarantee it will complicate and enrich your experience
of a show. You just need to start thinking differently, whether thats while
watching Mad Men or Game of Thrones or Scandal. Re-embrace your inner
student and remember why, ideally, we take classes in the first place: not to
affirm what we already believe, but to challenge and change us.