Season 5: Episode 1 - "A Little Kiss Part One"
What to do about Zou Bisou
Season 5: Episode 1
“A Little Kiss Part One”
Written by: Matthew Weiner
Directed by: Jennifer Getzinger
Setting: May - June 1966
Mad Men wasn’t just a great TV show, it was a cultural moment.
President Obama was among its biggest fans.
If Don Draper wore a new pair of sunglasses, they sold out the next day.
The characters became as much a part of the American experience as Huck Finn or Jay Gatsby. We express and understand ourselves through them.
This cultural avalanche all led to one moment. The phenomenon captured everyone who witnessed it.
Yes, I’m talking about a lil Québécois birthday dance known to all as… Zou Bisou.
Jumping ahead, in “A Little Kiss Part 2” Megan Draper’s sultry dance is the only thing any character can talk about. In real life, it was the same. If you were a fan of Mad Men going into the office on March 26th, 2012, your water cooler talk was “Did you guys catch last night’s episode?”
If the answer was yes, you or another coworker might have begun dancing or singing in nonsense French. This is exactly what the employees of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce do.
Great art creates a connection to our own human experience. We all feel for Don, understand Megan, and want to kill Harry Crane with a hammer.
Each season of Mad Men ends with the illusion of hope. Maybe after these failures, Don will finally have learned his lesson:
Season One Finale: Don returns to an empty home and wishes he was with his family.
Season Two Finale: Don comforts newly pregnant Betty and intends to become a better man.
Season Three Finale: Don accepts his divorce and starts life over with a new agency
Season Four Finale: Don gets engaged and his struggling agency looks like it will survive.
The first episode of the following seasons shatters those illusions:
Season Two Opening: Don is so lost he cannot perform his job or even be intimate with his wife.
Season Three Opening: Don is back to his old lying ways, feeling no concern over how his actions will harm the child he and Betty are bringing into the world.
Season Four Opening: The excitement of starting a new agency has stalled and Don’s personal and professional life teeter on the edge of disaster each day.
Season Five Opening: Newly married Megan and Don realize what everyone else knew at the end of Season Four: “This will not last.”
This is a painful admittance not just for the characters but for the viewers. We are five seasons and six years into this story. Is there still hope for characters who have failed us enough that we know them more for their failures than their successes?
The doomed feeling of this season was only heightened by its production which became delayed by contract negotiations between AMC and series creator Matthew Weiner. Weiner threatened to quit when the network demanded fewer characters and more product placement. He had a story to tell and Mad Men no doubt would have continued at a likely diminished quality but I don’t think he would have felt that severe of an impulse before Season 4.
Season 4 was television’s peak the team behind Mad Men knew what they had accomplished. How do you follow up the greatest TV season of all time?
By embracing that it cannot be outdone.
Season 5 is an acceptance that the fun is over. Don’s birthday party is a hilarious romp that becomes bleak when the music ends.
Mad Men seasons begin by sucking hope out of the room but this one says “You’re not getting that back.”
You know this season will not end well because the 1960s won’t end well. The show’s opening scene is not of Don, Peggy, or any of our favorite characters in the new year. It is about a real racist retaliation against equal-opportunity protestors.
We spent so much time hoping that Don Draper would improve himself that we lost sight of what matters.
The story of Don’s surprise birthday party can be summed up by the true main character of the episode: Megan. These two images tell the story of their marriage.
You rarely have to hand it to Don Draper, but he was not in the wrong. Don does not even celebrate his real birthday (which in S3 he says is in April but in this episode it is in December so I guess we’ll never know), all he wanted was to eat a good meal and spend the night with his wife.
She invited other people into their marriage not because she wanted to prove how much she loved him but to show others how in love they were.
“A Little Kiss” shatters any illusion that these two know each other.
Don privately poisoned his marriage to Betty and Megan publically showed that her marriage to Don could only ever be a song and dance. He was going to ruin things eventually because… well, he’s Don Draper ladies and gentlemen. Megan denies him his illusion by creating her own.
Zou Bisou is both delightful and horrifying. A fun tune that makes you want to dance while the eyes of every character betray the mood.
Everyone knows that Megan and Don walk a path of doom. Even worse, no one cares.
A good view from this point on is that every episode of Mad Men will comment on Vietnam or at least that era of the 1960s.
There are harsh truths that need to be addressed otherwise you end up in a disaster and say “How did we get here? Why didn’t we stop this?”
Season 4 was a redemption for everyone. At their lowest point, we watch them rise to a new day.
Now, they’re going to fall again. Season 5 opens as an intervention with the viewer, whatever good you imagined waiting in this season is not coming.
Do not look to Don Draper with hope. Look to yourself.
Ask your partner what they want to do on their birthday.
Treat a coworker as important as you treat any client.
Raise a child that is an answer to the future and not the past.
Great art not only connects but inspires us. We’re inspired to do more than dance to a catchy tune here.
Mad Men inspires us to be better than what we see. Our best hopes are not found at the bottom of a bottle.
Tomorrow isn’t about Don Draper turning a year older. Tomorrow is about the things that matter. That is why he isn’t in the opening scene.
A lasting hope for tomorrow is. In a hopeless time, there is hope if you look for it
.