Mad Men Rewatch

I'm doing a rewatch myself. For about the fourth time. I haven't watched it in a few years and it remains one of my favorite series ever.

The ending is that Don Draper came up for the idea for the coke commercial when he smiled at the very last frame. Through all his adversity, failure, success and current despair- he is a creative genius. He is able to use his life and anthropomorphize a product of his choosing for commercial purposes. He's the consummate Ad Man.


The whole series has been running on a 24 hour loop on Stories by AMC on Amazon Prime. Dangerously easy to fall into the rabbit hole.

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Loved the show when it aired so decided to do a rewatch. I didn’t really get the very last scene of the shows finale with the “I’d like too buy the world a coke. “ commercial.

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It’s the most famous commercial of that era. Maybe ever. The insinuation is Don was behind it.

That’s what my thoughts were too. I’m watching it on amc stories on my Samsung tv plus.

If you want to go deep down the rabbit hole of Mad Men there's a great blog where they would breakdown the wardrobe for each episode. There was so much story telling in the clothes it's impressive.

LINK

From their recap of the finale.

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First, let’s note – as so many did – that Don is back in the white dress shirt he wore when he walked out of McCann and his old life. That more than anything would indicate that his mindset is slowly traveling back to his old life, just as the smile at the end indicates a feeling of becoming inspired.

But did Don create the Coke ad formally known as “Hilltop?” After all, there were plenty of costuming calls to Coca-Cola imagery throughout the episode, in scenes that Don had nothing to do with. Some people have indicated a theory that Peggy wrote the ad, but first, there’s no way she’d be working on an account that large when she’s fighting to keep a small account like Chevalier. Second, there’s nothing in the filming or the story to indicate such a thing. She’s typing at the end, sure, but she spent half the series typing.

So was the universe calling out for this ad to be made, by constantly dressing everyone in red? Or is it more likely that Don, like all creative people, picks up bits and pieces of life, redresses them, and comes up with something inspiringly beautiful, but decidedly different:

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Don was on the verge of a suicidal meltdown before achieving inner peace for the first time in his life and his immediate reaction to that inner peace is to figure out a way to sell corporate sugar water to the masses. T

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Yep. Essentially the actual end of the 60s. All that enlightenment converted by boomers into consumerism. It was a genius ending.