Mad Men at 10: Why Peggy Olson was the best character on the show Ten years on from Mad Men’s TV debut, it’s worth reflecting on the seven-season evolution of Peggy Olson From the silhouetted, […]

Ten years on from Mad Men’s TV debut, it’s worth reflecting on the seven-season evolution of Peggy Olson

From the silhouetted, falling man-in-a-suit of the title credits to the majority of the promotional imagery, to the title itself, Mad Men’s protagonist was clearly Don Draper.

And yet Don Draper breaks one of the basic rules of screen protagonists. He doesn’t change – at least, not in any meaningful way. After seven seasons, 18 affairs, two divorces, countless voyages of self-discovery and seemingly hundreds of afternoon naps he is still as lost, rudderless and as haunted by his hidden past as he ever was.

Don conforms to the tragic notion of character; no matter what happens, he fails to learn his lessons, fails to change and so ultimately seals his own fate.

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The real protagonist of Mad Men then, even if she might not get the same screen-time, is Peggy Olson, played by the brilliant Elisabeth Moss.

A character who is practically defined by change, by learning to adapt to both the shifting sands of 1960s gender politics and the outright injustices of the same era’s office politics, Peggy is the one character in the show that we root for from beginning to end.

If Don was the anti-hero, Peggy was the hero

It’s perhaps the slightly cliched simplicity of Peggy’s progression – a triumph-against-adversity / American Dream-personified storyline – that has resulted in Don instead being the focus of so many thinkpieces and conjecture. He is, after all, defined by complexity and inscrutability, a blank canvas for writers and commentators to imprint their interpretations upon.

But Peggy Olson was no mere foil to her (initial) boss, and to bring her character to the point in the final season where she is supervising Don is a masterful conclusion to her story arc.

It’s all the more satisfying when we remember how we first met her in season one. The shy Catholic girl from Brooklyn, hopelessly out of her depth in a Madison Avenue ad agency where the secretaries were even more conniving and manipulative than the ad execs who openly lusted over them.

In fact, the first episode, ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’, is almost like a crash course for Peggy. After joining the Sterling Cooper secretarial pool and being assigned to Don, she tries to seduce him. He has just sprung to her defence against Pete’s sexist comments, and from what she witnesses around her, she assumes that seducing your boss is the done thing.

But she’s read the situation wrong. “I’m your boss, not your boyfriend,” Don says matter-of-factly, pulling her hand away.

As an aside, it’s a testament to the overarching vision of Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner that the image of hand-on-hand is echoed when Don places his on Peggy’s after they pull an all-nighter in the office in season four.

Moving on from her initial naivety, Peggy gets her first chance to break free of secretarial work with the Belle Jolie lipstick campaign.

When the cabal of male execs runs out of inspiration, they get Joan to organise a brainstorming session among the secretaries.

“That sounds intimidating, is it like a test?” one of the women frets. “There are no wrong answers, you just be your pretty little selves,” Joan responds. “Grab a lipstick, grab a mirror, and sit down.”

‘A basket of kisses’

While the rest of the women excitedly try on the samples without a thought for the purpose of the task, Peggy sits back and watches them.

When it’s over, with the likes of Roger Sterling and Ken Cosgrove’s bawdy humour mill run dry on the other side of the one-way mirror, Peggy hands the wastebasket full of discarded tissues covered in lipstick back to senior copywriter Freddy Rumsden, casually referring to it as a “basket of kisses”.

You can almost see a light bulb flash in his mind, and he goes on to suggest Peggy as a possible copywriter. (It’s also interesting to see just how hostile Joan is towards any notions Peggy has of advancing beyond her station at this point in the series, before they became office allies).

As well as professional liberation, the show also charts the sexual liberation of women in the Sixties, and again, Peggy is progress personified.

‘It will shock you how much it never happened’

From the awkward advance towards Don of the pilot episode, Peggy sleeps with Pete Campbell at his Bachelor’s Party, and from our 21st century vantage point it’s startling to see how little knowledge she has of her own pregnancy, and how it’s treated as such a hush-hush secret for an unmarried woman.

But what’s even more startling is that, instead of calling quits on her fledgling career, when Peggy tells Pete in season two about their baby, she reveals she’s “given it away”.

Then, in a flashback, we see Don by a groggy Peggy’s bedside in hospital.

“It will shock you how much it never happened,” he tells her. The message is clear: move on, move forward, put the past behind you. Just as he has tried (and failed) to do.

Peggy does move on, shedding the girlish image that prompted Pete to ask “are you Amish or something?” in season one to become a Manhattan-dwelling, headstrong professional by season four.

Soon she’s dabbling with drugs in the office (prompting the classic line “I’m Peggy Olson and I want to smoke some marijuana”) and even firing a male colleague when he draws a lewd cartoon of Joan.

It’s immensely satisfying to watch Joey’s face drop when he realises Peggy is being serious. Cue a petulant, infantile tantrum as he tips his files on to the floor and warns the fellas that the “fun’s over” on the way out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b28GqQfm49U

‘Let’s get liberated’

Peggy’s will-they-won’t-they relationship with Stan Rizzo was also one of Mad Men’s most memorable, if predictable, storylines.

It begins in glorious fashion in season four when the new art director claims that she’s “ashamed of her body” as they have a playful tiff. Peggy calls his bluff, stripping off her clothes and staring back at him, hands on hips in her underwear.

“You’re a fruitcake, you know that?” Stan says.

“And you’re chicken shit,” she retorts. “I can work like this. Let’s get liberated.”

Reflecting on that scene, Moss said: “It makes me smile and it makes me nostalgic because Peggy and Stan’s relationship developed into something so sweet and meaningful. He’s sort of her work husband.”

While the neat resolution of the Peggy and Stan story in the final episode of Mad Men was an undeniable fan-pleaser, there was another sequence in season seven that became her character’s defining moment – and the stuff of meme gold.

Having reached a point in her career where she’s switched firms, come to realise her talent (and her financial worth), and even bossed Don around, Peggy’s transition from shy new girl to headstrong creative is complete.

In an episode that dwelt on the physical move from SC&P to McCann-Erikson, Peggy and Roger Sterling form an unlikely drinking partnership in the empty old office. He’s collecting scraps from the building, including the late Bert Cooper’s 19th Century Japanese print of ‘The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife’ (a pornographic painting of an octopus pleasuring a woman) and revelling in tipsy nostalgia.

They drink more, bond more, and by the evening she’s roller-skating around the empty office while he plays an organ.

The next day Peggy arrives at her new office in a short scene that’s become iconic. Dark sunglasses, cigarette dangling from her mouth, clutching said pornographic painting for all to see. The fact that it’s relayed in slo-mo only emphasises her triumphalism.

Has she become Don Draper? No, she’s just become the fully realised Peggy Olson.

Perhaps it’s wishful thinking to hope that one day we’ll get a 1970s-set, Peggy-focused Mad Men spin-off. For now we’ll just have to make do with watching the box-set. Again.