Person To Person

I've referenced this several times this year, but I rewatched Mad Men over the last six months. It's my favorite television show of all time. I like character development more than plot development, and Matthew Weiner really knows how to develop characters and then play them off each other.

I just completed the final episode just now. I slowed down my pace over the last six weeks because I knew I only had a few episodes left and then I'd need to wait at least four years before starting again (so I'd forget enough to enjoy the surprises again). Today, for whatever reason – maybe the reason is simply "I needed it after the Purdue loss" – I watched the series finale.

The title of this post is the title of the finale: "Person To Person." It's a reference to an old version of collect calls where... I can feel the confusion of everyone under the age of 35 reading the words "collect call" so I'll back up and explain it all.

All phones used to be wired (you knew that). You had a home phone and you had a work phone and people reached you at one of those two places. If you dialed "0" you could get the operator and the operator could do stuff for you (like place a "collect call" which is just a fancy way of saying that the operator would ask the person you were trying to call if they'd accept the charges for the call and if they said yes, you'd get to talk to them).

So when you wrecked your sister's car and there weren't cell phones and you found a pay phone and you needed to call your parents to tell them that you just totaled your sister's new car by driving over to St. Louis when you weren't supposed to drive to St. Louis and you needed a ride home in the middle of the night but you didn't have any coins for the pay phone... you called collect and hoped that your mom A) woke up and B) accepted the charges. Just a random example I plucked out of the air.

A person-to-person call (this goes back to when I was really young) was a kind of collect call where you were trying to reach a specific person. It wasn't a "whoever picks up the phone can accept the charges". The operator would say "this is a person to person call for Jim Smith" and only Jim Smith could accept the call, not just any random fool who answered the phone. If they weren't there, you weren't charged.

(It was here where a few younger readers just had a "wait, you were charged PER CALL?" moment. Just... go ask you aunt to tell you a story about how they lived in Homewood but their daughter had a boyfriend in Hammond and she called him long distance every night and then ask her how Uncle Ken responded when he got a $588 phone bill one month.)

The finale of Mad Men is titled "Person To Person" for two reasons (there will be no spoilers here). One, there are several person-to-person calls in the episode. And two, the stories needed to be wrapped up by removing the office environment and focusing on one-on-one conversations between characters. To fully wrap up the series, Matthew Weiner needed to have most of the characters resolve things one-on-one.

Which is why I'm going to put up the paywall right now. The rest of this article, which will attempt to discuss the rest of the season after this terrible loss to Purdue, needs to be done person-to-person.