He is the show, folks. He’s been superb for three seasons, but it was this last one – when the lies caught up with Don Draper – where Hamm separated himself from the pack.
Tim Goodman, San Francisco Chronicle
I can’t remember why I decided to join the first ranks of Mad Men viewers. I think it had to do with the Sopranos pedigree – that dog always could hunt – but at the time, I was sure one show wouldn’t make much of a difference in my life. It’s only TV.
Three years on, this literate corner of “only TV” has become an indelible link to what mattered in my parents’ generation and what matters in mine. It’s built my community here. And it really is, so often, about just one guy.
I didn’t know who any of these actors were before the show began. Still, never having seen him in anything before, Jon Hamm is the one who I feel dropped from the sky, put on the suit, and stepped into the character of Don Draper. There was no adjustment period. He didn’t need to grow into the role. From Scene 1, Episode 1, Season 1, Jon Hamm is Don Draper.
We have had to trust him to carry the map. We haven’t always known where things are going, and sure as hell Don doesn’t; but there are times when it seems Jon does. In the first scenes of Season 2, stirring halfhearted advice on Mohawk Air into Don’s enervated team, it’s as if Jon can imagine the lock-it-or-not moment at the door, that last night at Sterling Cooper.
Even earlier, lying at the bottom of the stairs at the start of Babylon, Jon is staring down people from Dick Whitman’s past when his eyes meet those of Bowlcut Dick, Don’s younger self. Here’s the man who will sit on those same stairs in the final episode of that year. Here’s the man who will bring Don and Dick together, and bring the pain, two years later. I did not know then why that scene of the man and the boy was important, but I trusted the man with the really good face to show me. I trust Jon Hamm more now, because he has.
I doubt that it has been easy for him. Being Don Draper is a lot of hard work in the dark. In interviews, Jon comes off as happy, but he plays a sinking soul: a man who loves his children but isn’t with them much; a guy who literally drinks and drives, who picks up strangers on the road at night. Jon is color but Don’s a charcoal sketch. Jon knocks it out of the park on SNL, and we’ve seen Don laugh, what? Once?
Saying this character is fractured doesn’t come close. It’s more true to say that Jon makes the Don kaleidoscope interesting in a way that actors who do the window thing can’t.
If Jon Hamm doesn’t win the Golden Globe this weekend, there is something wrong with the process. His performance sets him apart from every other nominated actor. Over three seasons, Jon’s work has displayed subtlety and maturity, and carried a show with the same qualities. He makes the small but necessary moves that make us forget we’re watching TV, and worry instead about the man alone on the train, the man at the kitchen table with the shoebox and the angry wife. These things are not about being a star, they are about telling a story. Jon Hamm knows how to take us there.
Good luck on Sunday, Jon. Thank you for three years of beautiful work, for going wherever you have to go to find the dark places. Thank you for always leaving the light on for us.
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