The Muse Behind Mad Men

In a Paris Review interview we recently flagged, Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner cites the influence of John Cheever, saying that the writer “is in every aspect” of the show. Elisabeth Donnelly elaborates:

Cheever is the closest thing that Mad Men has to a spirit animal. In his life and in his work, Cheever was a faker, a man trying very hard to fit into a box, and completely aware of it. His spirit infuses the edges of Don Draper’s American story. References abound, of course: Don and Betty lived on Bullet Park Lane — Bullet Park was the title of one of Cheever’s later novels — in Ossining, New York, the suburb where Cheever lived for much of his life. I think Cheever would be delighted to see where Matt Weiner is taking Don Draper, and the flights of profound beauty and weirdness that color Mad Men.

Rebecca Makkai also explores similarities between the show and Cheever’s fiction:

Cheever’s stories often end not with action but in a tangential and meditative fugue; Weiner’s episodes end with music, arguably the filmic equivalent. The perfect discord of Betty eating ice cream to the strains of “Sixteen Going On Seventeen” ended a dark Season 5 episode better than any cliffhanger, any plot development, could have. As with a Cheever story, we haven’t wrapped things up neatly – to do so would be an insult to the complexity of what has come before – but we’re given a tonal riff on the story, plus time to absorb it all. We’ve already seen the splash of the rock in the pond, and now we’re watching the ripples. At the end of Cheever’s “A Country Husband,” the protagonist stands in his garden after a series of social and marital humiliations, and watches a neighbor dog prance “through the tomato vines, holding in his generous mouth the remains of an evening slipper.” A lesser writer might have stopped there, but Cheever takes off for outer space: “Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.” If, next spring, “Mad Men” ends on a note half that strange and sublime, I’ll be satisfied.