As the sixth season of "Mad Men" treads further into strange and dark territory, its viewers seem to be doing the same. The past few weeks have pushed astute viewers closer and closer to the brink of sanity, resulting in some amazing "conspiracy theories" ranging from Megan being Sharon Tated to Ken Cosgrove's tap dance as an allegory for Vietnam to Bob Benson being an inter-agency spy, government spy, or worse. We've since seen numerous articles that compile these theories for our reading pleasure, but always with some ironic distance, that those who came up with these theories wear tin foil hats made from the wrappers of dehydrated meals that they've stored for the impending zombie apocalypse. We should keep in mind that we live in a post
Room 237 world, and this type of viewing is becoming increasingly popular because the materials needed to formulate off the wall theories are readily available to everyone who is watching. The difference between the theories presented in
Room 237 and the theories popping up around the web about "Mad Men" is that the "Mad Men" theories have come about in the course of a couple weeks. They weren't the result of obsessive viewing and reviewing over years; no one is burning out their VCR to capture every single detail of last week's episode. Wikipedia and recap message boards have allowed relatively casual fans to dive into a mode of viewership previously reserved for the most obsessive of fans. This proves especially rewarding for a show like "Mad Men", whose creator is himself obsessive about details and symbols. With the assurance that nothing appears or happens by accident, an engaged viewer can spend the rest of his Sunday night in a Wikipedia-Youtube-"Mad Men" wormhole and return with something wild, probably unlikely to actually play out, and, most importantly, interesting. With the return of "Arrested Development" and before that the success of "House of Cards", it seems more and more likely that television is trending towards accommodating binge watchers who grew up with Netflix and Hulu. The type of viewership that we've seen during this season of "Mad Men" may be the most cogent argument against taking original programming in that direction (of course last week's "Game of Thrones" also makes such a case, but that's a different discussion altogether). With a week off between episodes, audiences have a chance to view themselves into some sort of productive madness and share the fruits of their labor with the world, which in turn makes the coming of the next week's episode all the more satisfying, even if none of these theories come to fruition. So really we shouldn't be judging these theories by their end results, but how creative they are, and how they can enrich our viewing experience. We should really learn to love the peculiar intersection of fandom and conspiracy theory, it just might save cable television (but probably not).