Several of my most interesting friends on Twitter are fictional characters from the early ‘60s. It started innocently enough when demure, intense Peggy Olson started following me and I reciprocated. Now Don Draper, his wife Betty and daughter Sally, Ken Cosgrove, and Bertram Cooper, to name just a few — all denizens of the award-winning AMC series “Mad Men.” – provide me glimpses of their quotidian lives between Sunday night episodes of the show.
Along with “30 Rock” and “Central Texas Gardener,” “Mad Men” is one of only three TV programs I actually look forward to. It’s probably an acquired taste – highly stylized period mise-en-scene, with lots of smoking, quirky dialog and long silences. Sort of like “Far from Heaven” if David Mamet had written the screenplay.
So after these characters began introducing themselves to me on Twitter, I became increasingly intrigued about the genesis of this unlikely, anachronistic online community. Was it organic fan fiction or a borderline brilliant marketing tactic – a pioneering publicity campaign for a program about publicity pioneers.
So when I finally got around to looking into it this morning, I was gratified to see that Brian Stelter at the New York Times had already done some of the leg work for me. According to Stelter, the origins of these retro personae are murky, with AMC initially moving to take them down but now professing delight with the unofficial avatars – some of whom seemingly have knowledge of or connections to an AMC online marketing agency.
On AMC’s own “Mad Men” blog, Camille1969 seems to accept the Twitter cast of characters as marketing creations, and suggests that the voice behind Donald Draper needs to be recast for the sake of the promotion, noting:
“The challenge is that Don keeps his own counsel, can be abrupt, and is a man of few words. However, since the POINT of twitter is MARKETING and to get people to watch the show, there needs to be a way to keep him in character while letting people enjoy the sublime experience of talking with a main character…
“I cannot emphasize enough that you are doing a grave disservice to the show and Jon Hamm by having the Don Draper character on twitter coming off as an ass****. I hope someone reads this and replaces twitter Don with someone who can write engaging ironic and clever copy while staying in character.”
Regardless of who’s operating behind the scenes, like me, MadShrubbery is hooked:
“I can’t really comment on Don, since I’ve never participated with him and I’m not really interested in his character, but I really enjoy some of the others like Sal, Ken and Paul. It’s always a little thrill when, out of those thousands, they respond to you.”
October 6th, 2008 at 4:22 pm
The person behind the Roger Sterling twitter doppelganger does a particularly fine job, and is a fun one to follow. Then again, that’s my favorite character on the show as well, so YMMV.