Reflecting on Jon Hamm’s television career feels like delving into America’s contemporary history. Somehow, the actor who became famous playing Don Draper in television’s masterpiece Mad Men has, over the years, played a range of characters who embody much of American mythology: the advent of capitalism, consumerism, and advertising in Mad Men; the growing power of the media in American Hostage; the shallowness of wealth and finance in Your Friends & Neighbors; and the myth of the Frontier and its collateral consequences—oil extraction, the Western, and wild capitalism—in both Fargo and Landman. Looking through Jon Hamm’s filmography is a deep dive into America’s representations on screen, across every aspect of society and through radically opposed ideologies.
That makes Jon Hamm a shifting figure, something unsettled, as comforting as it is worrying, as if Don Draper were carrying his doubts and traumas with him across other TV shows. What if Don Draper decided to put his salesman talents to work in the oil business? That could be Monty Miller in Landman. In hedge funds and finance? That could be Andrew Cooper in Your Friends & Neighbors. There really is something of Draper’s seminal role in everything Jon Hamm has happened to play since. Even in Roy Tillman, the ruthless sheriff from Season 5 of Fargo, who believes he is the law and is therefore above the law: he is judge, jury, and, too often, executioner. Are we really so far away from the Don Draper who often considered women—and other human beings—as commodities?
In Landman, his character digs for oil. It seems like Jon Hamm digs for the contradictions of American masculinity, torn between truth and loyalty (American Hostage, Mad Men), greed and power (Landman, Fargo… Mad Men). That in-between space contains all the cracks in Don Draper’s life, cracks that echo the realization, in Your Friends & Neighbors, that everything the character had taken for granted was ultimately shallow. Those cracks, and the way Jon Hamm reveals them on screen, make most of these series some of the most riveting television of recent years.
- American Hostage Season 1, as of September 21, only on Sky Show
- Your Friends & Neighbours Season 1 & 2, available on Apple TV, included in your Sky Show Premium subscription
- Mad Men Season 1 to 7, available on Sky Show
