Ariane Hudelet’s videographic work effectively demonstrates the drillable complexity of the TV series Mad Men (AMC, 2007-2015). Hudelet focuses on the end of a single episode – “Babylon” (1.6) – to unfold her larger argument about the show’s intermediality, specifically the metaphorical use of historical and musical references, and about Mad Men’s poetic, meditative style which underscores its preference for difficult characters and relationships that resist the “graygrey flannel suit” or “counterculture” stereotypes inscribed in the cultural memory of the 1960s.  Taking Don Draper’s (Jon Hamm) reaction to a performance of the song “Babylon” at a Greenwich Village coffeehouse that is intercut with a montage showing the episode’s other central characters as a cue, Hudelet follows the musical reference and unpacks its manifold meanings. In doing so, she also showcases the affordances that the video essay offers for a multimodal academic engagement with the Mad Men’s rich intermedial connections.
This video essay belongs to the growing body of videographic work on television published in [in]Transition. As Jason Mittell has recently pointed out in his review of Erlend Lavik’s video essay “Setting the Scene: The Opening 164 Seconds of The Wire” https://mediacommons.org/intransition/setting-scene-opening-164-seconds-wire, the days when television was notably underrepresented in the journal are finally over (see also Mittell’s earlier assessment in “Videographic Telephilia” http://mediacommons.org/intransition/2017/videographic-telephilia). The latest publications on narratively complex series range from Lavik’s formal and thematic analysis of the opening scene of The Wire (HBO, 2002-2008) to Elizabeth Alsop’s experimental exploration of “televisual excess” in The Knick (Cinemax, 2014–2015), Hannibal (NBC, 2013–2015), The Leftovers (HBO, 2014–2017), and Twin Peaks: The Return (Showtime, 2017) http://mediacommons.org/intransition/television-will-not-be-summarized. In this video essay, Hudelet approaches Mad Men as a “drillable text” (to use Mittell’s description of programs that invite viewers “to dig deeper, probing beneath the surface to understand the complexity of a story and its telling”) and offers yet another example of how videographic work can engage with contemporary television.
The video essay relies on repetition as a method of discovery replaying the same sequence again and again. With each repetition, viewers return to the coffeehouse performance of “Babylon,” to learn more about the musical reference – from its origin as a biblical psalm mourning the loss of Jerusalem and the exile of the Jewish people origins to Don McLean’s interpretation to Rastafari adaptations into reggae songs to Boney M.’s disco hit “Rivers of Babylon”. Through this intermediality, the video essay frames the characters and their relationships in terms of isolation, loneliness, and longing. This circular structure of the video essay (or “carousel” to pick up on the metaphor that Hudelet borrows from Sean O’Sullivan’s excellent analysis of Mad Men’s serial condition), the layering of various sounds, and the use of superimpositions as well as multiscreen compositions allow Hudelet to draw multiple connections and highlight the show’s complexity in ways that also echo the lyrical quality of Mad Men.   

Works Cited
Mittell, Jason. “Forensic Fandom and the Drillable Text.” In Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture, edited by Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. New York: New York University Press, 2013. <https://spreadablemedia.org/essays/mittell/>. 
O’Sullivan, Sean. “Space Ships and Time Machines: Mad Men and the Serial Condition”, in Gary R. Edgerton, ed. Mad Men. London, NY: IB Tauris, 2011. 115-130.