Did the Palladinos Predict Don Draper?
Jon Hamm’s guest spot on Gilmore Girls was dramatic irony at its finest
There are a lot of jokes in television shows that didn’t age well. Monica from Friends in a fat suit, all the trans jokes in Ugly Betty and Scrubs. There are also jokes that are evergreen, that have withstood the test of time. Britta’s assertion that she “can excuse racism” but will “draw the line at animal cruelty” in Community will never not be relevant. Some jokes have even gotten better with age like a fancy cheese. The Simpsons did, after all, predict like 20 real world events, and I think about how Paris Hilton was president in that alternate universe episode of The Suite Life of Zack and Cody at least once a month.
But the rarest joke, at least in its relationship to time, might be the one that wasn’t a joke at all until rewatched years later. Future circumstances the writers couldn’t have predicted result in a magical kind of dramatic irony, turning the mundane into an inside joke for the viewers of the future. I can’t think of a better example of this than when Jon Hamm guest starred on Gilmore Girls.
Hamm made his appearance in season three, which aired in the fall of 2002 until the spring of 2003. He wouldn’t go on to catch his big break as the studly but troubled star of Mad Men for another four years. At the time, his only credits were small roles in indie films and a recurring role on the long forgotten NBC medical drama Providence. Keep this in mind as I tell you how his character arc on Gilmore Girls transpired.
Lorelai (the main Gilmore girl for those of you who know nothing about this show and yet miraculously are still subscribed to this newsletter) must attend one of her mother Emily’s swanky auctions where she happens to meet a tall, handsome Peyton Sanders (Hamm). They haggle over the last glass of wine and she leaves the encounter thoroughly charmed because, duh. Hamm might not be the Don Draper yet, but he still looks like that.
Just a few episodes earlier, Lorelai’s heart had been stomped on by Christopher, the father of her daughter Rory. She had fallen back in love with him, and for the first time could envision a future of the three of them as a family fully intact, but his pregnant girlfriend Sherry (played wonderfully prickly by Twin Peaks’ Mädchen Amick) sunk that dream. So this flirty encounter with Hamm was a welcome excitement after a few weeks (or months? No one knows how time works in Stars Hollow) of mourning. Lorelai seizes the opportunity and does the unthinkable — she asks her mother, whom her strained relationship with is the very crux of the show, for his number. Emily obliges, ecstatic to see her daughter finally engage with a man she deems worthy (read: rich). Lorelai, who is never lacking in confidence when it comes to asking a man out, boldly gives Peyton a call. He not only asks her out to dinner but also to a David Bowie concert a few weeks away. Almost too good to be true! And of course, it is.
When they go on the date, Lorelai realizes Peyton is a complete dud. He did nothing but talk about himself and the cars he drives and the wine he likes. The date was so unbearable Lorelai decided to forgo a DAVID BOWIE concert just because standing next to this man while “Space Oddity” is playing would simply be too awkward.
The only reason we as an audience know any of this is because Lorelai tells us. Well, she tells Rory but it functions as telling us. We see Hamm at the auction. We see him on the front steps of Lorelai and Rory’s home picking Lorelai up for her date, and then we never see him again. The horrid date happens off screen and then Peyton just becomes another point of tension between Lorelai and her mother.
Strangely, the writer (Justin Tanner) and director (Joe Ann Fogel) of this particular episode were both one-offs in the Gilmore Girls universe. This was their first and last credit on the series, leaving the episode, which has little to no impact on the series as a whole, feeling like a forgotten fever dream. And because it wasn’t the show’s matriarch Amy Sherman-Palladino who was in charge of this particular storyline, we’re left with very little insight as to why things were done the way they were.
There are a few plausible explanations for why the date was offscreen. My favorite one is that they actually filmed a dinner scene with Hamm and it was IMPOSSIBLE to make him seem as dull as Lorelai described. Call it lazy writing — show don’t tell and all that bullshit — but sometimes the relaying of information can be more potent than actually seeing the scene being described. And as the casting directors may have discovered, if you’re looking to cast someone to play a dud, Jon Hamm is not your man.
A more realistic theory is they didn’t have the budget that week to create a new set. Sherman-Palladino has never known how to budget money or time evidenced by a full musical about garbage that appears in one of the last episodes of Marvelous Mrs. Maisel or the fact that in season two of Gilmore Girls, when the Palladinos couldn’t even get a premium parking spot from the executives at the WB, Lorelai and Rory go to a Bangles concert where the actual Bangles play several songs and there is an arena full of people (extras they’d have to pay actual money)?? Did Amy and Dan rob a bank??
The show has certainly conjured up restaurants before. In a later episode, Lorelai’s soon-to-be-boyfriend Jason takes her to a swanky Japanese restaurant she hates and we get to watch every minute. But that served the plot, as it set up the relationship between Lorelai and Jason which would go on to be a central thread of the season. In this instance, it was obvious Peyton Sanders was not going to be a recurring character, which in itself is a hilarious concept to me. Again, at this point in time, Jon Hamm was more or less a nobody. I’m imagining him walking into the backlot of the WB and the Palladinos looking him up and down and saying, “Eh, yeah this guy will do for a scene or two, but then we’re bringing in a real leading man like Chris Eigeman.” (Amy Sherman-Palladino does have a penchant for picking out teen heartthrobs though. Casting Chad Michael Murray, Milo Ventimiglio AND Jared Padelecki as Rory’s love interests really cemented the show in the cultural zeitgeist. But as someone who is currently rewatching Girls, all I have to say is if Lena Dunham was in that director’s chair, Hamm would have been shirtless working as a busboy in Luke’s Diner for a seven episode stint at minimum).
Realistically, Hamm could have actually been busy. At the time, he had a recurring role on another forgotten show The Division, which aired on Lifetime and was a groundbreaking show about policeWOMEN in San Francisco. Yeah, that’s right. Ladies can be cops too! It starred Bonnie Bedelia who you might recognize from the Die Hard movies.
If this were true and the show couldn’t have Hamm on for more than an episode, there’d be no point wasting time developing his character. He was an object for Lorelai and Emily to bicker about, a bug in Emily’s web of high society from which Lorelai was trying desperately not to get stuck. I keep comparing him to Eigeman, who plays Jason “Digger” Stiles, because they start out as essentially the same character. Alluring men who are a little too close to Lorelai’s parents’ inner circle. But Eigeman (who is NOT usually leading man material if you didn’t catch my sarcasm above) has an arc that relies on him being charismatic and engaging. Hamm's lack of an arc relies on him being the antithesis of those things.
And therein lies the latent joke. What the Palladinos didn’t know is that Hamm would go on to star as one of the most charismatic, engaging leading men in television history. Don Draper’s rizz is so potent, so infamous, the drop of his name in a Tinder bio is a marked red flag for women who haven’t even seen an episode of Mad Men. This man had women leaving their husbands, abandoning a room of schoolchildren, crashing their cars upstate. He had a hot blonde wife he traded in for a hot brunette (ok this is actually Betty erasure. She DROPPED his cheating ass, but she really had to think about it and that was undoubtedly because of the rizz). Don Draper could make a sales pitch on a plain bar of soap that would make a room full of grown men cry. He has the metaphorical blood of two suicides on his hands. You can call him a lot of things — self-absorbed, fraudulent, rat bastard, son of a whore (because he was one), cheater, manipulator, pathetic. But you wouldn’t call him dull.
Knowing all of this and then going back and watching this episode of Gilmore Girls makes the twist all the more stark. The way the scenes progress, we see Lorelai leave with Peyton, relieved to discover he is as handsome as she remembers, and then it immediately cuts to her returning home and waking Rory up at a measly 10 pm to tell her the date went sour because, of all things, Jon Hamm was a total bore. Don Draper, snooze fest! Not worth more than four dry lines of dialogue! A pretty face and nothing more!
It’s a fun kind of cosmic irony when extremely small parts in TV shows are filled with soon-to-be Hottest Man of the Year contenders. It happened in Buffy the Vampire Slayer when Pedro Pascal was cast as a college student who could have been Buffy’s love interest for the season. Instead he was killed immediately and Buffy fell for Agent Riley Finn, played by Marc Blucas. Pascal, as we all know, went on to become the internet’s daddy/boyfriend. Blucas went on to become a Hallmark Christmas movie fan favorite. Things have a way of working out.
Part of me wishes that Gilmore Girls and Mad Men could have been on parallel timelines, so Hamm himself would’ve been in on this joke. A true crossover. Though in that instance, it would have been much more tempting to show the date, have Hamm put on his Don Draper charms and perhaps have Lorelai see right through them and still drop him before the David Bowie concert. It could have highlighted the truth about a character like Don: below the surface, he is rather dull. The man put up walls of apathy built with layer upon layer of a tortured backstory. Those walls may have been cracking with bursts of creativity, of poetic genius, but by the end, we see he’s just a deeply flawed man stuck in a cycle fueled by his own lack of humility and self awareness. He falls into the same patterns over and over again, allowing himself to find escape in affair after affair while he squanders his talent at work with his own self absorption. He’s not nearly as emotionally adept or insightful as he convinced ad buyers he is.
The pivotal line of Mad Men, in my opinion, is delivered by one of the women who inevitably falls for the Draper rizz and gets broken in the process, Dr. Faye Miller. She’s a consultant for a consumer research company working with Draper’s advertising firm Sterling Cooper. And before she saunters into a doomed relationship with Draper she makes a snide comment that he’ll soon end up marrying his secretary. Don looks at her offended, and she cuttingly retorts “I always forget. Nobody wants to think they’re a type.”
She was correct. He does end up marrying his secretary. The character, in the end, is so predictable he becomes boring to watch. Underneath the Don Draper of it all is a sad, needy, riddled-with-toxic-masculinity-and-stifled-emotions Dick Whitman (iykyk). And perhaps in a distilled crossover episode, Lorelai could have seen this shine through, especially because she is also a main character who is larger than life but bogged down by self absorption.
Though I do enjoy that this is just a fluke. Because of the timing, the meat of the Gilmore Girls episode isn’t, “hey, look it’s Don Draper playing a boring guy!” Instead, it’s just a realistic episode about dating. We don’t get many of those in Gilmore Girls, which in its bones is a relationship show which frequently looks down on “casual dating.” Lorelai and Rory are depicted as far too desirable and superior to be in anything but long-term relationships with medium-to-hot men who have terrible communication problems and frequently give them a tummy ache.
Watching Gilmore Girls as an adult, I find myself relating a lot less to the characters I used to idolize. But Lorelai’s two-minute fling with Jon Hamm was a moment I could see myself in her. I could definitely imagine having a chance encounter with a good-looking man, building him up in my head as a dream guy and then being thoroughly disappointed and having to navigate the awkward waters of putting myself out there and changing my mind. Who sifting through the murky fish-pic infested swamp of the dating apps can’t relate?
This and the moment in season four when Lorelai is too busy to get a haircut and gets roasted by her grandmother for it are the most real she has ever been to me, so part of me would have hated it if the mythical manliness of Jon Hamm had stolen the show. But whether we as viewers have watched Mad Men or not, the moral (if you can call it that) of the episode remains the same. A handsome guy is just a guy. Jon Hamm is just a guy. Don Draper is jUsT a GuY!!
Should Lorelai have gone to that David Bowie concert? Honestly, probably. It’s David Bowie! She could have just ignored that man and sang along to “Life on Mars” like I truly don’t get that? But our girl will not tolerate a dull man even if he looks like Jon Hamm and I think that’s beautiful.
B Plot
Question: What’s a TV pairing you think should have been endgame but wasn’t?
Mallika: I’m not sure why Pretty Little Liars is on my mind so much recently but it never sat right with me how after EVERYTHING Alison put Emily through (letting Emily think she was dead not even the worst), they ended up together. Her endgame should have been Maya St. Germain!!! I loved Maya and they were actually nice to one another (imagine) and Maya didn’t die in the books so they didn’t have to kill her here. Plus Maya’s murderer was a stalker pretending to be her cousin…? Very Peyton Sawyer of her (related: Peyton from One Tree Hill should have ended up with Jake Jagielski and Lucas should have ended up alone).
Rachel: Veronica Mars and Logan Echolls till I die!! Shhh no one tell me this is a toxic couple who met in high school because he was dating her best friend who got murdered and of course it wasn’t going to work out. I won’t hear it and I won’t stand for it! Those two were made for each other. And I won’t spoil the revival for those who haven’t watched but Rob Thomas owes me $$ for emotional damage for that final scene…
C Plot
R.I.P. to “The Custom of the Country,” the miniseries Sofia Coppola was developing which would have starred Florence Pugh if Apple hadn’t pulled their funding. “It’s a real drag. I thought they had endless resources,” Coppola told The New Yorker. You’re telling us that Apple looked at an adaption of an Edith Wharton book developed by Sofia Coppola with THE Florence Pugh and said “nah we don’t have the $$” after making that Christmas movie with Ryan Reynolds? You’re telling us they thought it was more worthwhile to fund The Crowded Room which might as well have been an M Night Shyamalan flick for how much sense it made? Ghosted was a better investment ?? We’d like to talk to someone…
Probably no one cares about the Wizards of Waverly Place reboot but us — or rather, we care about drama. Last week we wrote about how much immense secondhand embarrassment we felt for Jennifer Stone and David DeLuise (who played Alex’s best friend and dad in the original show and run the rewatch podcast “Wizards of Waverly Pod”) for not getting a call to be in the reboot (to be clear, we never have any idea what we’re talking about but we were speculating they didn’t get a call). But then it was seemingly confirmed DeLuise is coming back. And Stone posted a photo with the original cast with the hashtag #everythingisnotwhatitseems, which seems telling, no? Are we making up the drama? Are we the drama?
Josh Radnor, who player Ted Mosby on How I Met Your Mother (the character Mallika said last week she’d most like to fight purely because he’s annoying), got married this month and for some reason we’re reading every detail about it in the New York Times. There’s a lot in the article about how he and his wife met at a sound meditation retreat while on psychedelics. “That is when Mr. Radnor and Dr. Jacobs slid into the DMs of each other’s consciousness,” the article reads. Anyway. We’re mostly here to focus on the fact that the wedding took place outside at dusk during a snowstorm that had been predicted for days. “Their 164 snow-soaked attendees endured 20-degree weather as they exchanged vows,” according to the NYT. We know the whole “a wedding should be whatever YOU want” rhetoric but what if they had simply done this inside. Congrats to the happy couple, though! Hope your friends still like you.
Hayden Panettiere has a lot to say about the writers of Nashville. She told The Messenger that the show’s bizarre tendency to mimic her real life struggles, from her dating life to her addiction to her relationship with her daughter, was not lost on her. The writers were just lazy as hell apparently and it was very traumatizing, Panettiere said “because I felt like I was acting out my own life.” This sounds awful and shame on those writers but also Panettiere is painfully relatable here: “I didn't have time to take care of myself [and] to think about and go through the pain I was experiencing physically [and] emotionally. I just wanted to drum it out and watch mindless television and great shows.” WHAT was she watching?? We have to know.