mad men, mad men, mad men, mad men

Mad Men is one of the reasons I started this blog. One of the interesting things about it is that while a lot of the Everyone Agrees These Are The Best shows of this century have suffered or prospered according to their finale, I'm comfortable calling Mad Men one of the all-time best dramas regardless of how the final season goes. It isn't Lost, it isn't Breaking Bad or Battlestar Galactica -- unless it ends with Dick Whitman being publicly revealed, it's hard to imagine how it could be constructed as having told a single narrative. There aren't episodes that will seem shitty or inexplicable in hindsight once a finale "reveals all," like with Lost.

And yeah, I'll get to Lost's finale in another post, or maybe even will have done already before this post goes up.

I can't even tell you how many times I've seen Mad Men. I stopped buying the DVDs at some point - despite my love of audio commentary and preference for owning physical media - once we had Netflix streaming and a Roku and all that, and AMC runs marathons fairly often. I'm sure I've seen the first season at least seven or eight times, and there are undoubtedly episodes I've watched a dozen times. And I've rewatched it all in writing this post.

Episode by episode thoughts after the break.

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes (pilot)

It's interesting that the series starts out by intentionally withholding information from the audience -- I don't mean the Dick Whitman story, but the fact that Don Draper is married with kids. The second scene has him over at Midge's, stressed about work ("I don't wanna go to school tomorrow") because he can't think of a pitch for Lucky Strike. Midge even asks him, after sex, "do you think I'd make a good ex-wife?" I'm fairly positive she knows he's married, though come to think of it I can't remember a scene making that explicit. I'm not saying anything about the scene plays weirdly -- only that normally, there'd be a little mention of his marriage, for the audience's sake. Instead it's deliberately held back as a surprise at the end of the episode, and by then he's already hit on Rachel Menken, too.

Here I need to point something out, as a cocktail fan and historian: Don and his crew drink a lot, but they don't drink very well. Mad Men takes place right at the beginning of the nadir of American drinks, a period that would last straight through All in the Family, Hill Street Blues, and Mad About You before we finally came out of the darkness a few years before Mad Men began airing. 

During the Mad Men period, a lot of classic cocktail ingredients had either ceased production or fallen out of favor. Vodka's big marketing push in the 1950s had paved the way for cocktails that were constructed from flavorless alcohol added to whatever the fuck you wanted, rather than crafting more nuanced and interesting cocktails from ingredients that actually tasted like something. Palate-wise, Don's Canadian Club is the predecessor to the vodka martini with a dash of vermouth. 

About that Canadian Club: Don calls it "rye," but that's rye in the Canadian sense, which has nothing to do with actual rye whiskey, and can include -- as it does in this case -- blended whiskeys made up principally of neutral grain spirits. It's whiskey diluted with vodka. Real rye whiskey is one of the most flavorful whiskeys, one of the most flavorful spirits period, especially in North America, and all but died out in this dark age. Blended whiskeys like Canadian Club vastly outsold straight whiskeys like bourbon, Scotch, and real rye in this period, not just because they were cheaper but because they were bland -- ads touted their "mildness" and "lightness" -- and easy to drink. Take it straight. Make an "Old-Fashioned," in which case the bitters and fruit are going to cover up what little whiskey flavor made it through. Mix it with 7-Up and a Cub Scout would have no trouble gulping it down.

You hear so much about people making a big deal out of the cocktails they make for their Mad Men parties, but Jesus, anything period-appropriate is just going to be awful. This was, increasingly, the age of utilitarian drinking: drinks were meant to get you buzzed or fuck you up, as unnoticeably as possible.

Annnnyway.

I still remember watching Mad Men for the first time. It was a lot like Friends, in that it was heavily advertised ahead of time, but not in a way that really conveyed what the show would be like (and after all, how could it?) People these days keep calling it AMC's first scripted show, which is wrong -- I had watched a few episodes of Remember WENN, a pure nostalgia show. This was not that. Even the ads managed to make it clear this would not be that.

What first caught my attention was the meeting with Lucky Strike. After seeing Don struggle with this pitch, we see him come up with it on the fly, right there in the meeting. We actually see his thought process -- not dumbed down and scrawled on a whiteboard, not made mystical as he throws rocks at bottles, but some sense of what it's actually like to come up with and develop an idea ex tempore. The only time television normally shows this is when characters are solving a crime or diagnosing an illness. (The Silicon Valley first season finale famously did a great job with it too, years later.)

First season has a lot more Midge than we'll get again, and it's a shame. That's one of the things I loved in first season -- the tension between Don the business man and his attraction to Midge the Bohemian. His disdain for her scene is clear, but he's not intimidated by it the way Harry or Pete might be.

When we first watched Friday Night Lights, I told Caitlin, you're not going to expect it, but if this show clicks for you, Tim Riggins is going to become one of your favorite characters. And you really wouldn't expect it from the first few episodes, arguably the first season, in which Tim is this brooding beering hulk, torn up inside over his affair with his now-disabled best friend's girlfriend. But we gradually come to love him, partly for the ways he changes and partly as we get a glimpse deeper inside.

So too with Peggy Olson. When the show first started, I was certainly rooting for "the girl from The West Wing," who was in a position very familiar to me: my mother, who attended MIT on a full scholarship in the 60s and had a near-perfect SAT score, switched majors from chemistry to math because the dean of chemistry told her the only job she could get would be as a male chemist's secretary. So she taught math instead, and supported my father, the weaker student, as he finished grad school and started his company. While MIT has never been the most progressive school, engineers and science types are supposed to be drawn to meritocracies -- but that's how ingrained and systemic sexism was.

But although I was rooting for her, I don't know how much I liked her, or at least how much I found her interesting. She was quiet and timid and apologetic. She made awkward social moves that seemed comical even for the time. But gradually she became the second-most important character on the show. There's no show without Don -- or at least, it'd be a drastically different one -- who embodies certain elements of the era while resisting others, and who is the perfect combination of the insider with power and the outsider who, in Betty's words later down the line, "doesn't understand money." But so much of what makes the show work comes from Peggy's arc -- Don has to fight, but Peggy has to fight harder to get half as much, and the relationship between Don and Peggy is the most important, best detailed, and most emotionally fraught of the show.

Elisabeth Moss is one of our greatest actors. If you haven't seen Top of the Lake, do so at your earliest convenience.

Red in the Face (Season 1, Episode 7)

There are so many moments in the first season that kick you awake and let you see what kind of show this is going to be. If Mad Men lost some buzz in its later seasons, it may be in part because it became the show it was, instead of just letting you know what it was going to be - the novelty wore off, in other words. In its first couple years, it's still frontier. It's still unknown.

One of the recurring things in first season is people trying, to varying degrees, to figure out who Don is. Rachel doesn't really understand him, and bolts when she gets a glimpse of Dick Whitman at his most scared. Pete stumbles onto Don's secret past and tries to use it against him. Both Dick's half-brother Adam and the guy on the train whose name I don't remember try to connect with him, and fail. In later seasons, this motif is replaced by one of mistaken and borrowed identities -- Don and Sal posing as G-Men, for instance.

And this, this is the second episode in which Roger makes a clumsy effort to find out about Don Draper's past. "From the way you drop your G's sometimes," the patrician Sterling says, "I thought maybe you grew up on a farm. Maybe with a swimmin' hole." Don doesn't take the bait, and later in the same evening, Roger hits on Betty. Although Roger is a philanderer, nothing in the rest of the series supports the idea that hitting on the wife of a co-worker is an ordinary thing for him - with some notable exceptions (Joan, Megan's mom, Laura from Duet), he usually goes after the young, impressionable, and unattached. Clearly Betty isn't the reason he's making an exception here. More likely, whether he's conscious of it or not, this is another attempt to find out who Don really is.

And he finds out, when Don out-indulges him by way of revenge, putting Roger in the position of puking up oysters after climbing every stair back up to the office.

It was another one of those moments where this often surprising show managed to surprise again. There's no work advantage in Don taking this little bit of revenge here -- it's purely personal, and somehow that seems more appropriate than if he were to go about things like a normal ladder-climber in a nighttime soap, catching Roger in a compromising position and demanding a raise or that kind of crap. This is revenge no one knows about except Don and Roger.

You know, this may be the last time when I really think of Roger as Don's boss. It's not just that Don is a partner for most of the series. It's that even in the first season -- even though there are times when we think his job may be in danger -- Don is so prepossessed that it's hard to think of him as someone who works under anybody.

While I'm thinking of it, why did Dick Whitman never serve in World War II? Was his draft number just never called? Dick would've turned 18 in late 1943 or early 1944 (we know his birthday is "six months ago" when he celebrates Don's birthday on June 1, later in the series), when there was plenty of war left. At one point I'd assumed he had a farm deferment, but we later learn he "grew up in a whorehouse," and wasn't on the farm anymore when he turned 18. Presumably he volunteered for Korea, but was he living at home that whole time? Until he was nearly 30?

Speaking of Don's bosses ... as early as this, we see Jim Hobart of McCann Erickson trying to hire Don Draper. Good luck with that one, Jim.

Shoot (Season 1, Episode 9)

Directed by Freaks and Geeks' Paul Feig!

So this is the episode when Betty shoots the neighbors' birds, in a scene that had a lot of us at the time going, "Ooookay, Betty's more interesting than I thought." And then nothing comes of that.

I think it's clear to anyone who has read anything about Mad Men over the years that Matthew Weiner sees Betty differently than fans do, at least any fans I know or have read comments from. Just recently, in a retrospective interview, he made it clear that he thinks the reason people were unhappy with Don's proposal to Megan at the end of season four because -- well, let's let him tell you:

"I never know what’s gonna frustrate the audience. I have no idea. I don’t know. When Don proposed to Megan, I thought they were going to see it as the best twist ever, and they were so hard on that episode which is, to me, a really, really solid and meaningful episode to me. And I didn’t realize until years later that they just didn’t want Don to get engaged again. They wanted him to go back to Betty. I don’t think it had anything to do with the episode. It had to do with what happened."

Listen, I love Matt Weiner, I loved his work on the Sopranos, and I recognize Mad Men is a passion project, but this is a reading of season four that is just absolutely bonkers to me. Certainly there are many kinds of Mad Men fans, but I've never heard a single person say they wanted Don and Betty to get back together -- and there are a bazillion other reasons to have problems with that proposal! Like that he barely knows Megan! And he's dating Dr Faye at the time! And the proposal is pretty transparently motivated by his desire to have a mother for his kids, not a partner for himself! And that he's such a fucking mess he can barely handle dating, much less marriage!

But even apart from that: clearly, to even think that people want Don to get back with Betty, Matt has to like Betty more than I do, more than I think most fans do. He sees her very differently. But I'll be honest -- I can't tell how he sees her. It's not just that I disagree with him, it's that I honestly just cannot sit down and write a description of what I think Matt Weiner thinks Betty is like. It is a mystery to me.

Long Weekend (Season 1, Episode 10)

Apart from Cooper telling Joan that she can do better than Roger, this isn't one of the better episodes -- there's a lot of dialogue that's very on-the-nose, and a lot of dialogue that delivers big chunks of exposition. However, it's notable for Don's defense of Richard Nixon's chances in the presidential election, in that in listing everything good about Nixon, everything that makes him more relatable than Kennedy, Don literally says, "I look at Nixon and I see myself."

Maybe this too is an example of the episode's clunkiness. Of course, we always read this as Don unintentionally dating himself -- youngster Pete is the only one who sees JFK's appeal -- and certainly Kennedy is the more popular president, but it's not like the election of 1960 did away with Nixon once and for all. I wonder if we're expected to think that the Don Drapers of the world have a comeback at the series' end in the same way Nixon did.

Nixon vs. Kennedy (Season 1, Episode 12)

Or Don vs. Pete, I guess. The one-way Don/Pete rivalry comes to a head as Pete reveals Don's secrets to Cooper, who responds in a way that is absolutely perfect, and was so integral to sealing this show as a classic: "Who cares?" So fucking satisfying.

Like Lost, Twin Peaks, Community, and Battlestar Galactica, this is a show where the first season really brings back memories of wondering "what IS this show, how is it going to work?", that sort of squinty fidgety engagement when you know you like something but it's doing something completely different from what you're used to. It's like driving a new route -- you never drift off into autopilot, so you notice the flamingo in that yard, and hey there's a Cuban restaurant in this part of town, and oh nice, a used bookstore I haven't been to.

Even at the end of the first season, it isn't clear. I know a lot of people came into second season expecting or hoping for a mystery as substantial as Don Draper's past as Dick Whitman, and the closest we ever got to that was the sort of false-Christ Bob Benson, which isn't very close at all. Because it's not that show. And sometimes, once you're not that show anymore, you struggle to figure out what show you are -- Twin Peaks obviously flailed around for a while once it wasn't the "who killed Laura Palmer?" show -- but in this case, Matt Weiner seems to have always known that it wasn't a "some kind of mystery, not a murder, but you know, some kind of secret revealed or something" show from the start, and was totally comfortable structuring the first season that way. For some people, the fact that subsequent seasons weren't repeats of season one's formula was the beginning of the end of their engagement. You started to see a lot of fashion blogs, a lot of spot-the-error blogs, as though people were hunting for a reason to be watching.

But ultimately it remained what it was from the first episode: an exploration of just who Don Draper really is. And that exploration is more complicated, less sumupable, than "who is Dick Whitman and why did Don Draper used to be him?" The Wire has been called a novel for television, but Mad Men nails it just as well, it just happens to be a different kind of novel -- John O'Hara probably, maybe John Steinbeck. A little John Updike and obviously some John Cheever. Basically all sorts of Johns.

One of the great things about this episode is that it would have made a fantastic season finale, and yet there's one more episode to go.

Maidenform (Season 2, Episode 6)

One of the few uses of non-period music in this series is the weird use of the Decemberists' "Infanta" to open this episode. Given that one of the other uses -- the Cardigans -- is in season one, I wonder how much of it is just the show finding its feet and deciding what it is and isn't going to do.

Heyyy, that auditioning actress Pete sleeps with, that's Jerry's daughter from Parks/Denna from Marry Me!

There's a key moment in this episode, and in retrospect it seems crazy that it's only season two: while in bed with Bobbie Barrett, Don finds out that he has a reputation -- that women he sleeps with talk about him. This hits him hard, though it's hard to say whether it's because he's obsessively private and doesn't like being talked about, or is in denial enough that he hasn't admitted his cheating is habitual and constant, with a long stream of women in his wake.

The Gold Violin (Season 2, Episode 7)

One of my favorite episodes not because of its contribution to the big dramatic plots -- Jimmy Barrett tells Betty that Bobbie and Don are sleeping together, which leads to Betty and Don's separation, which in turn leads to Don going to California for the third act of the season -- but for two amazing subplots:

1: Bert Cooper's Rothko. You don't often have characters on TV discussing art, especially real-life art, but here you have The Boys and Jane sneaking into Bert's office to look at his recently acquired Rothko, an imposing piece of abstract art. Everyman Crane is mystified, searching the office for a brochure that explains it. Ken responds to it more profoundly than even art director Sal.

2: And Sal has a crush on Ken, the accounts man with a sideline as a writer. The scenes at Sal's house after he invites Ken to dinner and not only ignores his wife the whole time but treats her every word as an intrusion is heartbreaking, in so many different ways.

The Jet Set and the Mountain King (Season 2, episodes 11 and 12)

When I was a kid, I was fascinated by the season or two of Laverne and Shirley where the girls - and Lenny and Squiggy! - relocate to California. Due to the whim of syndication, I watched this era of L&S before the similar era of I Love Lucy. Like the rest of Generation X, I grew up with reruns - by the time I was allowed to stay up into primetime and watch new sitcoms, I'd had access to, what, probably 10 or 12 hours of sitcom reruns a day, and had already formed my impressions of the genre and its tropes. (One of the recurring themes of this blog, I realize, is my amazement at how different things are for The Kids Today compared to the small slice of time that defines my norms and expectations.)

What was fascinating about the California era of L&S was that it was such a change, and this was at a time when, at least in my frame of reference, television shows didn't change. Gilligan was stuck on his island, sure, but no more than Barney Miller was stuck in the precinct cracking wise, or Mr Drysdale was stuck in a constant attempt to get a bigger share of the Clampett fortune through shady but never quite malicious means, or Lois Lane was stuck never figuring out that Clark Kent was Superman wearing glasses. The only shows that changed were Land of the Lost (the Marshalls meet Enik and learn more about how they got lost, the dad goes back home and Uncle Jack replaces him) and Battlestar Galactica. The idea that L&S could trade Milwaukee for the Three's Company-ish looking sets of Southern California seemed as crazy as Batman moving to Hooterville.

Anyway, knowingly or not, these "Don Draper in California" episodes always conjure up that feeling for me. They're among my favorite parts of the series, even when his later visits are less mysterious or tinged with magic, as this one is.

While season two has made it clear that every Mad Men season isn't going to play out like season one's Mystery of Dick Whitman, it also establishes that certain patterns will hold true -- notably that the last two or three episodes of every season will be ... kind of fucking majestic. There's more going on in Mad Men than just the third act playing out what the first two acts set up -- sometimes there's a curve ball like the California trip or Don's engagement to Megan, sometimes it's an amazing solution like in season three's "Shut the Door. Have a Seat."

Meditations in an Emergency (Season 2, Episode 13)

One of the major "history" episodes, the second season finale is set during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which motivates Betty to get revenge on Don via a quickie with Captain Awesome, and provides the backdrop for the proposed merger with Duck's old British firm and a bunch of character moments like Colin Hanks telling Peggy she's a sinner and she's going to hell. I never liked Chanks' priest character, and this episode felt like it was giving me permission to really hate him. Peggy is so often surrounded by unlikeable supporting characters -- her mother and sister, Chanks, most of her boyfriends.

But this is so satisfying: Pete tells Peggy he loves her, and Peggy tells him "Pete, I could have had you in my life forever if I wanted to... I had your baby, and I gave it away."

As much as I love Young Adult Sally Draper, letting her grow up meant missing out on moments like "Mommy doesn't like to eat."

This merger business with Putnam, Powell, and Lowe, this sets in motion one of the recurring themes not only of this show but of recent television dramas: the reorganization of organizations. The Sterling Cooper Something Something firm goes through changes in ownership, partnership, and scale over the course of the series, and it's always handled way more dramatically than you would have expected before this show started. We end up with similar firm shake-ups playing out over the course of The Good Wife, and even Breaking Bad and Parks and Rec in their own ways. (For that matter, this sort of shake-up was used to fuel a lot of the drama of Parenthood, at least Adam and Crosby's storylines - that show just had a terrible track record with actually following up.) It's as though there's recently some kind of interest in a kind of ... institution-as-character.

This has always been such an uneasy show. The season ends with Betty, post-hookup, telling Don she's pregnant, and a long silent moment as Don takes her hand.

Out of Town (Season 3, Episode 1)

One of the first scenes in the third season premiere is a discussion between Cooper and new British overseer Lane about Cooper's "Dream of the Fisherman's Wife," a work of art that will be important in one of the series' final episodes.

Love Among the Ruins (Season 3, Episode 2)

I've never particularly shared Don's taste in women. Here we meet his soon to be next paramour, Suzanne Farrell, and as much as I love Abigail Spencer on Rectify, Suzanne is maybe my least favorite of his flings.

My Old Kentucky Home (Season 3, Episode 3)

One of the most memorable and talked-about episodes. Roger in blackface! Pete and Trudy doing the Charleston! Peggy smoking marijuana! Joan playing the accordion!

Every time I rewatch it, I'm struck by how smart and tight this episode is, not only featuring those memorable moments but moving the plot along in important ways: Don meets Connie Hilton, the man who will force him to sign a contract for the first time; Sally's relationship with her awful grandfather Gene (who is less awful to her than in general, granted); Betty meets future husband Henry Francis; and in a show in which all the leads except Peggy will divorce at least once, the stigma of divorce is discussed in the context of Nelson Rockefeller's, which in hindsight is often blamed for shifting the Republican Party to the far right, by rendering unelectable the leader of the center-right Republicans.

Guy Walks Into An Advertising Agency (Season 3, Episode 6)

A kind of magical episode that fits this season so well and that nobody could stop talking about when it aired. In ways it's like a microcosm of the season or even the series as a whole: expectations are first raised (the impending arrival of the British results in the partners thinking it's good news and that Don will be given a new job in London) and then dashed (Guy is made overseer of the agency, Roger is considered so irrelevant he's not even listed on the hierarchy, Lane is moved around the board like a pawn); Don finds out the man he met at Roger's party was Conrad Hilton, and is summoned to pitch him; Pete frets over impressing the British while Ken lands the John Deere account just before they arrive, and doesn't seem to care very much about the competition between the two of them; and the British reorganization is canceled after a piece of bizarre slapstick in which fricking Lois runs over Guy's foot and shreds it with the riding lawnmower.

Not only that! In another bit following up on Old Kentucky Home (in which Joan discovered that Greg may be a doctor, but he's not a very good one, and his friends think he married out of his league), Joan finds out that Greg lacks the skill to ever be a surgeon, and has no career plan, which he reveals to her right in the midst of her retiring from Sterling Cooper. The series has made no secret of how awful Greg is -- he rapes her in Don's office, he belittles her, he basically has no value beyond fulfilling the status Joan accrues from marrying "a handsome doctor," and now she's finding out that there are degrees of handsome doctors and she has married the least of them.

This episode really captures how frustrating this season is -- not frustrating in a bad way, but how frustrated we are on behalf of the characters. I think for that reason it's also when a lot of the attrition started. I don't have ratings information -- I don't know for sure that viewership fell off. But anecdotally, this felt like the era when a lot of people were realizing that Mad Men wasn't the show they wanted it to be, that it was bleaker than it was glamorous, and could often be slow paced.

Wee Small Hours (Season 3, Episode 9)

Two clients give Don and the agency trouble: Conrad Hilton and Lee Garner Jr.

Connie Hilton is one of the series' best characters. He presents a lot of the same difficulties as any other client -- here, he pitches an idea, "Hilton on the moon," and expects to have it pitched right back to him -- but magnified and complicated by two things: his vast amount of money (which in turn provided sufficient motivation for Cooper to finally insist that Don sign a contract) and the fact that he and Don are sorta kinda friends. It's an incredibly unbalanced friendship but one that Connie keeps insisting on -- he wants Don's time outside of work, he wants unpaid work from him as a favor, he wants to talk to him in ways that are clearly unprofessional and have his forgiven because they're "friends." But the reality and power of the work relationship are never more obvious than at the times when Connie is invoking this friendship.

I have no idea how much Mad Men's Connie resembles the real-life Conrad Hilton, but he's sure as hell true to life for SOMEbody.

Meanwhile Lee Garner Jr makes a pass at Sal, and when Sal turns him down, Lee insists that Sal be fired -- not just from the account, but from the agency. Harry neglects to do it, Roger does it instead, and Harry and Sal together appeal to Don, who probably could fix this. In fact, in retrospect, knowing as we now do that Lee had a thing for Don -- and that Roger knew this -- it seems even more likely than it did during this episode that Don could have fixed this.

Not only does he not fix it, he gets pissed at Sal for not doing whatever Lee asked. Don knows Sal is gay, so what's the problem? It's actually hard to say if he would take the same attitude with a woman in this position. Even with $25 million at stake, it's hard for me to believe he would be mad at Peggy for turning a guy down, and more likely he'd say fuck the account, and belt the guy. After all, he's the one person who opposes the plan to rent Joan out to Jaguar, later.

This episode, this decision of Don's, will always linger for me. We have yet to see Sal again, so we don't even have the assurance that he lands on his feet. I don't need Don to make up for all the wrong things he's done over the years, but I do need a certain amount of self-understanding, and while I think he recognizes the existence of most of his sins, this part I'm less sure of. It's always going to stick in my craw.

The Gypsy and the Hobo (Season 3, Episode 11)

Before I get to the meat of this episode, let me point out the latest cameo in this series -- which isn't as chock full of cameos as, say, The Good Wife, but which makes such startling and interesting choices in its casting. Mary Beth Keller plays Annabelle, the dog food client and Roger's former flame. MBK played Laura on Duet (and later, Open House), an early Fox series I fondly remember, and if it makes you feel old to think that she's old enough to play Roger's old flame (though she wasn't even 50 yet when this episode aired), consider that Talia Balsam -- who plays Mona, Roger's ex-wife (and Slattery's real-life wife) -- was not only paired with Michael J Fox on Family Ties, but played Alex's daughter on Taxi. Time flies.

The meat, of course, is that this is the episode where Don tells Betty about Dick Whitman, in what I think is still the longest sustained sequence of the series -- starting roughly at the halfway mark of the episode, which is exactly when you don't expect it. This is something that always felt like it had to happen some day, though I wasn't sure if Betty would find out from Don or from Pete or even somebody else. It felt like a shoe that had to drop, in any case. It's fitting that it happens the way it does -- as a sort of endnote to finish off their relationship. The fact that Betty is able to feel sympathy for Don here -- or pity, anyway -- is one of her few likable moments since she shot the pigeon.

The icing on the cake of this fantastic scene is that Don and Betty have this long confessional conversation while Suzanne is waiting outside in the car for Don. That is a brilliant bit of drama.

Shut the Door. Have a Seat. (Season 3, Episode 13)

Mad Men as heist movie: in order to escape being sold to McCann, the Sterling Cooper partners assemble a crack team of ad men and women in order to form their own firm, with Lane first firing them in order to get them out of their contracts and then, after being fired himself for doing so, being hired on as partner. It's a brilliant bit of business, and it's exactly the kind of thing we rarely care about on television. Somehow this show invests so much in the specifics and details of the characters' work that we actually care about their work life in a way that isn't true even for most workplace comedies.

Peggy, after Don asks her to come to the new agency: What if I say no? You'll never speak to me again?
Don: No. I will spend the rest of my life trying to hire you.

If only Don lived up to this, but so much of his arc after this season is about his backsliding and hitting various rocks bottom. Of course, if not for that, "The Suitcase" wouldn't be as good as it is, just a few episodes from now.

We end the season with Roger re-energized not by his new wife but by a revived interest in his work, Don on the cusp of divorce, Pete and Peggy with new work responsibilities and respect. This is the first time the series has reached a place where it could satisfyingly end. The major characters have all undergone profound change since the pilot, and no one's story feels underserved.

Christmas Comes But Once a Year (Season 4, Episode 2)

You go into season four thinking, oh, things will be better for everyone now. They have their own firm again, everything will be great. But it turns out money is tight, everyone needs to spend all the favors they have owed to them, Lucky Strike represents such a big share of the agency's business that Lee Garner's ass has to be kissed at every opportunity, and Don, ironically, doesn't handle divorce well. When Dr Faye Miller is introduced, it feels like it could be for a number of reasons. She's a consumer research expert, after all, and research has always been presented as anathema to the needs and aspirations of creative. But her professional impact is actually pretty limited -- she's a contributor to the agency getting on its feet in these early days, but Don eventually burns that bridge.

In the end, what Faye really is is a romantic red herring. She's attractive, intelligent, and stable, and the fact that her family is loosely connected to organized crime gives her just enough, I don't know, grime? to balance Don's own past and origins. She's the alternative to Don's sleeping around, and the alternative to girls like Jane's friend, who's just too young and unseasoned for Don to settle down with.

But instead, of course, he ends up taking a last-minute veer and proposes to Megan at the end of the season, in large part because of how she acts with the kids -- handling kids being the one thing Faye can't do.

What's interesting is that Megan is first introduced in this episode, too.

The Rejected (Season 4, Episode 4)

While meaning to let his father-in-law know that the agency will have to drop Clearasil due to a conflict of interest, Pete finds out Trudy is pregnant, and Vincent Kartheiser is just great here. We so often see Pete Campbell's Bitchface (it's pronounced beach fuh-say) that it's nice to capture a real moment of joy.

Megan gets a little bit of a spotlight -- talking about how her mother takes off her makeup -- during Faye's focus group asking the secretaries about Pond's cold cream. Right from the start, our first impressions of Faye are about work and professionalism while, even though we meet her in the workplace, the first impression of Megan is all about strong family bonds.

Immediately after that scene, we get the latest reminder that everyone thinks Peggy slept with Don while she was his secretary, whether or not they also think that's how she got the copywriting job (Freddy Rumsen, at least, knows it's not why she got the job). Don's secretary, talking to Peg about how much she can't stand being around Don when he broke her heart, assumes Peggy went through the same thing. And she wasn't even at the agency when Peggy was a secretary!

Zosia Mamet is so much more tolerable as Peggy's new lesbian friend Joyce than she is on Girls.

I believe this is also the first episode directed by a cast member (Slattery).

Waldorf Stories (Season 4, Episode 6)

As a kid, a surprising number of my favorite shows were one- or two-season wonders. I don't know what this says about me or about television. I do know the deck was stacked somewhat by my age -- I was a teenager during the early days of Fox, when it experimented with a lot of short-lived shows while finding its way (a way that eventually revolved around its major hits, Married With Children, The Simpsons, Cops, and The X-Files, four shows that set the stage for today's television landscape). Point being, one of those Fox shows was The Outsiders, a TV adaptation of the classic S.E. Hinton novel/Francis Ford Coppola movie, starring Jay Ferguson -- Mad Men's Stan Rizzo -- as Ponyboy.

Let's talk about Stan Rizzo, introduced here as the art director at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. In this fourth season, Stan is almost always an asshole. He's not as much of a pig as Joey, but he laughs at everything Joey does, and he gives Peggy shit in almost every scene they have together. He makes fun of her, he calls her uptight, he deliberately makes her uncomfortable, and he tries to have sex with her in the office after he thinks she came on to the delivery boy (who was Abe, her boyfriend).

But he gets better. By the final season, Stan is my favorite character outside the Big Six, and Caitlin is a big Stan-and-Peggy "shipper." I can see why: regardless of their rocky start, by the time we get to the end of the road, Stan has been through more with her than anyone but Don, and has made that journey as an equal. He knows her better than anyone but Don, and unlike all of the men outside of work, he doesn't trivialize her industry (Abe), her contributions to her work (Chanks), or the mere fact that she wants to work as a professional rather than in a time-biding job that just fills the hours until she's barefoot and pregnant (all of her boyfriends and dates). Peggy understands men a hell of a lot better than they understand her. Is it any wonder she doesn't get married?

The Suitcase (Season 4, Episode 7)

Quite possibly the best episode of the series, with Don and Peggy holed up in the office after hours at Don's insistence, while Peggy is missing her birthday celebration with her drab boyfriend and awful family, and Don is putting off calling California to see how Anna is doing. We shift from the office to a diner back to the office as they yell at each other, commiserate, and confess, and along the way we have:

1) the two of them openly talking about Peggy's baby, and about everyone thinking Peggy slept with Don, for the fist time;

2) Don confiding in Peggy about his past -- he doesn't come out and tell her the whole story the way he later does (off-screen) with Megan and his kids, but he tells her enough that if she chooses to (and it's not clear to me if she ever did, prior to Don's Hershey meltdown) she can put the whole thing together, other than Adam's suicide;

3) honest discussions about their work and personal relationship, which make it clear that Peggy is Don's closest work friend, even if he's unable to ever put aside the boss-employee relationship for long;

4) the two of them listening to Roger's memoir tapes!

There is a lot to love about this show, but by the middle or so of second season, it was clear that Jon Hamm and Elisabeth Moss were the two best actors in a cast that regularly includes five or six Emmy-worthy performances. This one episode shows both sides of the Don/Peggy relationship -- not just the closeness but the condescension and selfishness of Don, and the impatience of Peggy -- and makes it fuller and more real than we usually see on television, or in fact in fiction tout court. In one episode we see their relationship both at its worst and at its best. In one episode! We like both these people -- sometimes more than others -- and we want them to be close, we want them to be friends, but the show resists the desire to give in to us all the way, and will never remove those frustrating frictions. There's never a Ron and Leslie moment where Ron decides that even though Leslie is ideologically opposed to everything important to him, she's still always right -- not because Parks is wrong to paint those two that way, but because Parks is a sitcom and Pawnee is a cartoon, while Mad Men and the 1960s are another thing entirely. If Coach and Mrs Coach are television's best couple, Don and Peggy are television's best pair.

There are a lot of different ways you can approach the "what is the best TV show ever?" discussion: what show had the most amazing episodes, what show was flawless for its whole run (which bumps Friday Night Lights down the list because of season two, for instance, but should also ding The Wire for the unevenness of season five), what show did something no other show has done, what show was so influential that it's responsible for the other best shows (which is why I sometimes think that any "best show ever" conversation is actually asking "what's the second best, after The Twilight Zone"), and so on. One of the ways you can look at it is, "Which television show includes the largest number of characters who absolutely must be part of the 'greatest characters ever' conversation?"

Friday Night Lights, for instance, is an amazingly well-told story with only a handful of truly great characters compared to, say, The Wire. And Breaking Bad has a fairly small cast, especially of main characters, so even if its batting average is very high, at the most it might have, what, six great characters? That may sound like a lot -- but compare it to Twin Peaks or The Wire.

Point being, Mad Men is high on that list. It probably comes after The Wire because The Wire has an enormous cast. But of the six characters I consider the core cast -- Don, Peggy, Pete, Roger, Joan, Betty, with the understanding that the second three all have periods when they're less prominent -- at least five of them are in that greatest characters conversation, and I'd add Coop (all characters named Coop are great, I guess), Sally, Stan, Ken, Lane, Connie Hilton, and maybe Sal and Ginsberg. Part of me wants to add Jim Cutler, but as entertaining as he is, we know almost nothing about him as a character. That's still a dozen fantastic characters.

In another case of this show so often building parallels, we've seen a few times this season -- as we do here, when he shows up at SCDP to take a shit in Don's office -- that Duck is on a downward spiral much like Don is. Duck, though, is handling it even worse -- embarrassing himself in public at the Clios, in the previous episode, while Don limited his embarrassment to a pitch that went badly (and still won the client, albeit selling them a slogan Don didn't actually want).

The Summer Man (Season 4, Episode 8)

"What do you do around here besides standing around looking like you're trying to get raped?"

God, this episode! Joey -- the kid from Jack and Bobby (co-starring John Slattery) -- has been a fairly innocuous presence until mid-season, when he increasingly becomes a thorn in Joan's side and makes his lack of respect -- really, his contempt -- for her clear. It's the latest in a series-long subplot about the frustrations Joan faces because of her appearance, and one that feeds into her lashing out at Peggy in a final season episode, after Peggy says she wouldn't be mistreated the way she is if she didn't dress the way she does. Peggy probably doesn't have as much of Joey's respect as she should, but he at least treats her like a co-worker; Joan outranks him and he treats her worse than a secretary.

There's dialogue making it clear he has mother issues, but mostly he's just an asshole.

This is a good place to link to Erika Schmidt's excellent piece on a final season episode, especially this part:

This is not only about sex, what we see these men do. This is about territory and power.

How dare you? How dare you have a job? How dare you be good at it? How dare you have a roommate and an apartment of your own—and how dare you prefer it that way? How dare you be good at sex, because how dare you have fucked anyone before me? How dare you be 30 years old? How dare you aspire to more? How dare you command respect? How dare you make an executive decision? How dare you look and dress the way you do? How dare you expect me to respect you? How dare you come here to do work? How dare you expect to do your job the way we do ours? How dare you not be fun?

That is exactly what we're seeing, again and again -- often directed at Peggy, sometimes at the other female characters, and especially at Joan once she's put in a decision-making role.

Speaking of assholes. It's not made explicit, but this is the last episode where Don sees Anna Camp. While it was always clear that nothing was going to happen here -- he's been sleeping with literally random women, and is obviously more interested in Dr Faye (finally asking her out) than AC's character -- the fact that their relationship ends after she blows him implies that's the only thing Don was waiting around for.

In yet more guys-being-assholes-to-women stuff: after Betty and Henry accidentally run into Don and Anna Camp at dinner, Betty says "I need a drink." Henry's response: "You NEED a drink? That's what winos say. That's not something you're allowed to say." This guy's always been a bit of a tool -- if constitutionally incapable of the epic assholishness Don can manage -- but Jesus Christ, Henry.

What this episode is usually remembered for are the stylistic choices: both the voiceover (Don's, as he writes in his journal) and the little touches like cutting out the sound or zooming back the lens when Don is in a reverie. Honestly, I don't have a strong opinion about it one way or the other. It's a show that embraces the occasional episode that takes a stylistic departure. This time it works better than in The Fog, not as well as in some other examples.

Blowing Smoke (Season 4, Episode 12)

Season 3 ended with Roger finding renewed purpose after being treated dismissively by the British overlords. And yet, in season 4, he is often more hindrance than help, as when he alienates the Japanese because of a war that broke out before his wife was born. When he loses Lucky Strike, he makes it worse by not telling anyone, supposedly in the hopes that he could somehow fix it or find a replacement. The replacement he pins his hopes to, though, is brought in by Pete and promptly sabotaged by Pete as a favor to Don, who won't be able to pass the security clearance requirements. So Roger himself has done little to get himself out of this situation except look around and hope someone else does something.

It's Peggy who inspires Don to fix things. "If we were a dog food brand," she says, evoking another Sterling client, the Mary Beth Keller account, "we'd change our name. You're always saying, if you don't like what they're saying about you, change the conversation." Don would of course deny her any credit for her role here -- all she said was change the conversation, and he's the one who decides to publish a letter in the New York Times declaring that SCDP will refuse tobacco accounts in the future.

Once again Don shows that he may be a genius, but not only is he not a leader -- something the partners can forgive, because Cooper is the only one who really values or understands leadership, and he's not sufficiently involved in the day to day operations to realize how poor Don is at it -- but he isn't a team player. As mad as everyone is at him for it this time, it's next season when it'll really come to blows -- but I think this tobacco letter incident, even though it works out, plays a big role in the partners eventually turning against him. I think Cooper, in particular, never forgives him: "I didn't think you had a heart for a partnership. We've created a monster!"

When people talk about the best Pete scenes, they usually talk about "NOT GREAT, BOB!" or "The King ordered it!", and rightfully so, but one of mine is in this episode. Pete finds out that Don paid his $50,000 that the partners are required to pay in in order to keep the firm operating. Don owes him, of course, for tanking the aviation account so that Don didn't need to quit. Pete goes out into the hallway and catches Don's eye. Don just nods, so slightly. That's it. But the scene carries a lot of weight, given that Pete was the closest thing the show had to an antagonist in the first season.

Tomorrowland (Season 4, Episode 13)

Betty fires Carla for letting Glen into the house to say goodbye to Sally, which means Don has no one to watch the kids while he's in California, which leads to bringing his secretary Megan along, which turns the trip into a Wife #2 audition. She passes both the sleeping with him test and the how-is-she-with-kids test, and boom, Don's engaged!

Don Draper finally has his mid-life crisis.

The normally private man can't wait to tell the office he's engaged. And Roger is clearly very aware of Don's crisis; when he says "see, Don, this is the way to behave," I take it to mean not only that he's telling Don that when Roger got engaged to Jane, Don should have been outwardly approving and supportive -- and he's realizing that he truly is in Don's position, in that he recognizes Don's decision is ridiculous, and in realizing this, probably understands what a mistake he made himself.

One of the things Don seems to miss is that the kids see Megan as more of a peer than an adult -- Sally's even worried that Megan will miss Mr Toad's Wild Ride, something she'd never worry about with Betty or Don -- and that, by extension, a babysitter you enjoyed sleeping with is not the same thing as a partner, much less co-parent. Megan is never entirely bad -- I certainly feel bad for her at times, and given her awful mother and sister, it's a wonder she's not worse -- but she's a poor choice of spouse for a middle-aged man with a teenager. Betty is such a memorably terrible mother that it's not always as obvious that Megan's not such a great step-mother, but a lot of it comes down to her inability to actually be a parental figure -- instead she treats the kids like younger friends, or like you'd treat your friend's kids.

The way that Megan's good with kids, in other words -- keeping them upbeat and entertained -- isn't necessarily one that actually leads to good mothering. After all, the most impressive thing she does, in Don's eyes, is fail to get mad at them, because that's how fucked up Betty and Don's step-mother were, so that's where his expectations are set.

A Little Kiss (Season 5, Episodes 1-2)

Let's be honest about something: most of the best TV shows have a race problem. If The Wire is the exception that proves the rule, the rest of the lineup ranges from the just plain weird treatment of race in Friday Night Lights (in which a small Texas town has no significant Latino characters outside of the ones who show up for the disastrous second season and then vanish) to the simple neglect of most sitcoms.

Mad Men has invited more criticism on this issue than most shows because of its era, one most Americans associate with the civil rights movement in its first half and the urban race riots of the second half. A lifetime of 60s nostalgia has driven home the importance of African American civil rights to the 1960s (and, usually, the importance of white people to the African American civil rights movement). So it's easy to feel that the white focus of Mad Men stands out more, or is more deserving of criticism, than the strangely overwhelmingly white New York City that Friends lives in.

I don't know what the role of African Americans was in the world of advertising in the 1960s, but I do think the dearth of non-white characters is unfortunate. Think of how rich the show has been because of the varied experiences of Betty, Peggy, and Joan. Instead, we have a black housekeeper who doesn't even speak in some of her scenes, an elevator operator, a janitor or two, Paul Kinsey's black girlfriend, and two black secretaries introduced halfway through the series. With the exception of Dawn, none of them get their own subplots for so much as an episode, and we certainly don't explore the black experience of this world the way we explore the female experience. Far more prominent -- and still not as much as most people expected for a 1960s show -- is the way black concerns play into white lives, like Paul's use of the civil rights movement as his latest boho accessory.

This episode provides another example of that: we open with an African American protest and some rival ad men dropping water balloons on them, which leads to SCDP hiring Dawn. But if anything, this just underscores the show's lack of interest in the black experience, by adding a couple black characters and never doing anything with them.

Don't get me wrong, it's true that Mad Men is under no obligation to provide a full account of the 1960s. It barely touches on sexuality, despite this being a hugely significant decade for gender identity, and of course, even when it comes to white folks, we are getting the 1960s as experienced by the white folks of New York City, which is a very different 1960s than experienced in the South, in rural areas, or in Paris. It can't show the entirety of the decade. Even the staunchest critics know that. At the same time, part of the point of the criticism is that it's not exactly coincidence that again and again, race is the neglected area in so many shows that "can only do so much."

Meanwhile, we get a look at Don and Megan's married life, and although that look is centered around Don's 40th birthday, which is a pretty atypical event, there's sufficient reason to wonder if they ever have a typical day. This is a couple that seems to have married soon after getting engaged, after all, and never dated before that engagement. Though Don has told Megan all about Dick Whitman, beyond that we have to wonder how well they know each other -- how well they could possibly know each other, through no fault of either.

The interactions between them are tinged by the age difference, which isn't as significant as between Roger and Jane, but is still enough for Megan to taunt Don for being an old man. More than Jane, Megan is very much a Stylish 1960s Young Person - which just adds to the feeling that Don has married the babysitter.

It also becomes clear very quickly that Megan doesn't like and doesn't belong in the advertising industry. She's working at copywriting, but the differences between her and Peggy couldn't be more obvious -- though with Don as her husband, that doesn't necessarily make us realize immediately that Megan won't remain in this role.

We have a weird Lane plot this episode, but most Lane plots are weird, and I say that as a fan: he finds a wallet in a cab and tracks down the owner, but not without a weird flirtation with the owner's wife (?) on the phone first.

God, Joan's mother is fucking awful. There are so many awful mothers in this show!

One of the better moments: Roger solves the problem of Pete's tiny office by paying Harry to trade with him, with over $1000 of Roger's own pocket money.

And we meet Meredith for the first time, working in reception for now, and later to be one of Don's more amusing secretaries.

Mystery Date (Season 5, Episode 4)

"Mystery Date" is the first episode to address the question -- Megan herself brings it up! -- surely on everyone's mind: can Don be faithful in his new marriage? Did he cheat on Betty because he was unhappy with Betty, or just because he's Don Draper and that's what he does? It addresses the question but doesn't quite answer it (and we don't know how long he and Betty were married before he cheated), as Don's tryst with Andrea (Twin Peaks' Madchen Amick!) is part of a fever dream. She doesn't just make herself available, she refuses to leave him alone, letting herself into the apartment, and eventually he chokes her to death. Is he struggling with the impulse to cheat on Megan? It isn't clear, though this seems to be the implication or at least his own interpretation, since he tells Megan, once the fever has cleared, "You don't need to worry about me."

Of course, he cheats on her a year or so later, with Sylvia. Does he in between? I don't think we actually know.

Meanwhile, Roger demands Peggy do some work at the last minute but lie about when he told her to do it - and she demands $400 for the favor! Go Peg.

And go Joan, for finally ditching that dickwad Greg, even though it means having to depend on your terrible mother even more.

Signal 30 (Season 5, Episode 5)

Let's take a moment to appreciate one of the smaller Mad Men subplots: Kenny Cosgrove's writing career. We first find out about the account man's other life when he has a story about tapping sugar maples published in The Atlantic, and later he starts writing dozens of science fiction and fantasy stories under the name Ben Hargrove. Go Kenny!

I just realized that my pen name using the same name-masking algorithm as Ken's would be Kill Harpi.

Far Away Places (Season 5, Episode 6)

A stellar episode, primarily divided into three vignettes:

Peggy, who's frustrated both by Abe's lack of respect for her work and by the special treatment Megan is getting for being Don's wife, plays a card from Don's hand -- going to the movies in the middle of the day, where she smokes a joint with the stranger next to her and gives him a handjob. She also gets some of Ginsberg's story and a sense of his weirdness -- he initially claims to be a Martian, but we then find out he was born in the concentration camps and adopted by Mr Ginsberg.

Don insists Megan blow off work and come to Howard Johnson's with him, because she's never been. She's pissy about receiving special treatment -- it's a sign that he doesn't take her work life seriously -- and underwhelmed by HoJo's. After their fight degenerates to the point that she brings up his mother, and refuses to get in the car with him, he drives off without her, and by the time he's turned around, she's gone.

Roger tries LSD for the first time! The "trip scene" is its own subgenre of television at this point, and the big cliches -- psychedelic visuals, cartoons -- really only work in comedy. We get different effects here -- just as funny, when it's music coming out of Roger's liquor bottle -- and the emphasis is more on the surreality of the experience and Roger's revelations.

The stories happen simultaneously, so we get Don's panicked call to Peggy, looking for Megan after she's stormed off, without any context.

I think everybody can sympathize with the position Don's in initially: you're excited about something you want to introduce your significant other to, and they not only aren't feeling it, they actually mock it and tell you how bored they are. It's one of those things all couples go through at some point, to some degree or another, and it's its own special challenge. Don and Megan ... don't meet the challenge well.

Roger: I have an announcement to make. It's going to be a beautiful day.

Lady Lazarus (Season 5, Episode 8)

The best part of this episode is a conversation between Peggy and Megan. Megan doesn't want to be a copywriter but realizes no one's going to fire her because she's Don's wife, and is afraid to tell Don she wants to quit and try acting. She's all "woe is me, what do I do about this," and Peggy has no time for it (especially since it's clear Megan isn't asking for her opinion, just for support). "There are people dying to do this job, and you don't even want to be here?"

Dark Shadows (Season 5, Episode 9)

This is a great one to bring up when people defend Betty. Pissed or jealous or whatever about Megan -- after glimpsing the younger woman changing clothes when vain-as-shit Betty is struggling with her weight because of her thyroid, and finding a love note Don wrote to Megan -- Betty tries to sabotage things by telling Sally to ask her about Anna. But Megan knows about Anna, so all that's accomplished is jeopardizing Sally's relationship with her father.

And once Sally gets pissed at Megan, she gets a typically fantastic Sally Draper line, which encapsulates so much of the previous year: "You were my friend first [i.e. before you were Don's.]" That's exactly right, Sally. Dad married your friend. (Arguing with Megan soon after, Don says, "Jesus, who's the child here?")

Christmas Waltz (Season 5, Episode 10)

PAUL KINSEY IS A HARE KRISHNA!

This episode does a lot of work, setting up not only the conflict with the Jaguar account that propels the next episode, but Lane's money troubles and forging of Don's signature. It's easy to look back on it and just see the roots of those tragedies, but we're rewarded with Don and Joan's trip to the Jaguar dealership (and the bar after). Another show might put them in bed together or start a relationship here, especially since other scenes build on Don's growing dissatisfaction with -- really, distaste for -- Megan in the wake of her rejection of the advertising industry. This isn't those shows, thankfully. These are two competent people with a lot of respect for each other, and the show has always been frugal in doling out their moments together -- so much so that one of my favorite moments of the final season is Don and Joan in the elevator, promising to get lunch together soon.

Surprise! There's an airplane here to see you.

The Other Woman (Season 5, Episode 11)

The agency gets the Jaguar account, but arranges for Joan to sleep with the Jaguar rep in exchange for a partnership -- an arrangement that proves to have been unnecessary once Don wins the account on merit.

Have you seen The Mist?

The ending.

That's what this episode reminds me of.

Fuuuuuck.

A couple years later, it still hurts, and of course, the season isn't done punching.

Commissions and Fees (Season 5, Episode 11)

After Don discovers Lane forged his signature on a $7500 bonus check in order to pay his back taxes, he tells Lane to resign -- "Find an elegant exit." He's not going to ruin Lane's reputation. He's not going to tell anyone. Just find a way to leave.

So Lane kills himself.

I mean, I don't even know what to say after that. This fucking season hit hard.

I shouldn't ignore the Glen stuff, or Sally's first period, or how Lane's increasing inability to be friends with Joan without also hitting on her comments on the series' Joan subplot, or the touch of Rebecca surprising Lane with the gift of a Jaguar he can't afford. But Lane killed himself and I don't know what else to say about it.

I feel so bad for his wife right up until the next time we see her, when she blames the agency for Lane's death, because "You had no right to fill a man like that with ambition." She might not even be entirely wrong, but it's a hell of a thing to say about a guy.

Glen: "Everything you think is going to make you happy just turns to crap."

The Phantom (Season 5, Episode 13)

Maybe the least-tidy season finale? Megan's acting career is officially underway; Peggy is about to go on her first business trip, having left SCDP in the hopes that she'll advance further elsewhere; Joan is partner, but hasn't had time to settle in yet, and it's too soon to know how much real power she'll have; Roger is still drifting after his second divorce and his experiences with LSD. And Pete. Oh Pete.

The series is steeped in infidelity, but the transgressions we see the most of are Don's and Pete's, and so Pete's come across as a clumsy attempt to emulate Don. (In the very first episode Pete even says he always thought he was a creative -- like Don -- until arriving at Sterling Cooper and being told he was an accounts man.) Don somehow sails through his affairs -- he seems to feel he's hurt no one except his own wife, and is deeply troubled when Bobbie Barrett casually reveals that the string of women in his wake openly talk about him. He's clearly been treating his affairs as though once he moves on, they cease to have happened. They are zipped up and undone. And although we know he's fooling himself, it's true that he rarely has to experience the consequences of his philandering. It's not a coincidence that Don's rock bottom -- well, the first of them -- comes when he's single and dating a string of women he's totally allowed to date. He's uneasy with sexual freedom, and more at home as an adulterer; Joan later implies this is the norm for ad men.

Pete can't stray an inch without consequence. By the end of the series, of course, he's learned this, and counsels his brother accordingly.

Don picks up willing, intrigued women; Pete makes clumsy fumbles or sexual assaults. Don dates Midge, who dates other men and is perfectly fine with his being married; Pete has an affair with his fellow commuter's wife, who is revealed to have had a string of affairs, at least some of which ended like his did: with her losing a large chunk of short-term memory to electro-shock treatment. (At the beginning of season six, Don and Pete both sleep with their neighbors' wives; Don's affair lasts off and on through the season, while Pete is caught immediately and Trudy kicks him out.)

Part of Pete's problem is that he becomes attached. He actually likes this woman. I don't know how many women we can say that of where Don is concerned, other than Rachel. Certainly he didn't like Bobbie Barrett. Midge and Abigail Spencer are question marks for me, but one way or the other he wasn't head over heels like Pete.

The last scene underscores this difference between them. After all this trouble Pete has had all episode, Don is sitting at a bar, approached by a random woman on behalf of her girlfriend. "Are you alone?" she asks. We don't hear his answer.

The Doorway (Season Six, Episodes 1-2)

Bob Benson! Was there ever a red herring bigger than Bob Benson? The thing about the generations that will watch this show years down the line in great gulps is that you miss out on all the speculation about Bob Benson, week in and week out. The big one that kept recurring, like the idea that Don is D.B. Cooper or will jump out the window in the finale, was that Bob will turn out to be the son of Dick Whitman, possibly with a prostitute. Like Ginsberg, he always seems a little off, and clearly rubs people the wrong way. But it turns out that this is likely only the result of the stresses of being a closeted gay man in a time and an industry hostile to them.

After all, Mad Men rarely goes for the big reveal like that. It's just, ever since first season, people keep expecting it to.

Betty: You're so calm from all that violin.
Henry: She plays beautifully.
Betty: You and Bobby had the same look on your face when she was playing. She's a year older than Sally.
Henry: No one would blame me for leaving you for a teenage musician.
Betty: She's just in the next room. Why don't you go in there and rape her? I'll hold her arms down.
Henry: Betty, what the hell.
Betty: You said you wanted to spice things up. Will it ruin it if I'm there? You know what, if you wanna be alone with her, I'll put on my housecoat and take Sally for a ride. You can stick a rag in her mouth and you won't wake the boys.
Henry: All right. All right Betty.
Betty: My goodness. You're blushing.

TOTALLY NORMAL.

Once Sandy isn't raped and heads off for the big city, Betty tracks her violin down to a bunch of dropout types squatting in a house. Encounters with hippies and the counterculture are increasing, the later the show gets -- Megan's actor friends and Jane's intellectual friends are near cousins to them, Roger's daughter runs off to a commune, etc. One of the few areas where Don was ahead of everyone else.

Collaborators (Season Six, Episode 3)

So, I'm not going to call it a retcon as such, but ... something about Don having grown up in a whorehouse has never quite sat right with me.

It's first introduced in season five, when Don is at the brothel and tells the madam, "I grew up in a place like this." We see flashbacks to the whorehouse in season six, which culminates in Don's confessional pitch to Hershey's.

That's sort of the problem. It feels like this is being seeded early in season six mainly to build up to that confession, and it ... doesn't feel consistent with the Don of the first four seasons.

Am I complaining about Mad Men here?

Maybe.

It's definitely true that this is one of those series where the first three seasons fit neatly together as a piece, and so do seasons five through the end -- with season four as a transition between the two, I guess. The difference is certainly not as stark as with Lost or something, but sometimes it feels like some of the pieces in the second half of the series do not fit well with the first half, in ways that can't just be chalked up to character development. The biggest example, the most concrete example, is this newly introduced piece of Don's backstory. Don's early life just doesn't seem to add up. He stays with Abigail and Uncle Mac until he's almost 30? What, for Adam's sake? He has to join the Army to get away -- even though by this point he's clearly picked up significant mechanical skills (all throughout the series he impresses people with his ability to fix things)? Did he just lack the will and drive to leave?

Seriously, according to the timeline, by the time Don leaves Abigail and Uncle Mac's, he's the same age Betty is in the first season of the show. I realize Betty came from money, but it really takes him that much longer to get his life going? (He also meets both Anna and Betty very soon after becoming Don Draper, given Sally's age.)

By the end of season six, the whorehouse backstory feels as significant to Don's character as the What Happened In Korea backstory, and so it feels strange that it hasn't come up before. That Megan makes no allusions to it, that it doesn't come up in "The Gypsy and the Hobo." I mean, I realize the reason for this is very simple -- Weiner and the writers hadn't thought of it yet -- but that's what I'm saying, newly introduced backstory is often going to feel out of place once you get deep enough into a serialized story, because there will always be previous occasions that now stand out for not having brought it up.

It's not handled sloppily enough for me to say that it just feels like they wanted to give Don a new secret -- like confessing that he'd been born poor and out of wedlock would feel like old hat now since the audience has known for so long -- but on a weaker show, that's exactly how it would feel.

As a sidenote, one of the joys of this series is watching someone who is excellent at what they do, and Don is so fucking elegant as he sabotages the pitch to introduce radio ads to the Jaguar campaign, by talking up as virtues all these things that will appeal to the dealers but will cheapen the prestige of the brand, resulting in the higher-ups killing an idea Don never wanted to pursue. He even makes it seem crasser by dropping his usual professional cadence and saying things like "Fellas, this is gonna work."

For Immediate Release (Season 6, Episode 6)

The episode where Don and his self-appointed nemesis Ted impulsively decide that their agencies should merge, so that they can land a top-secret Chevy account (which turns out to be the Vega, a real-life disaster that Chevrolet was never able to effectively market). This merger gifted fans with two things:

1: Peggy and Don working together again! Obviously Peggy has ample reason not to be happy about this, but the series wouldn't be the same without their dynamic.

2: Jim motherfucking Cutler.

I have a Perseus action figure on my desk from the original Clash of the Titans. I've had it for thirty-something years. That movie blew my fucking mind when I was a kid. I became an L.A. Law fan later, sure, who didn't?, but Harry Hamlin was always Perseus for me until Veronica Mars, where he was amazing as Aaron Echolls.

What's great about Hamlin's Jim Cutler is how unlike any other Harry Hamlin character he is. He's stuffy but occasionally hilarious, in a way that really doesn't translate to print, but oh my God, his lines to the other characters sometimes. I love Cutler so much.

We have the beginnings of a Joan-Don rift here, sadly, as Joan points out Don's essential selfishness - as willing as he is to walk away from the agency at any time, he's also perfectly willing to make decisions on its behalf without talking to anyone else or considering the impact on them. He did it with The Letter -- and to a lesser extent with throwing his weight around when Putnam, Powell, and Lowe took over -- and he does it later with the Hershey pitch, in a sense. Here he not only planned a merger but dumped the Jaguar account that Joan sacrificed herself for.

The Crash (Season 6, Episode 8)

Drugs and dancing. Two things Mad Men does so well. But maybe never better than this.

This speed-fueled episode doesn't work as well as Roger's acid trip, but it is damned entertaining.

Favors (Season 6, Episode 11)

Don's never been the most attentive father -- notably skipping Sally's birthday party without any real explanation in the first season -- but what he puts her through here is beyond the pale. At the same time, in the long run it works to bring them closer, because her witnessing his infidelity with Sylvia -- whose son Sally has a crush on! -- puts up a wall between them. And taking down that wall is one part of his motivation in telling her about his upbringing, in the finale. But oh my God.

The Quality of Mercy (Season 6, Episode 12)

I wish I had more time to talk about, and really think about, Bob Benson, but if I don't get this post up soon, no one will have time to read it. The "solution" to the Bob Benson mystery is intriguingly minimalist: he isn't a lunatic or Dick Whitman's bastard son, he's just a self-invented man along the lines of Dick, without going so far as to actually repurpose another man's identity. Like Dick, he grew up poor and rural, and has crafted a persona that hides this. The fact that he's gay gives him more to hide and maybe more reason to hide it.

In Care Of... (Season 6, Episode 13)

Don: I was an orphan. I grew up in Pennsylvania in a whorehouse.

I'm just, I'm gonna say it again, this is a different origin story than "I was born to a whore and raised by my father and his wife, and then I stole my CO's identity after accidentally killing him in the Korean War."

That said, the speech he gives to the Hershey people -- the real one, the confession -- is one of his best pitches in the series' run. "The closest I got to feeling wanted was from a girl who made me go through her johns' pockets while they screwed. If I collected more than a dollar, she'd buy me a Hershey bar. I'd eat it alone in my room, with great ceremony. Feeling like a normal kid." This is poetry.

Everyone in the room is shocked, but Ted's the only one who's unable to put his work face back on and go through the motions of closing out the meeting. I've always found that interesting.

This is another place where the series could end, though not as satisfyingly as at the end of season three. Don's career in advertising has come to a possible end, as has his marriage with Megan (as we see when season 7 begins, neither is quite dead yet, but doesn't last a hell of a lot longer). He's told his kids his story. The rest of the cast, things are more up in the air for them, but the Don Draper Story at this point has a discernible beginning, middle, and end.

Meanwhile, Pete's mother has died, possibly killed by the caretaker she married; and Peggy and Abe have split up (and she fucking stabbed him!), making an affair with Ted that much more plausible.

Time Zones (Season 7, Episode 1)

What a great fucking season premiere.

This is another of those premieres that we anticipated more than most, if you'll allow me to speak for you, because of how season six ends. Among all the possibilities, Don playing Cyrano to a freelancing and sober Freddy Rumsen is NOT what I expected. Nor that he hadn't told anyone that he's lost his job -- or not quite lost it, but been placed on indefinite suspension.

This is a different kind of rock bottom than the self-annihilation of his single days or his depression and cruelty in his second year of marriage to Megan last season, though it may be a continuation of the latter.

Since it took me fucking twenty-five years to realize it after first seeing him in One Crazy Summer and later Dharma and Greg, I'm just going to point out that Joel "Freddy Rumsen" Murray is Bill Murray's brother, in case anyone else also didn't realize it. MINDBOTTLED. Damn I love Freddy.

Anyone, everyone starts this season in flux, appropriately enough. It's never been more obvious than Don and Megan are on the cusp of a breakup, its only the specifics in question -- and as an answer, we get the least common breakup on television, the slow drift-apart. Meanwhile Peggy's dealing with grumpus new boss Allan Havey from Up All Night, Don flirts with but doesn't go home with widowed Neve Campbell, Roger's daughter Fucking Awful Margaret (pretty sure that's her Christian name) is on a passive-aggressive forgiveness tour, and Joan's visit with Boy Travis is the latest reminder of the way things change in the advertising game.

That said, I am going to wrap this post up here, since it brings us to our current season (sort of; season 7 is really two seasons, of course), and how the series ends is going to color a lot of what I think about the final season. Besides, the longer this post gets and the closer we come to Sunday night, the less likely anyone's going to have time to read any of this!