Angry Fellas

Our TV watchers examine the best of Mad Men.

“The Good News”

Don Draper + Lane Pryce + Gamera = one of Mad Men‘s most memorable episodes.

Dennis

I hope this episode has inspired everyone to befriend a British man, get him drunk, and watch Gamera with him (steak and strippers optional). Lane was my favorite part of this episode. Sure he was mean to Joan, but he said funny things and rubbed beef on his crotch!

I was also pleased to see The Real Don Whitman’s wife back, even if this might be one of (if not the) last time we see her. Poor Anna can finally meet Dick’s kids now that Betty’s in the know, but she might not even live to see that visit. I’ve enjoyed Melinda Page Hamilton’s mellow portrayal of Anna in the moments we’ve seen her and am sad we won’t get to see her. But if Sal has taught us anything, nothing gold can stay on Mad Men (yes, I’m going to mention Sal every episode until that time if/when he shows up, and then I’m going to mention how excited I am that he’s back, dammit!!).

I’m actually surprised at how few characters were in this episode. Don, Lane, and Joan had a lot of screen time, with just slight cameos for the rest of the office folk, and nary a glimpse of Betty, Sally, and the rest of the (fake) Drapers. Still, I like that the writers don’t try and force everyone into every episode of the show, especially when it’s Don, Joan, and drunk Lane we get to spend time with. I’m sure Peggy’s New Year’s with her boyfriend (which she humorously had to remind Joan, and us, that she had) was delightful, but I’m happy I got to spend the first moments of 1965 with this threesome of characters instead!

Zoe

“I know exactly who you are, and I love you.” Is there anything as rare and wonderful as that sentiment, especially when it’s true? Mad Men‘s strength is the way it plays with dualities and the past, forcing us to consider the many faces we end up showing to the world. Don is not alone in his secrets, though he certainly has heavy ones. Each and every character and viewer has one–what many of us lack is our Anna, the person who offers us a reprieve from the burden of having so many different roles.

I hate to think that’s the last time we’ll see Anna, if only because the idea of her and Sally meeting is too amazing, but what a send off. Not only does she offer Don some of the kindest words he’ll ever hear, but Melinda Page Hamilton plays her so well, as this light and beautiful woman who has faced some terrible hardships and come away loving and fun and just the right amount of sarcastic.

And, so, of course when faced with her–with everyone’s–mortality, Don goes on an epic bender with the perfectly British awkward Lane, a man who has done some many things the proper way, only to have them fall apart in his hands. No wonder he’s embracing America, Texas belt buckles and all. Lane’s public face is so much more rigidly enforced by the standards and protocols that he grew up with, that it’s great to see him lose them for a bit and realize that it’s OK.

Lastly, Joan. Joan and her terrible marriage to a nice, handsome, but awful man. A man who denies her passions while abandoning her to whatever fate awaits him in Vietnam. A man who treats her like a child, failing to recognize how much she has kept everything together. And Joan has no refuge, no drunken coworker, no Anna. And so when her dualities confront her, it’s heartbreaking, a person who sees how doomed they are, but no way out. And, unfortunately, I’m not sure that there is.

Scott

Clearly, “The Good News” was a fine hour of television, mostly as a chance to spend time with some of the show’s most underused characters (maybe only the  fifth or sixth time Joan’s been given considerable screen time and only the third notable Lane appearance). But it also spent a while wallowing in sleaze, an unwelcome development for this fourth season that’s gnawed at me in every episode. I hate to sound like a prude, but one of my favorite elements of the first season of Mad Men was that while the male characters would behave like demented sailors on shore leave, their vices were handled in tasteful ways. We wouldn’t see, for example, Don having graphic sex with sadomasochistic prostitutes, or pathetically propositioning teenagers he’s known since they were babies.

This isn’t a new problem, it’s just worse than ever. Don’s mistresses in season one – Rosemarie DeWitt’s deceptively deep beatnik Midge and especially Maggie Siff’s tortured Jewish career woman Rachel Menken – were two of the show’s brightest stars, complex and compelling women who challenged and ultimately rejected Don. His two main mistresses since then – the callous Bobbie Barrett and the airheaded proto-hippie schoolteacher Suzanne – were one-note bores whose relevance to the story was more theoretical than actual.

I know there’s a reason behind this. The Don we also worshiped for his effortless cool now seems like a creep. A guy who could get any girl he wanted while he was married is now single and pays for sex. He’s been turned down in every episode so far by women of a younger generation who aren’t eager to hop in bed with a handsome man just because he told them to. But he’s also gotten laid in each of the three episodes by three different woman in an increasingly cringe-worthy fashion. Now I dread the moment every week when Don turns predatory, engaging in grossness that sends one of TV’s most high-minded shows directly into the gutter. We get that he treats most women like trash and that he’s bad for doing so, do we really need to see it every week?

Ellen

After this week’s episode, the friend I was watching with turned to me and exclaimed, “I love this show but it always leaves you wanting more.” Not only did she set me up for a perfect That’s What She Said, she ably summed up the glorious frustration of this week’s ep ending on the cusp of a new year, with life and death literally hanging in the balance. This week brought us the welcome spectacle of a Don Draper New Year’s Eve, but also a number of unanswered questions: Why does Joan seem so single-minded all of a sudden about starting a family? Will loyalty or dishonor win in Don’s behavior towards the California Drapers? Seriously, can we hand Lane Pryce his Emmy right now? We’ll probably have to wait all season for these, but the writers are digging us in and I am right there in the trenches with them. Next week hopefully we’ll know how everyone else spent their New Year’s Eve, but I’m guessing Gamera wasn’t involved.

“Christmas Comes But Once A Year”

Angry Fellas continues with this week’s Mad Men, bringing back a newly sober Freddy Rumsen,  Lucky Strikes villain Lee Garner Jr. and even fan favorite Trudy for a cameo.

Zoe

We’re almost halfway through the decade and everything is falling apart. Isn’t that just the way holidays feel sometimes, though? You have all these dreams of what could and should happen–from the presents you want to something as simple as a parent being present–and so rarely does the reality match up. Everyone’s dreams conflict and grind together, which is why the holidays can be the most stressful time. But if you’re on Mad Men and you used to be somebody, those holidays of 1964 are about telling you how much smaller you’ve become in everyone eyes.

From Roger having to ham it up as Santa to please the firms only client to Freddy’s old fashionedness being attack by his former underline to Don’s continued descent into pathetic drunken sadness (with a delicious topping of jerk, ruining Allison’s dreams) nothing is what it used to be or was supposed to be when dreams were being dreamed.

And then there’s Sally, angry and alone, finding solace in the frustrated, creepy friendship of Glen, a former pariah. I am not the child of divorce and I’m too young to have been a child of divorce when it was such a scandal, but Sally’s building frustration and anger is, of course, only going to grow to mimic the wider cultural anger that is about to explode.

As for Peggy, her dreams didn’t get dashed as handily as everyone else’s this week, but while we smiled at the joke of Mark thinking her a virgin and old fashioned, the truth is she’s more Freddy than future hippie. She wants the dream of marriage and happiness, combined with her dash of feminism. And looking so post-coitally let down it seems like her dreams might be dying too.

Dennis

This week’s returns include a recovered (but still old school) Freddy, the Drapers’ loveable housekeeper Carla, Lucky Strike louse Lee (it’s his fault we don’t have Sal anymore!), Pete’s wife Trudy (Community’s versatile Alison Brie), and the ever creepy neighbor boy Glen! It seems Mad Men is bringing back more and more familiar faces with each episode (the fact that Aaron Stanton and a few others from the old agency are still in the opening credits indicates there will be more reappearances to come).

I’m most excited to see Carla (the closest thing Sally has to a real mother figure) and Trudy back. It seemed that the season finale had primed Trudy to be a bigger presence in the new agency, but I wonder if Brie’s regular role on Community may have derailed that. Still, I’m glad to see she’ll still pop up in a guest starring capacity from time to time. I also dig the dynamic between Peggy and Freddy. Peggy seemed fairly broken up when a drunken Freddy was ousted, and it’s interesting to see him back with Peggy a much more mature, established person.

I’m least excited to see Glen, since I fear what his creepy plans are for sweet Sally. I do hope we see (not just hear) Glen’s mom Helen again, as I always felt like she too was previously primed to be a bigger character and am curious to see what remarried life is like for her. Maybe she and Betty can compare notes, without further slapping ensuing?

Meanwhile on the actually NEW faces front: I also wonder if this is the last we’ll see of Don’s nurse neighbor, as played by Grey’s Anatomy’s recently deceased doctor Nora Zehetner. (Is it me or is Don averaging like 3 love interests an episode now that he’s single?). And why did it take me TWO episodes to realize that Betty’s new beau is played by Blake Bashoff, aka Lost’s dearly departed Karl? He was one of my favorite recurring characters!

Ellen

Okay, so I had a nightmare that every Mad Men episode this season was going to revolve around a holiday, and it made me really upset. Not that Matthew Weiner couldn’t potentially pull it off, but I suspect every holiday will cause a wave of similar behaviors: Don, feeling guilty over the divorce, will spend too much money and then do something stupid with a lady to get over his guilt. Everyone’s spouses will make a cameo. There will be seasonal decorations. So let’s hope next week’s trip to Acapulco isn’t quite so seasonal.

On this week’s Christmas episode, we unwrapped all kinds of secrets: Freddy didn’t die! Peggy’s boyfriend is kind of a dim bulb! Making his first appearance in season 4, Gene is no longer a baby! Okay, we could have guessed that one.

I really had thought Freddy was dead to us, though, and his reappearance suggests that no one in the repertory is gone forever. As a Sal fan, comforting news indeed. Secondary case in point: Creepy Neighbor Kid Glen, working at the tree stand with his stepfolks. (Tangent: I learned on Twitter today that the kid who plays Glen is Weiner’s son Marten. I’d love to have heard that kneeside chat. “Son, I’ve got a part for you in my project, but there’s a catch…”) When Glen hears that Sally Draper wants to move he decides to “help” by trashing the entire place, except her room. Bit weird, that kid, but a great way to deliver the information that Sally also wants out of Bullet Park Rd.

Peggy’s decision to let Freddy’s words get to her and sleep with her unremarkable man was disappointing, but not surprising; she’s still trying to figure out the kind of girl she wants to be, and we are right along with her. (I had at least a 30-second memory blank before I remembered her affair with Pete Campbell. It’s been a long time since then!) I’m disappointed and surprised, however, in Don’s decision to add his faithful secretary to his list of conquests. The excitement of seeing Don back in action was ruined by his ill-picked and ill-timed target, even if she was right there falling into his arms. Really, who didn’t see that one coming out awkward? Are we going to have to send Don to “the fraternity” too? At least he could have written a check.

“Public Relations”

Welcome, one and all, to Angry Fellas, SPJ’s weekly coverage of Mad Men season 4. Though only half of us are fellas and we’re much more likely to collapse in a state of existential dread Rachel Menken-style than get angry at this masterpiece of a show, we’ll be here for the next 13 weeks as television’s classiest summer diversion winds its way through 1964 and ’65. Join us, won’t you?

Ellen

How exquisite the irony, that the man who could sell the world anything must struggle with selling himself! The challenges facing the new plucky upstart ad agency established at the end of Season 3 mirror, to some extent, those facing the D in SCDP. Don struggles with life in a tiny office (he seems to bulge out of it at one point) where his rash decisions have consequences, and outside of work his reinvention as a bachelor about town isn’t going so swell either. “Nice girls” (like Jane Sterling’s perfect date for him) will maybe grant him a kiss in the cab, and prostitutes leave him drained and cold. Who is Don Draper? The more pertinent question may be, what’s going to hold him together from here on out?

Having spent three years with Don in our imaginations, it’s sort of hard to watch him fall apart this way. Even when violently disagreeing with the course of action he takes, I find myself rooting for him — but it’s hard to know what to root for him to do here. Moreover I was surprised at the degree to which Don identified with his marriage. I always pegged Betty as the spouse most likely to cling to her relationship as central self-definition, not a difficult choice considering how quickly she moved into her new role as Mrs. Henry Francis. And she’s clearly doing that here in a wince-worthy Thanksgiving dinner scene and subsequent Bad Parenting display. (Semi-related: did anyone notice Kiernan Shipka, Sally Draper, has been promoted to the opening credits? Kid’s going places!) But I think Don, for his part, underestimated how much fulfillment he found in enacting the part of family man. It’s in the way he tucks his children in at his new Village apartment, and the hollow look in his eyes as he waits on the couch for Betty and Henry to come home. He can’t nap or drink those feelings away.

Elsewhere, Peggy and Pete pull off a stunt that is some pretty weak sauce compared to today’s viral marketing campaigns but involves old ladies beating up each other for a ham. Unfortunately, not only does Don disapprove (despite the client’s pleasure), but we don’t get to see the beating happen. Such a tease, show! Maybe by New Year’s Eve.

Zoe

First things first: Sally freakin’ Draper, everybody! I know, I know, like me you were all worried what was going to happy to our favorite sassy gal in the divorce and it turns out…she got taller! And more depressed. I’m excited to see how the divorce plus her mother still being a terrible mother has affected her as the season continues.

Of course, Sally Draper isn’t the only character on the show (I wish!). As always, the focus is on Don and what a crumbling mess his life has become. Don never particularly liked Betty, but being married centered and focused his life outside of work in a way he’s sorely lacking now. Plus, Don is becoming increasingly out of step with the times–a theme that has always been present in the show, but one that seems like it’ll become more of a focus this season.

Which is great, because as fun as Don Draper is as a character the fact remains that there are compelling and real reasons you don’t see men much like him these days. Even his style of dress seems to be more drab and despondent than the bright colors that are starting to emerge in his office. And his take on Peggy and Pete’s publicity stunt (which would be done today, only now they would break out into song about the hams) is both valid and, well, curmudgeonly.

Likewise, Don’s inability to brag on himself is a sign not just of Midwestern values (which I get), but also not quite being in step with the times and the true uses of a newspaper profile.

That said, I’m not despairing of Don’s chances to adjust and grow yet. He grew a spine with Betty at the end and the Wall Street Journal interview (and throwing out of the swimsuit clients) show there’s some fight in him still.

There’s a lot going on in this episode, establishing the new sense of things, introducing a few new people, but what I appreciated best is the new glimpses into Henry Francis. Sure Peggy is a little more ballsy and Joan has more power, but those are natural outgrowths of what we already knew. It’s Henry Francis who remained a bit of a mystery last season and it was nice to see his slow realization that maybe, just maybe, Betty isn’t a prize after all. I’m glad they were able to keep Betty in the show–not just for my Sally fix, but wherever Henry Francis’ realizations will take us. Like Don, Betty is going to have to learn that things are done a bit differently now.

Scott

I recently advised a poor soul uninitiated in the ways of Mad Men to give the show a chance. “But remember,” I warned, “it’s slow. Veeeerrry slow. Just stick with it.” If he started out with “Public Relations” he probably thought I get bored with the glacial pacing of speed metal. From the bright new office that looks like a set from Laugh-In to The Nashville Teens’ proto-industrial classic “Tobacco Road” playing us out, this great season opener puts Mad Men on a new propulsive course that’s shockingly far from the quiet, relentlessly bleak first two seasons.

Like my colleagues, I am very excited about Sally’s expanded role on the show and her improved enunciation (somebody got her front teeth back!). I don’t think I’ve ever seen a child grow up seriously on an adult drama before, and starting with her Grandpa Gene episodes last year I think the little lady captured all of our hearts. I’m also excited about Peggy’s new confidence and haircut, but not so much her new man. The girl deserves happiness, but this guy seems like a dope to rival Henry Francis. I am chomping at the bit to see how the show keeps Sterling Cooper castaways like Kinsey in the fold, but I’m pretty much always happy watching Mad Men unless that skank Bobbie Barrett’s around.

Dennis

It’s finally here! Mad Men is back! Hooray! After the grade A (A stands for Awesomeness) season finale last year, the bar was set high, but this episode was at least consistently as good as we’ve come to expect. It’s great to see most of the gang (sorry, Sal) back. This was a particularly Don-centric episode, but it was some of the supporting players that I was even more excited about. Yay for Peggy and her fake fiance! Yay for Roger Sterling (the dude was averaging approximately a quip a minute!). Yay for the Bobby Draper’s ability to end an awkward moment with his love of sweet potatoes! And yay for some new faces as well. It’s good to see Jack & Bobby‘s Matt Long as a new employee. As anyone who has read the Roundtables can attest, I had some strange compulsion to watch ABC’s The Deep End every week, so I’m actually pleased that ABC canned it, if only so now Long can have meatier material here. And, meanwhile Don’s got yet another love interest in the form of True Blood‘s Anna Camp! At least, this one seems a bit more interesting than Miss Farrell. Who knew for such an annoying person herself, Jane had such cool friends?

I do wonder how the show will integrate Betty into this season. She’s always sort of been a character on an island of her own, but with Don and her divorced it seems this will be even more true. I wonder if this show will end up having Betty cheat on her new hubby with her old one. Seems like it be too easy to predict for a show this well-written. I guess we’ll see. I can’t wait to see how this season progresses!