Mad Men

I don't know about anyone else, but right now I'm on Team Ted in this little pissing contest.

And I'm sure there's more to it, but if all Bob Benson's weird helpfulness was a build up to him being a nice, cute and helpful boyfriend to Joan? I would be kind of ok with that.

Oh Sylvia, I really love you, and any woman who drop kicks Don's overinvested ass. It was great to see her and Ted take him down so many notches, and poor Megan is STILL like a Charlie Brown wah wah wah in the background. What Sylvia does not get is that Don has no home, he's never allowed himself to truly build one with anyone.

And I'm sure there's more to it, but if all Bob Benson's weird helpfulness was a build up to him being a nice, cute and helpful boyfriend to Joan? I would be kind of ok with that.

Me too! I really want her moms to be wrong about him. I just really love James Wolk and want to see him stick around, trying to get his foot in anybodies door. I wouldn't mind if that were Pete's.

The Bobby Kennedy clips always kill me, even more than JFK, the films of JFK are gruesome, but at respectful distance, we don't hear anything, but in LA there are so many camera's/mics there and you can hear this chaos/grief up close, and his death on camera, it really does feel like the end of one era and the beginning of this darker more depressing decade.

The Don and Sylvia scenes made me cringe. Ick.

As they should have.

It's interesting that they've made Don so thoroughly unlikeable. I wonder if they're building to some kind of redemption arc for the final season, or if they have some sort of other plan.

I don't think Don is capable of redemption at this point. I think he's too far gone to ever be happy with himself, and I think he'll be dead by series end. He's sloooowly bleeding to death.

I loved Peggy's smack down with Don. Everyone else lets him get away with his shenanigans, but not Peggy!She sees more than he'd like.

I spent much of this episode saying over and over, "Jesus Christ Don.. you are truly a piece of shit."
He's decided that he is this monster and by God, he is going to show everyone how awful he is. Good work Don. Good.work.

I am also in the "hope Bob is just a nice boyfriend or something for Joan."

AVclub made the interesting point that Don is basically inacting what happened in previous episodes (Red in the Face in particular, the one with the projectile vomit) but we have a totally different lens on it, so we are realizing how awful he really is.

I love Matthew Weiner for that. It really truly is the best type of tv writing, Don has not changed at all, we've just gotten to know him and realized that this is who he is. Hes just an awful person. Its that part of him that was always there its just been allowed to develop and fester.

And I REALLY hope Jon Hamm gets an emmy this year. I mean, I think Bryan Cranston will, and will deserve it completely, but I really hope Hamm gets rewarded for this performance (is there a weird backlash towards him or is that just ONTD's bizarre opinions?) because my God this year in particular he has been so good at just not shying away from making Don reprehensible.

I think Don's always been pretty reprehensible. Yeah, he's a brilliant creative (most of the time) and loves his kids (most of the time), but the self-hatred that's thinly disguised as confidence and brooding creativity has always seemed a little sad to me. Add that to his tendency to love the beginnings of things (affairs, mergers, business, births, etc.) and he's pretty much a slimeball. He's incredibly interesting to watch and see how all of this will play out, but yeah, a pretty reprehensible guy.

Completely agree. I've said it before, I'll say it again, Don Draper is a case study in how charm and good looks can allow you to ignore horrible things or cast them in a different light, and I think Matthew Weiner has made the audience a case study in that beautifully.

I think Don's always been pretty reprehensible.

Yup, one of his first scenes is of him cheating with Midge, we meet his mistress before we meet his wife. He's a dick in the bar too. I thought Heather Havrilesky's analysis was spot on, it's not that Don hasn't always been portrayed as a vile dirtbag, because he has, it's that in other seasons we had reasons to understand his behavior: Betty was ice queen/messed up so we could see how he'd want to escape someone like that via an affair, and he had fairly humanizing relationships with Peggy and Anna, and Rachel(and to some degree Sylvia who is in her way an echo of that season 1 storyline), we saw the vulnerability and the desire to connect and be more. But Anna died, and the rest evolved beyond him leaving him alone to stew in his own acrid juice.

Also, like you said, Betty had her own issues. Now hes with Megan. Who isn't perfect but is overall a lovely, kind woman who loves his kids and is a very good wife to him. She even is up for his vaguely kinky sex life. But hes still an awful person.

Kiran wrote:Completely agree. I've said it before, I'll say it again, Don Draper is a case study in how charm and good looks can allow you to ignore horrible things or cast them in a different light, and I think Matthew Weiner has made the audience a case study in that beautifully.

So, for those of us who saw Hamm's Dr. Drew Baird character on 30 Rock, what we are basically seeing right now is Don Draper being "out of the bubble." His stale moves are pretty much the equivalent of Dr. Drew butchering the Heimlich Maneuver - "so pretty, so, so stupid."

Meanwhile, Ted Chaough is charming the hell out of me and Ikindalovehim.

I kind of love Ted, too, and I think Kevin Rahm is really good; the overeager slightly douchy guy who used to annoy Don in season 4 and Peggy's fantasy boss actually seem like understandable parts of the same person to me. The scene between Chaough and Gleason in the hospital room was really great. You got a sense of a long history between two characters who we haven't seen that much.

I saw the theory floated last season that Don partially fell in love with Megan because she was his idealized version of Peggy: younger, interested in being a copywriter, idealistic; but also sexier and more glamorous and more optimistic than Peggy, with none of Peggy's baggage or knowledge of how bad he could be.

If there is something to that, I wonder whether Ted is being set up as Peggy's Megan, meaning he's basically her ideal version of Don. An older mentor figure who values her talents, but also showers her with praise and credit. Less intimidatingly handsome than Don, more friendly and optimistic. I really wonder where it's going, because honestly if it weren't for the fact that Ted and Peggy are both married/involved, I'd think they would be good together. Of course, I have seen this show before so I know nothing ends well. And Peggy's real soul-mate is Stan, anyway.

Luciano wrote:Meanwhile, Ted Chaough is charming the hell out of me and Ikindalovehim.

As do I. I know it's wrong, but I want Ted and Peggy to ride off into the sunset together. I think they're both charmingly awkward and right for each other.

Going back to Bob, I wonder if they are trying to set him up as sort of a proto-Don for the new era. I mean, in the beginning of the series, Don was The Man for his era-- who every guy wanted to be and every woman wanted to be with (within the context of the era as we were shown). Bob (who has that similar alliterative name) is the new up-and-comer, and he does it by being a different kind of guy than Don could ever be: open, outgoing, aware and sensitive. He's the new generation.

RiverThames wrote:Going back to Bob, I wonder if they are trying to set him up as sort of a proto-Don for the new era. I mean, in the beginning of the series, Don was The Man for his era-- who every guy wanted to be and every woman wanted to be with (within the context of the era as we were shown). Bob (who has that similar alliterative name) is the new up-and-comer, and he does it by being a different kind of guy than Don could ever be: open, outgoing, aware and sensitive. He's the new generation.

Bob reminds me of the Don we met in flashbacks, the Don who sold cars and worked as a fur salesman before conning his way into a job at SC. I think you might be onto something.

Decca wrote: And Peggy's real soul-mate is Stan, anyway.

I will go down with this ship! Man, do I love Stan.

Ugh, I'm just so sick of Don and his madonna/whore bullshit. I wonder what Tom and Lorenzo will have to say about that red dress Don got Sylvia to wear.

It is so odd and yet not, that this show gives me a great deal of insight into my Father. (who OMG, as some people know, was like a low-rent version of Don Draper. The whole lying about who he was, what his real name was, where he was from, EVERYTHING, and my Mother finding out half-way through the marriage. Lemmie tell you... that episode was really difficult for my Mother and I to watch.) When real life or vulnerability of any kind would come to the surface, this meant trying to squash it, running away, or doing everything to alienate all.

I do think back to when Faye Miller said to him, that he only likes the beginnings of things. He's like this emotional hoarder and he's reaching the point where the cat skeletons and piles of old newspapers can't be hidden anymore. Don Draper is a total Gatsby.

I think Ted is the new Don, not Bob. Ted says "rap session" and "groovy!" (I know those weren't dated terms then but it still made me think of Mr Rosso from Freaks & Geeks.) I think Don knows he's losing his grip on the new era but is too far gone into his hate spiral to do anything about it. That shit with Sylvia in the hotel room? That was so, so creepy and gross. Like, under some circumstances it might be sexy, and maybe Don meant it that way, but Jon Hamm did such a great job of making it both slightly inept and deeply menacing at the same time. I'm so glad Sylvia dumped his ass. She had a dream, my ass - she just saw Don for who he was: a controlling skeeze who is only interested in his own pleasure. I'm so intrigued by where this season is going to go.

I think Bob is definitly a contrast to Don but because hes been on the show as a recurring character for so long, I think hes more a contemporary of Don's who went a different route.

Which is why I hope he and Peggy don't hook up. I don't want Ted to cheat on his wife. Plus I am part of the Stan and Peggy train. Ted and Peggy do have great chemistry though.

I can't picture Stan and Peggy being intimate, but I can easily picture it with Peggy and Ted. YMMV.

Also, like you said, Betty had her own issues. Now hes with Megan. Who isn't perfect but is overall a lovely, kind woman who loves his kids and is a very good wife to him. She even is up for his vaguely kinky sex life. But hes still an awful person..

Totally, this. That's why I feel that people who hate that Don married Megan, or who hate Megan's character are somewhat missing the point. I think it's essential that we see her as a foil to Don, because there is really no good reason for Don to be treating her the way he is. So, I agree. We're supposed to finally hate Don for who he has always been. And I do. And it's fun.

Don Draper is a total Gatsby.

Yes. Though Gatsby is portrayed as a good person (with secrets no doubt, but highly redeemable, if not admirable). Don is so, so, so NOT.

I think at the start of the series when we knew less about him Don was more aligned with that aspect of Gatsby. Now your just like fuck bitch, every woman is your Daisy for about 3 weeks, huh?

Kookla wrote:Totally, this. That's why I feel that people who hate that Don married Megan, or who hate Megan's character are somewhat missing the point. I think it's essential that we see her as a foil to Don, because there is really no good reason for Don to be treating her the way he is. So, I agree. We're supposed to finally hate Don for who he has always been. And I do. And it's fun.

I liked the idea of Megan and Don impulsively marrying her but thought the execution of the character in S5 was dreadful. There had to be a way to show that Don was in the "lavender haze" without there needing to be such a hard sell on the part of the writers: She's sexy! She writes copy! She's chic! She saves client dinners! Peggy adores her! Care about her actress dreams! Jessica Pare didn't screen test with Jon Hamm prior to getting the part and IMO it showed. Characters can be wrong for each other but underlying chemistry between the actors generally helps (like what John Slattery and Peyton List have together as Roger and Jane) and honestly I think she has more with Elisabeth Moss than JH.

Also, I didn't get the sense that MM viewers in large part ever really blamed Betty as the primary culprit in her marriage to Don turning out badly, so there was never the feeling that we needed to see Don fail as a husband again, at least in such excruciating, ongoing detail, to understand that he was the architect of his own misery. Allison told Don he was not a good person in S4 and here were are in S6 still having it hammered home that Don is a piece of shit. Breaking news! I guess that's supposed to be the "genius" of the story, that Don has always been this guy, even going back to the pilot, but now he's not so young and slick and in control and at the top of his game creatively, and as an audience, we've been there, done that, so in S6 we are finally seeing him in the correct light. But ultimately this is a TV show and just because the retreads are intentional doesn't mean that half a season's worth of them (so far) are entertaining to watch.