Mad Men Carousel: The Complete Critical Companion

By Matt Zoller Seitz, Megan Abbott and Max Dalton

Mad Men Carousel is an episode-by-episode guide to all seven seasons of AMC's Mad Men. This book collects TV and movie critic Matt Zoller Seitz’s celebrated Mad Men recaps—as featured on New York magazine's Vulture blog—for the first time, including never-before-published essays on the show’s first three seasons. Seitz’s writing digs deep into the show’s themes, performances, and filmmaking, examining complex and sometimes confounding aspects of the series. The complete series—all seven seasons and ninety-two episodes—is covered.
 
Each episode review also includes brief explanations of locations, events, consumer products, and scientific advancements that are important to the characters, such as P.J. Clarke’s restaurant and the old Penn Station; the inventions of the birth control pill, the Xerox machine, and the Apollo Lunar Module; the release of the Beatles’ Revolver and the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds; and all the wars, protests, assassinations, and murders that cast a bloody pall over a chaotic decade.  
Mad Men Carousel is named after an iconic moment from the show’s first-season finale, “The Wheel,” wherein Don delivers an unforgettable pitch for a new slide projector that’s centered on the idea of nostalgia: “the pain from an old wound.” This book will soothe the most ardent Mad Men fan’s nostalgia for the show. New viewers, who will want to binge-watch their way through one of the most popular TV shows in recent memory, will discover a spoiler-friendly companion to one of the most multilayered and mercurial TV shows of all time. 

It's the perfect gift for Mad Men fans and obsessives.

Also available from Matt Zoller Seitz: The Oliver Stone Experience, The Wes Anderson Collection: Bad Dads, The Wes Anderson Collection: The Grand Budapest Hotel, and The Wes Anderson Collection.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: ABRAMS
• Release date: Nov 10, 2015
• ISBN: 9781613129364

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the editor in chief of RogerEbert.com. He is also the TV critic for New York magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism. His writing on film and television has appeared in The New York Times, Salon.com, The New Republic and Sight and Sound. Seitz is the founder and original editor of the influential film blog The House Next Door, now a part of Slant Magazine, and the cofounder and original editor of Press Play, an IndieWire blog of film and TV criticism and video essays.

Book preview

Season 1

Enough

Spare me the looking backward with longing,

The searching the memory with regret.

Relieve me of the angst and woe.

Has it been enough suffering to pay

The price for the wrongs and imperfections?

Life encompasses its own hell.

There need be no other.

We always find what we seek

Regardless of the guise.

We pay our dues at the door, each one we enter

Looking for something somewhere

When we need only find ourselves.

What anguish and torment we invite

And willingly endure

Thinking we are accomplishing something

That we were meant to do,

Carrying an outdated guidebook,

Belatedly finding the map.

Burdened with a twisted sense of duty,

Lifted with a truer sense of joy,

We journey ceaselessly on

Charting a course that brings us to an end

Somewhere midst our first selves and what we have become,

A weary mixture of all that life has brought us.

Yet do we need to feel useless, ineffectual

When we have tried so hard to live and be,

To become something more than when we began?

—MARTHA ORTON

SEASON 1 / EPISODE 1

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

Written by Matthew Weiner

Directed by Alan Taylor

It’s Toasted

"S moke Gets in Your Eyes starts with a definition of Mad Men." The white-on-black title screen tells us the term was coined in the late 1950s to describe the advertising executives of Madison Avenue.

After a pause it adds, They coined it.

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes¹ not only creates a world, sets the gears of a story in motion, and introduces us to the show’s hero, adman Donald Draper (Jon Hamm²)—it tells us that everything on-screen is about control.

Control of money. Control of power. Control of information. Control of the image.

The tale is told in accordance with the rules of the society in which it takes place. Screenwriter and series creator Matthew Weiner and director Alan Taylor are controlling storytellers. They dole out facts about the ad agency Sterling Cooper and its employees on their own timetable. Even though we get to observe intensely private moments, we’re always on the outside looking in. Our peeks behind the curtain are not comforting. They confirm that the powerful decide what we see, how we see it, and what that glimpse will cost us.

The portrait of Don is the best example of the way Mad Men reveals itself. He’s one of the most powerful characters on the show, but we can’t access his interior. We gather from the shot of his Purple Heart and the sound of bombs bursting as he drifts into a nap that he’s a veteran, but we don’t know why it’s important that we know this. When we get to the end of the episode and learn that Don has a wife and children and a house in Ossining, New York,³ it’s a surprise, based on his behavior.⁴ But even though we surmise that Don must not be satisfied at home—otherwise, why would he have a mistress?—his warm smile at his as-yet-unnamed wife and kids confounds that assumption. Who is Donald Draper? We don’t know yet. When will we find out? When the show is ready to tell us. The details aren’t filled in, but are slowly unveiled.

We learn a bit about the show’s central location, Sterling Cooper, a small but respected ad agency whose fortunes are built mainly around one client, Lucky Strike cigarettes. We also get a sense of the society that surrounds Madison Avenue: an upper-middle-class to wealthy social sphere, vigorous and arrogant, with domestic satellites throughout Manhattan and the tristate area. It is a world ruled by straight white men who are comfortable giving orders to black men and to women (in the workplace and in the domestic sphere) and who admit outsiders selectively, and only for profit. These men are complacent about being on top. They like for things to be done a certain way, and they explain what, exactly, that way is, in language that leaves no room for challenge.

There are hints of disquiet and dissatisfaction, mainly in scenes with the Jewish department store manager Rachel Menken (Maggie Siff⁵), whose wealth gives her the power to rattle Don’s sexist assumptions; and Don’s bohemian girlfriend, Midge (Rosemarie DeWitt⁶), who digs Don’s magnetism and creativity but seems unimpressed by his status. And there are moments here and there that make easy jokes about antiquated technology and attitudes, such as when office manager Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks⁷) describes an IBM Selectric typewriter⁸ as simple enough for a woman to use.

But for the most part, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes denies us the sorts of comforting anchors that many period stories provide. There are no characters who represent the twenty-first-century, college-educated, bourgeois American’s perspectives on race, feminism, economic inequality, or anything else.

The new secretary, Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss⁹), exemplifies the episode’s storytelling approach. It places viewers on the outside. Most TV pilots have a character like Peggy: an audience surrogate who gives other characters an excuse to deliver exposition. But not many go so far out of their way to make the surrogate character an emblem of what it means to be relegated to the outer boroughs of the American Dream. Peggy’s presence reminds us that while Don feels somewhat detached, even alienated, from the world he seems to rule, this is but another example of Don’s privilege. Peggy doesn’t just feel like an outsider, she is one: a woman in a man’s business.

Peggy arrives from the outside, knowing only that this is her new workplace. It’s a white-collar cattle pen, with boxy desks and featureless columns and walls largely devoid of art. Secretaries type away under rectangular light panels. Switchboard operators connect the firm to the outside world. [END. 1] As Joan, the boss of the secretarial pool, takes Peggy (and us) on a tour [END. 2], she describes a male-supremacist workspace, and a job that’s equal parts nanny, maid, mother, and concubine to men who act like bosses even when they aren’t. She also lays out what she considers an ideal future. She says if Peggy, who currently lives in Brooklyn, makes the right moves, within a year she’ll be in the city with the rest of us, and if she’s really smart, she’ll be out in the country and not have to work at all.

Also: She needs to show more leg.

Joan’s not just telling Peggy how to do her job. She’s telling Peggy how she’s expected to present herself to men, appeal to men, and live her life in service to men, while pursuing dreams that were defined by a male-dominated society, with a mighty assist from fantasy-enablers like Don.

The most unnerving moments in Smoke Gets in Your Eyes make it seem as though being a woman on Madison Avenue circa 1960 was to feel constantly scrutinized, rated, and otherwise dehumanized by men. The junior accounts man, Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser¹⁰), who’s about to get married but ends up wheedling his way into Peggy’s bed at the end of Smoke, presumes that Peggy is a concubine or a concubine-in-training. He says he’s looking forward to taking first crack at the female entertainer at his bachelor party because "it’s rumored that she took down more sailors than the USS Arizona. In the scene where Pete peals, Ready to sweet-talk some retail Jews? he refers to Peggy as Don’s little friend and asks her if she’s Amish or something. (I’m from Brooklyn," she replies.)

At Joan’s urging, Peggy visits a gynecologist. He lights up a cigarette, tells her to relax, and thumps her belly as if testing the ripeness of a water-melon. As we hear him ask Peggy if she’s there to get on the Pill,¹¹ we’re looking at a close-up of his hand sliding into a latex glove—an image redolent of an older form of birth control and a different method of penetration. The doctor shockingly betrays Joan’s confidence, mock-worries that once Peggy gets on the Pill she’ll become a strumpet, and warns her not to turn into the town pump to get your money’s worth. A couple of minutes into this already uncomfortable scene, there’s a cut to a wide shot of the doctor leaning into Peggy as she turns her head in the direction of the camera. The new vantage point makes it look as if Peggy is in the preferred birth-giving position, circa 1960. Supine, subservient, helpless.

I really am a very responsible girl, Peggy says, in a faraway voice.¹²

Everywhere you look, men are making jokes about having women, as they might have lunch or drinks. Whether the women want to be had is immaterial. It’s all part of a script that men and women know by heart. At Pete’s bachelor party, a woman coiffed like Marilyn Monroe slinks onstage in a Gentlemen Prefer Blondes dress, removing a black glove to organ music. The entire setting is theatrical, and not merely because it is a cabaret. The waitresses and the performer are playacting a certain ideal of femininity. The men are playacting the rituals of moneyed urban masculinity. At one end of the table sits the closeted gay art director Salvatore Romano¹³ playacting the straight young tomcat on the prowl. Do you have a girlfriend, Salvatore? Pete asks him. Come on, I’m Italian, he says, an ad-libbed nonanswer that leaves the evening’s script undisturbed.

A lot of the dialogue in Smoke conflates sex and ownership, women and property. Ken Cosgrove¹⁴ shows up at Pete’s party with employees from a nearby Automat; You press a button and they come out, says another of Pete’s coworkers, Paul Kinsey.¹⁵ When Don takes umbrage at Pete’s treatment of Peggy and cautions him to watch his mouth, Pete assumes that Don and Peggy are sleeping together.¹⁶ It’s not true, but we’re given to understand that it’s not beyond the realm of possibility: In this world, dominance and control are masculine, compassion and surrender are feminine, and that’s just how it is.

Although the dialogue sketches the characters in brisk strokes, it’s never purely functional. It returns again and again to control, and what it means to be in control, and how it feels to be controlled by someone else, and how words and images can be deployed to control how people perceive themselves, and the world.

Consider the agency’s condescension to Rachel Menken.¹⁷ It’s about controlling a story and an image. Rachel wants to change the store’s image because its narrative has grown stale. Don is pitching a campaign based on Sterling Cooper’s preconceived notions of what Menken’s Department Store is, and (to their mind) always will be. When Rachel balks, Don tries to shut her down by invoking her father. Rachel parries by telling Don and his colleagues that her father no longer runs the store because they just had their lowest sales year—a fact that proves the old story and image aren’t working. Pete senses that the agency is losing control of the meeting’s narrative and rides to what he thinks is Don’s rescue. Lighting Rachel’s cigarette, he asks why she came to Sterling Cooper when there are dozens of other agencies better suited to your needs, code for firms that employ Jews. Translation: We aren’t here to change the story or the image, lady, and if that’s what you want, you’d better ask someone else to give it to you.

If I wanted some man who was from the same village as my father to manage our accounts, I would have stayed where I was, Rachel says. Her unflappability would be impressive even if she weren’t the only woman in the room. But the Sterling Cooper boys keep pushing for the store to use coupons until Rachel says that she doesn’t want them, she wants something besides coupons, she wants your people, Mr. Draper—the gentiles.

Rachel calls Don on his BS, but rather than listen to her and bend to suit her needs, Don gets his back up. Rachel has punctured Don’s sense of entitlement, and it stings because he’s not used to that. Senior partner Roger Sterling (John Slattery¹⁸) cautions the room against getting emotional—a gendered adjective that in this case seems meant to control Don, by intimating that his behavior is unmanly. It doesn’t work because Don is in aggrieved mode, ridiculing Rachel’s notion of enticing strangers to visit a store for aspirational reasons. He is offended by the idea of taking the very illusion upon which American capitalism, an institution run by WASP industrialists, was founded, and applying it to a campaign for a Jewish-owned store whose clientele consists mainly of immigrants and their descendants. I’m not gonna let a woman talk to me like this. This meeting is over, Don says, and storms out.

He and Rachel find common ground during an amends-making dinner. She senses that Don feels like an outsider, too, and says there was a silver lining to that meeting: the chance to hear all the things I always assumed people were thinking. Their conversation is charged with sexual possibility, but Don’s presumptions dampen it. His end of the conversation is meant to jam Rachel into an ill-fitting narrative that other women, Joan especially, wear with pride. Don asks her why she isn’t married, which presumes that her life as a single professional is a way station on the road to marriage and motherhood. If I weren’t a woman I would be allowed to ask you the same questions, and if I weren’t a woman, I wouldn’t have to choose between putting on an apron and the thrill of making my father’s store what I always thought it should be, she replies. (This is another moment where Smoke condescends to the past.)

The Lucky Strike meeting is also about how language can shape perception and self-perception, and give a person or a company permission to do as it pleases. Lucky Strike honcho Lee Garner Sr. (John Cullum)¹⁹ says the company is about to get sued for false health claims. [END. 3] Roger, a master diplomat, blames media manipulation for the industry’s troubles. Lee gripes about government regulators. His son, Lee Jr. (Darren Pettie), moans that they might as well be living in Russia. They’re both miffed that they can’t do business exactly the way they want to. They’re the most entitled people in an episode filled with entitled people. They crave language that will cripple constraints, erase them, wipe them out like the Native Americans, who, Lee Garner Sr. insists, gave us America, for shit’s sake.

So Don comes up with Lucky Strike: It’s Toasted.²⁰ Don’s speech justifying the slogan is the most powerful moment in Smoke.²¹ It reframes all of the screenplay’s control issues as variants of Freud’s death wish, which Sterling Cooper’s researcher, Gretta (Gordana Rasovich), outlined in a report that Don threw away and Pete snuck into his office and stole. Don says that all advertising is based on one thing: happiness. In the context of Smoke, happiness means the ability to do as you please, without worrying about other people’s expectations, opinions, rules, or laws. Don tells the Lucky Strike gang that happiness is not the past; happiness is the future: a promise of something better than whatever you’ve got right now. Happiness is defined here as finding a way to give yourself permission to do whatever you’re inclined to do anyway.

The Smoke of the episode title is not just tobacco smoke; it is a wreath that obscures the inevitable facts of change, of loss or absence of control, of decline, of death. Smoke is the hair dye, the makeup, the camera face, the good side. It is the slogan, the homily, the maxim, the song lyric, the home-team motto, the billboard slogan that tells us who we are so that we don’t have to wonder.

Is Don smoke? Is he mirrors? What is his story? How did he get to be so persuasive?

The first time we see him, we’re looking at the back of his head. Don is introduced with a camera move that tracks from screen right to screen left through a crowded, smoky bar,²² then pushes in to find him sitting alone in a red booth: a broad-shouldered man in a dark suit. Subsequent shots reveal a circa-1960 dreamboat type along the lines of Rock Hudson or Kirk Douglas. His hair looks Brylcreemed. There’s an empty glass in front of him. He’s scribbling notes: Brand name. Freedom. Conversion. Lucky Strike. Old Gold. He stays seated as he interviews a busboy (Henry Afro-Bradley) about his smoking habits. We never see Don from head to toe in this scene, only in close-up. How tall is he? What kind of shoes is he wearing? Does he carry a briefcase?

We don’t know.

In the next scene, he’s introduced in a slightly blurry profile close-up, knocking on Midge’s door. When Midge opens the door, the camera stays on that angle, so that for the second time in Smoke, we’re looking at the back of Don’s head. Finally, there’s a cut to a wide shot of Don entering Midge’s apartment. It’s the first time that we see all of him. The glimpse lasts a few seconds, and then again we’re looking at the back of his head. We see his face briefly as he crosses Midge’s threshold, then he closes the door, shutting us out. Inside the apartment, the camera gives us a long look at Midge’s face, but Don remains a foreground blur, seen mostly from the back. When we finally get our first glimpse of Don from head to toe, it’s in the same frame with Midge, who is also pictured in totality; in the next scene, they’re both naked (under sheets), and Don immediately gets up and starts putting his clothes (his work uniform) back on.

In the bar scene, we learned nothing about Don except that he’s probably in advertising and that he’s concerned about how to sell cigarettes at a time when the government is cracking down on the tobacco industry. In the scene with Midge, the talk is mainly about work (she’s an illustrator, and they seem bonded by their creativity), with fuzzy detours into their relationship. Throughout the rest of the episode, it’s work, work, work and words, words, words. Don chooses his words carefully, to sell pitches to clients and his image to colleagues. He rarely reveals more than he wants to.

Is Don as selfish, cold, and reactionary as he seems?

His scenes with Rachel suggest otherwise. And his final scene with Peggy very nearly confirms it.

Peggy thanks her new boss for sticking up for her with Pete Campbell, and nervously places her hand on top of his. What little we’ve learned about Peggy makes us think that this is anathema to her. She’s only doing it because it’s the kind of thing that Joan advised her to do.

Descriptions of Don’s previous relationships with secretaries suggest that his removal of Peggy’s hand is also a break from tradition.

First of all, Peggy, he says, I’m your boss, not your boyfriend. Second of all, if you ever let Pete Campbell go through my trash again you won’t be able to find a job selling sandwiches in Penn Station.

Peggy apologizes for letting Pete in, then assures Don that she’s not that kind of girl.

Don’s boss mask falls—but only for an instant.

Of course, he says. Go home, put your curlers in. Get a fresh start tomorrow.

---

1 Matthew Weiner wrote Smoke Gets in Your Eyes in 1999 as a spec script. At the time, he was a staff writer on Ted Danson’s sitcom Becker, eager to make the leap into drama. It somehow crossed David Chase’s desk; as a result, Weiner became a key creative player on The Sopranos, writing or cowriting a number of seminal episodes (among them Unidentified Black Males, The Test Dream, Kennedy and Heidi, and The Blue Comet). Yet, terrific though Mad Men’s pilot may be, there are ways in which it’s clearly the work of a less mature writer than the Weiner beloved by Sopranos fans—it is only the first four episodes, mainly the pilot, that make ironic jokes at the expense of the era in which it’s set. Such gags seem a bit like showboating by a writer eager for attention, but they’re forgivable in light of how substantial the episode is as a whole. Social anthropology is one of Weiner’s main concerns—we’re dropped into this world and allowed to draw our own conclusions about it, as was generally the case with The Sopranos (at least before Chase began his meta-critique of audience bloodlust).—Andrew Johnston

2 Although this is considered Jon Hamm’s breakthrough role, he’d previously had minor roles on several TV shows, including Charmed and The Division. He’s since had roles in movies such as The Town and Clear History, as well as guest roles on several TV shows, including 30 Rock and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.

3 The Drapers could plausibly live in any of a number of Westchester commuter suburbs but Ossining is an homage to John Cheever, who moved there in 1961. According to the exhibit Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, Matthew Weiner opened the first writers’ meeting of each new season by reading a Cheever short story aloud.—Amy Cook

4 It’s also a Well, of course moment. Mad Men debuted in 2007, on the heels of the finale of The Sopranos, one of many cable dramas from the aughts that were built around married men who got action on the side.—Matt Zoller Seitz

5 Maggie Siff previously had roles on Rescue Me and Law & Order: SVU. She went on to play Tara Knowles on Sons of Anarchy.

6 Rosemarie DeWitt has had roles in Cinderella Man, Rachel Getting Married, and on Showtime’s United States of Tara.

7 Christina Hendricks had roles on several TV shows, including ER and Firefly, before taking the role of Joan Holloway. She’s since been in films such as Drive and John Slattery’s God’s Pocket. Her Mad Men character Joan shares a first and last name with the heroine of John Cheever’s short story Torch Song.—MZS

8 The IBM Selectric typewriter was not actually introduced until July 1961; it replaced the ribbon and typebar found in its predecessors with a typeball. The Electric’s typeball and ribbon moved back and forth, but unlike traditional typewriters, the paper stayed in one place, and the Selectric could print different fonts on the same page. Matthew Weiner has said that he knew that this was an anachronism, but the more period-correct 1960 models were harder to come by and repair, and also much louder, which created more sound issues.—RKL

9 Elisabeth Moss played presidential daughter Zoey Bartlet on The West Wing from 1999 to 2006, among other roles, and went on to star in the acclaimed miniseries Top of the Lake and in Charlie McDowell’s The One I Love.—LP

10 Vincent Kartheiser had several movie roles from the nineties on, beginning with Tony Bill’s Untamed Heart, and was best known for playing Connor on the TV show Angel before Mad Men.

11 It is believable that Peggy would not know exactly how birth control pills work. The episode takes place in March 1960, but the Food and Drug Administration didn’t approve Enovid, Peggy’s prescribed birth control, for contraceptive use until June 23, 1960. It’s not a mistake, though: The Pill had been in general use for three years before it was cleared by the FDA. It has been conservatively estimated that at least half a million women used it before its approval, without appropriate directions for its use or full knowledge of its risks.—Roberta K. Lipp

12 Then comes the first of many perversely funny insert shots/cutaways in the manner of The Sopranos, on which Matthew Weiner served as writer-producer: As the doctor probes her and tells her, the fact is, even in our modern times, easy women don’t find husbands, she stares blankly at the first significant object that captures her eye, a wall calendar advertising Ehrlich Autoclave in Lodi, New Jersey.—MZS

13 Salvatore Romano is played by Bryan Batt, who had previously served most of his career on Broadway, with major roles in La Cage aux Folles (2005), Beauty and the Beast (2002), and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (1993–1994).

14 Ken Cosgrove is played by Aaron Staton, who had previously been seen on 7th Heaven and Law & Order: SVU.

15 Paul Kinsey is played by Michael Gladis, who was seen on Third Watch and Hack before Mad Men.

16 When the phone operators find out that Peggy is replacing Don’s previous secretary, Eleanor, they ask why, and Joan says she moved on because Don wasn’t interested.—MZS

17 Not only has the firm failed to visit the store, but they also serve traif (shrimp cocktail) at the meeting.—AC

18 Slattery had roles in several TV shows before Mad Men, including Sex and the City, Desperate Housewives, and K Street. He has taken more comedic roles since Mad Men, including Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp, which reunites him with Jon Hamm. He also directed God’s Pocket, costarring Christina Hendricks.

19 Known for Northern Exposure, One Life to Live, and The Day After.

20 It’s Toasted was in fact adopted as the Lucky Strike slogan in 1917, and remains on its packaging as of this writing—it refers to the heating process, distinct from sun-drying. The slogan’s origins are debated, with credit going to either the advertising agency Lord & Thomas or Percival S. Hill, a then-former president of the American Tobacco Company.—Lily Puckett

21 A Jewish-owned department store says it wants to change its image, only to be pitched a campaign that reinforces its existing image, and when the manager balks, the point man for the account appeals to patriarchal authority: the manager’s father, who owns the store. We see language being shaped in response to language: Don’s Lucky Strike pitch, which is essentially meaningless, takes the piss out of the federal government’s rules against claiming that smoking is approved by doctors. Don wins over the client’s reps by telling them that advertising appeals to the consumer’s desire to be told that he can go where he wants, and do what he wants, and reinvent himself when he wants, and not to worry, because in the end, he’s going to be okay.—MZS

22 According to the script, Don is drinking at the Knick Knack Bar.—AC

SEASON 1 / EPISODE 2

Ladies Room

Written by Matthew Weiner

Directed by Alan Taylor

Nannies and Eggs

"S moke Gets in Your Eyes (S1E1) was set mainly in the workplace. Ladies Room" goes outside the office, letting us see more of the characters’ private lives and developing them as personalities apart from Sterling Cooper. As written by Matthew Weiner and directed by Alan Taylor, it is also the first fully formed example of Mad Men using symbolism to complicate its stories rather than tie them up in a bow. Every scene is filled with images, gestures, or lines that seem to have a single, easily graspable meaning, but become richer when another scene comes along that builds upon them, or opens them up.

Look at the first scene: a double date with Roger Sterling, his wife, Mona,¹ and Don and Betty Draper.² The episode starts with close-ups of a waiter’s hands cracking an egg and squeezing a lemon over a Caesar salad. Put another egg in it, says Roger, seated next to Mona. When she balks, he insists that one egg is good, two is better. They’re seated in a red booth, not too different from the one where we first met Don in Smoke.

Roger brings up his childhood nanny, reminding us that the Sterlings and Drapers belong to a social class that can subcontract parenting when it wants to. Roger says his nanny used to make fried chicken for him to take to school, and that he used to have another nanny, a German girl with an enormous bosom,³ but his parents got rid of her after the Lindbergh kidnapping case.⁴ The scene is a great showcase for John Slattery, an actor who excels at playing elegant raconteurs who are aware of their ridiculousness and play it up to disarm their listeners. It also further defines Don as a mysterious man who apparently grew up lacking the things that his tablemates have.

But much more so, the scene is the beginning of an episode that’s as much of an argument, or an examination of arguments, as it is a story. The juxtaposition of a stolen baby and two cracked eggs tells us which thematic roads we’re about to travel down. [END. 1] Ladies Room is mainly about women’s self-images and life choices, and how both are shaped by ideas of what men and women should be. Why do we want the things we want? it asks. Is it because we really want them, or because we’ve been conditioned to believe that we should?

Now look at what the next scene does to the talk about nannies and eggs, aspirations and class consciousness. The instant that Betty and Mona get up to go to the ladies’ room, our ears prick up, because this room gives the episode its title. But the ladies’ room is more than a room and more than a phrase. It’s a prism revealing new facets of the action. You can read the phrase ladies’ room in terms of rigid gender segregation: one washroom for women, another for men. You can look at it in terms of feminine secrets: The ladies’ room is where women go to fix their faces and have private conversations about men. Or you could read it as a comment on how trapped Mad Men’s women sometimes feel, even though they might not think of themselves that way.

In the washroom, Betty seems ill at ease in her flawless skin, and there’s an undertone of fear to her cheerful remarks. She says she’s having trouble getting her hands to work. Mona helps her with her face, and the ritual underlines the effort that goes into maintaining the pristine facade of femininity that Roger and Don value; Mona says Betty’s lips help her hold on to a man like that.⁵ In the restroom, we get the episode’s second appearance by nannies, this time in the flesh rather than in dialogue: the African American washroom attendants. They wait on the white women in near silence, then complain about the trend toward smaller purses (which cuts into their tips, because the bags aren’t big enough for billfolds).

Don is the only person who won’t share. I can’t tell you about my childhood, Don says. It would ruin the first half of my novel. We surmise that he probably didn’t have a nanny and doesn’t want to say so. [END. 2] Most of the people at that table have, or have had, nannies. And the washroom attendants remind us that they still do. They are still being babysat.

Betty tries to get to know Don better, to make him seem more real to her and their marriage more secure. She married a phantom. Don doesn’t like to talk about himself, Betty tells Roger and Mona. I know better than to ask. I think I may know more about your wife than I know about my own, Roger tells Don after the spouses have left the table, which is funny now that we know Don’s wife doesn’t know much about Don. Driving home, Betty says that she likes seeing Don like that. You were sitting on my good side, says Don, turning a comment about his behavior into a joke. Betty is terrified: of losing Don specifically, and of being alone generally. She remarks that Roger gave Don an invitation to confide, but Don says he was raised to think that talking about yourself was a sin of pride. Betty’s remark in the car was yet another invitation to confide, but again Don declined. Later, Don sleeps, and Betty sidles up next to him and asks, Who’s in there? (She’s looking at the back of his head.) [END. 3]

These are subtle moments, and they seem fleeting, but there’s loneliness in them: Don’s as well as Betty’s. They are married to each other, but you wonder how well they know each other.

The scene fades to white, and the white becomes the pebbled glass of an office partition. Peggy walks into the frame and is joined by Joan in what feels like the second leg of the tutorial journey that started in the pilot. Approving Peggy’s clothing choices, Joan tells her that accessories are next. The word accessories has at least three applicable meanings here: the items of non-clothing that define a woman’s look; the lifestyle accessory, such as a boyfriend or a husband or children, or one of those houses in the suburbs that Joan craves; and the criminal variant: accessory after the fact. For two weeks I’ve been telling people I have a job in Manhattan, Peggy tells Joan as they enter the ladies’ room. Joan marvels at Peggy’s optimism, or naïveté, which overwhelms Peggy’s knowledge that she’s at the bottom of the food chain.

There are two mirrors in this scene. One is the bathroom mirror into which a crying secretary weeps as Peggy looks on. The other is the secretary herself, a human mirror of the miseries that other women in the episode grapple with.

In Don’s office, Harry,⁶ Sal, Ken, and another copywriter, Dale, [END. 4] unpack cans of Right Guard aerosol deodorant.⁷ A modern deodorant for a modern man, Ken says, starting a Don Draper free-associative hype-fest. The testosterone is thick; in the next scene a fireball flares behind the glass of Don’s office door. Ken’s coworkers test out the can on him, pinning him on the table in a mock gang rape. Let’s pretend it’s prom night, Dale says. You’re the girl. Bert Cooper (Robert Morse),⁸ cofounder of Sterling Cooper, grabs Don away, trying to get him to work on the Nixon campaign. Don objects on the grounds that even though Nixon doesn’t have an ad agency, his campaign manager seems to know what he’s doing. Echoing language used in the Right Guard gang bang, Don asks why they should chase a girl who doesn’t want to get caught.

Paul Kinsey is the only man in the office besides Don to treat Peggy like a human being, and to try to avoid piggish language when he’s around women, but we can’t be sure of his motives. He’s polite to Peggy at her desk, inviting her to lunch, then accepting her no graciously (Toodle-loo!), but later, when he gives her the tour of the office, he moves in for a kiss, looming over her. He wants to close the door and do it on the couch, and when she resists, he asks, Do you belong to someone? (Any woman who doesn’t belong to a man can be taken.) I think we’ve misunderstood each other, Peggy says on her way out. "But there is someone else, right?" says Paul, still not getting it.

The pressure weighs on Peggy. After her encounter with Paul, there is a shot of the back of her neck (a touch of Draper-cam) that makes us feel like a vulture perched on her shoulder. Peggy considers going home early until Joan shows up to complain that Peggy mistyped her letters. Peggy mistyped Joan’s letters because she did them after lunch, and the lunch was with the boys in the office, who speculated on how quickly she’d put out and under what circumstances, and even implied that she’d do it if they paid her. It’s hard to hit the right keys when your hands are shaking. The language the men use around the women is casually degrading. Its jocularity doesn’t mask its contempt. Each workday brings a hundred tiny assaults and smiling assertions of dominance.

"I’m from Bay Ridge; we have manners.⁹. . .Why can’t they just leave it alone?" Peggy asks.

And here we see a difference in perception between Peggy and Joan. Where Peggy is a burgeoning sixties woman, Joan has absorbed the mentality of the 1950s and doesn’t seem inclined to let go. Peggy bucks against the status quo. Joan enforces it.

As Peggy retypes the correspondence, we hear the Andrews Sisters singing I Can Dream, Can’t I?¹⁰ A low-angled shot looking up at Peggy makes it seem as though the ceiling is closing in on her. She’s trapped at this desk, in this office, in this role. The scene shifts into a slow-motion anti-reverie, a rancid parody of bliss. The dogs of the office drift past Peggy, sniffing her out. We’re reminded again that, in this world, ladies don’t have as much room to maneuver as men. More often, they’re pinned to chairs. Peggy’s anxious expressions confirm that the office can feel like a prison, or a zoo.

Things aren’t much better in the domestic sphere that Joan wants to graduate into. The scene with Betty and her pal Francine (Anne Dudek)¹¹ includes some of the same diminishing, self-loathing language that Joan lays on Peggy. Francine asks Betty if she might challenge the current PTA president who is obsessed with nutrition, although you wouldn’t know it to look at her. Francine, you’re terrible, Betty says, grinning; it’s a two-woman sewing circle, and their needles are sharp. [END. 5] A big part of Betty’s fear, which manifests itself as physical illness, comes from worrying that her seemingly ideal marriage to a handsome husband and great provider is built on a foundation of sand. That’s why the talk of the divorcée Helen Bishop (Darby Stanchfield),¹² who has just moved into the neighborhood, rattles her so; not for nothing does Betty say in the car that lobster Newburg and vodka gimlets should get a divorce. Moments after seeing Helen for the first time, Betty loses control of her hands and crashes her car. Is she an old lady? Betty asks Francine at lunch. Divorced, Francine replies—same thing, as far as they’re concerned. Francine says divorced condescendingly, but there’s a hint of pity: Helen has a nine-year-old boy and a baby. That’s awful, says Betty. All on her own? Can you imagine worrying about money at this point in our lives? Francine asks. No, says Betty.

The image of the traditional American family, heterosexual and white, is central. Ladies Room studies it as one might a sacred text. The episode glamorizes the constructed image of the Eisenhower-era, Leave It to Beaver–style nuclear family by showing us beautiful people with beautiful homes and clothes and cars, as if they, too, were fantasy objects, things that other people dream of having. No matter how critical the lens, you can’t photograph beauty in a beautiful way and not make the story feel just a bit like an advertisement. At the same time, though, Weiner’s script undermines the glamour by showing how people cling to the traditional family image out of fear, in a faintly tribal way.

There is talk that Helen’s presence in the neighborhood might lower real estate values. Even Don doesn’t understand why an unentangled life might be pleasant for a woman; as independent-minded as he is, he’s absorbed messages about what women should be. During another afternoon tryst with Midge, Don spies her new TV and wants to know who gave it to her and won’t let up until she tells him. She throws the TV out the window, a spontaneous gesture of contempt for Don’s nosiness but also for the assumptions behind it.

There’s a lot of talk of health and well-being, [END. 6] of the emotional and psychological kind—as well as about how women’s health worries were dismissed in the sixties. Betty tells Don that her physicians could find no evidence of physical ailment, but that one of her doctors recommended she see a psychiatrist. He said it could be a nervous condition, Betty says. Nervous about what? Driving? sneers Don. Acceptance of psychiatry didn’t really begin to flower in the United States until the 1970s, and even then it was the object of half-deprecating jokes in Woody Allen films, New Yorker cartoons, and on The Bob Newhart Show.

Later, Betty wonders if she really needs a psychiatrist, and Don says, I always thought people saw psychiatrists when they were unhappy. But I look at you, and this, and them, he says, indicating the children, and that, he says, touching the face that he admires so much, and I think, are you unhappy? Of course I’m happy, Betty replies. Well, that’ll be thirty-five dollars, Don says. You’re welcome. While this is outwardly a tender, funny scene, there’s a lot of fear in it. Don fears that his wife is unhappy or sick and cannot be made well. Betty fears that her husband is a mystery to her, that their marriage is a mystery to her, that it’s all fragile, that it can be taken away at any moment, and that she might end up like Helen Bishop.

The pitch meeting for Right Guard is a drama of uncertainties. It drives home that to talk about what men and women want is to enter a realm of constructed desires. Sal shows Don a mock-up of an ad exploiting the astronaut craze. Paul Kinsey says it’s shiny, that it’s from the future, a place so close to us now, filled with wonder and ease. Except some people think of the future and it upsets them, says Don. They see a rocket, they start building a bomb shelter. How did you get there? Paul wants to know. I don’t think it’s ridiculous to assume we’re looking for other planets because this one will end, Don says, carrying his household unease into the office.

Shifting gears, he offers, We should be asking ourselves, what do women want? He’s articulating the question every man on the show should ask every once in a while for kicks, to get out of their comfort zone, to see themselves as women see them. Dale suggests adding a chesty alien girl, and Don cuts him off. What Don wants to know is, what would make a woman want to buy this deodorant for a man?

The slack-jawed look on every other man’s face confirms that Don has struck a nerve. Not only do they not know what to say, they don’t know what to think. Don seems close to a breakthrough. He sits for a moment, then takes a drag off his cigarette.

But what he comes up with isn’t a flash of insight. It’s a turning inward, and it could be another reaction to the drama at home with his unhappy wife.

Don says women want a cowboy. He’s quiet and strong. He always brings the cattle home safe.

Then he catches himself, and has a near-breakthrough.

What if they want something else, he asks, some . . . mysterious wish that we’re ignoring?

---

1 Talia Balsam has had several television roles, including parts in Without a Trace, K Street, and L.A. Doctors. Her first major role was Nancy Croft in a three-episode arc on Happy Days in 1977, which followed the Fonz to Hollywood. She and John Slattery have been married since 1998.

2 January Jones had roles in American Wedding, Love Actually, and We Are Marshall before Mad Men.

3 John Cheever’s short story The Common Day features a cook named Greta (which is close to the name of the firm’s researcher) who has the breasts of an operatic contralto.

4 Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s baby, Charles Jr., was kidnapped on March 1, 1932; his body was discovered on May 12, 1932. The investigation of the kidnapping and murder lasted two years, and it was one of the most publicized crimes of the twentieth century.—LP

5 This scene also shows us some verbal choreography. Betty says to Mona, I don’t know if I told you, but my mother died three months ago. Mona says nothing. Nothing! The attendant then says, I’m sorry. There are other ladies waiting to use the mirror. So what you hear is, Betty saying her mother died, and then someone responding to Betty, I’m sorry.—RKL

6 Rich Sommer appeared in The Devil Wears Prada, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Elementary, and The League.

7 Right Guard deodorant launched its aerosol in the early sixties.

8 Morse was known for originating the role of J. Pierpont Finch in the musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1961), for which he won a Tony. He later starred in the 1967 film version in the same role.

9 Tony Manero’s date might beg to differ.—MZS

10 Written by Sammy Fain and Irving Kahal in 1937 for the musical Right This Way, the song was made famous by the Andrews Sisters, who rerecorded it in 1949.

11 Dudek appeared in several television shows and movies, including Bones, Invasion, and White Chicks, before taking the role of Francine. She also had a costarring role on House M.D., which ran simultaneously with Mad Men.

12 Stanchfield is best known for her role as Abby Whelan on Scandal.

SEASON 1 / EPISODE 3

Marriage of Figaro

Written by Tom Palmer

Directed by Ed Bianchi

Old Dick Whitman

There are a lot of dissatisfied characters on Mad Men , and a lot of characters with secrets, and Marriage of Figaro combines the two. The result is an episode that’s mainly about what it means to keep your dissatisfaction a secret, and details the effort and stress the secret-keeping requires, and the pain it causes. At the center are four characters: Pete Campbell, Peggy Olson, Rachel Menken, and Don Draper. Because each of their subplots could be lifted out and turned into a self-contained short story (or short film), let’s look at them one by one.

Pete’s Story

Pete has been following Don around like a yippy little dog since the pilot, simultaneously seeking his approval and plotting to show him up. He does share one key trait with his nemesis: He’s not happy being married. I missed you, Draper, Pete says upon his return from Niagara Falls; the use of Don’s last name is a too-familiar touch, given their power differential. Then it must not have been much of a honeymoon, Don says, and the look on Pete’s face indicates that it’s true. When Pete reenters the office, his coworkers press for salacious details. Pete says trysts with the wife are something a gentleman never discusses. He doesn’t react to Ken’s reverie about the coat-check girl at 21, declines an invitation to Lansky’s, citing plans with Trudy, and says wistfully, There’s going to be dinner waiting for me when I get home. He is trying to will himself into an emotional place where he can be happy in a lifelong monogamous relationship.

This and other statements amount to implied promises of fidelity. But on the cusp of his wedding to Trudy, Pete felt a woman up at his bachelor party, then spontaneously cheated on Trudy with Peggy. Whenever he sees Peggy, a charge passes between them. Their shared glances are neither sly nor innocuous. It’s a wonder their coworkers haven’t found them out.

Peggy’s Story

Like Pete, Peggy is unhappy in her job and wants something more, although unlike Pete, she’s basically a decent and honorable person who would rather not resort to treachery to achieve her goals. [END. 1]

But much of her anxiety in this episode is about Pete, and the strain of keeping Pete’s secret while he treats her like a second-class citizen because she’s a secretary and a woman in a testosterone-soaked office where Harry Crane kicks off a meeting with a powerful female client by telling a joke whose punch line is a woman’s death.

I should be on the list for the meeting, Pete tells her early in the episode, then quickly follows this up with I’m married now.

I understand, Peggy says. It never happened.

A lot of people are having sex, sometimes in situations or configurations that society wouldn’t approve of (Don is exhibit A), and it’s a constant topic of conversation, but the talk is always framed in a particular way. When men talk about it, it’s jokey, with a hostile edge. When single men talk about sex, it’s usually in terms of competition, acquisition, domination, and humiliation. Or it’s with a sense of slightly comical regret at having to take oneself off the market, as Harry Crane and Pete Campbell have done. When women talk about sex, they tend to avoid descriptions of body parts or the act itself, and their language is colored by romantic or matrimonial longing, or by a frisson of danger (circa-1960 American women aren’t as free to talk about, or have, sex—not in this world, anyway).

All this weighs heavily on Peggy, who seems more observant, intelligent, and sensitive than many of her coworkers, both male and female (that’s why the filmmakers gave her that subjective slow-motion scene with all the men checking her out at the end of Ladies Room (S1E2) because the interior of her mind is an interesting place to be). She seems shocked by behavior that others accept as a fact of life, as well as by the expectation (spelled out by Joan in the pilot) that she treat this job as a temporary way station en route to landing a husband, having kids, quitting her job, and moving to the suburbs. Pete is the most exciting thing to happen to her since she got here, but also the most shameful. Their secret connection underlines the unequal power dynamic between men and women at Sterling Cooper, as well as Peggy’s anxiety at feeling trapped or constrained but not having the language to articulate why. Elisabeth Moss’s extraordinary expressiveness is never more striking than in the many scenes where Peggy is teased, talked over, corrected, condescended to, and otherwise put in a defensive position. In Moss’s eyes we see glimmers of outrage yoked to intellect, characteristics rarely seen in the eyes of other characters, be they secretaries or executives.

Rachel’s Story

Rachel’s secret is that she feels isolated from nearly everything and everyone, and has developed a crush on Don Draper as a result. Somehow, Don gets her—or at least that’s her impression. She fights the urge to act on her feelings because he’s married, and because something about Don unnerves her. There’s a darkness to him, and a furtiveness. But Don and Rachel have a connection; we saw it during Smoke Gets in Your Eyes (S1E1) which introduced Rachel in a meet-hostile with Don that resolved itself in mutual curiosity over a dinner that felt like a date. In Figaro, Pete notices the connection, and says he’s never seen Don Draper turn it on before.

Something about the way you talk always restores my confidence, Rachel tells Don at the office in Figaro. I have a deep voice, Don says. It’s a joke, but David Mamet fans may recall a famous line from his 1987 directorial debut, House of Games, delivered by Joe Mantegna’s cardsharp and master manipulator: It’s called a confidence game. Why? Because you give me your confidence? No. Because I give you mine.¹

Rachel and Don’s confidence exchange occurs after Don admits that nobody from Sterling Cooper has visited the store whose renovation they were hired to mastermind. Don rectifies that error by stopping by later in the day. Beneath their conversations lie themes of identity, rootlessness, and self-reinvention in the aftermath of catastrophe, notions that already seem crucial to Mad Men. The original tenants laid the last bricks the day before the Crash, Rachel says of her father’s store, now her store (if only in the managerial sense). Boy, were they in for a surprise. This part of their discussion is about making a home in the wreckage of a life abandoned by someone else. It’s about how a chance at happiness is intertwined with the idea of the future, as laid out in Don’s Lucky Strike pitch from Smoke. Menken’s was a store out of step with the 1950s, a decade in which marketers invented the teenager as a separate consumer class (not kids, not adults); it will be even more estranged from the sixties, a decade driven by youth. Menken’s is entombed by its history.

Don’s dropped cuff link early in Figaro sets the stage for Rachel’s gift of a replacement set shaped like knights. Remember that, in the second episode, Don proposed that what women really want is a strong, silent type—the archetype of the cowboy, the knight of American mythology. It’s a stereotype of what women want, and Don eventually abandons it and urges his colleagues to ask a woman instead.² Things get complicated when Rachel and Don go to the roof and visit Rachel’s guard dogs, Carla and Leona, and share a kiss backed by a period Manhattan skyline that might as well be a backdrop in a comic-book film. They protect you, and they listen, Rachel says of her dogs, a description that also applies to the idealized knight or cowboy.³

What is this? Rachel asks Don when he makes a pass at her. Don’t try to convince me that you were ever unloved, he says with the arrogant certainty of a man who feels unloved himself. Don is taking advantage of Rachel’s distress, but he is also sincere—a contradictory mix of impressions that reconcile themselves through his eyes, which are at once resentful and beseeching, and his voice, which has a ragged edge. She pushes him away, but something in her face suggests that she could still invite him back. In his peculiar, counterintuitive way, Don has gained her confidence.

Don’s Story

Don has three secrets. They are, in order from least to most disturbing:

1. He is great at his job, and more thoughtful than most people who are good at it, as we can see by his demeanor in the strategy meeting and the lead-up conversation about the notorious Volkswagen Lemon ad.⁴ But Don is depressed about being stuck in a sham marriage to Betty—a pantomime of the suburban house/beautiful wife/two kids ideal that every adult in the United States, but corporate executives especially, was required to embrace circa 1960.⁵

In the powder room, Don feels ill at ease. This is a feminine space: perfume, floral pink washcloths, white soap resting in a ceramic hand. He dares not disturb Betty’s universe.

The facade of suburban normalcy falls away at his daughter Sally’s birthday party, where Don catches a glimpse of a happy couple through the viewfinder of his movie camera, gets drunk,⁶ bonds with Helen Bishop, disappears while fetching Sally’s cake, contemplates suicide at a railroad crossing, and returns home late with a gift of a new dog. This thrills Sally,⁷ but Betty isn’t happy, because she’s the one who’ll have to take care of it while Don’s in Manhattan all day—doing what, exactly? Well . . .

2. Don is having two affairs, one physical (with Midge), the other still largely emotional (with Rachel). In Figaro he tells Rachel he’s married. She says she didn’t ask because she didn’t want to know. He says the marriage is something that shouldn’t have happened.

3. Don Draper seems to be a construct of some kind, a new life erected atop the rubble of an older one, like Menken’s Department Store. We’ve gotten intimations of that construct before, including the shot of Don examining his army medal in Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. But Marriage of Figaro edges it further into daylight in its opening scene, when a man approaches Don on the train and addresses him as Old Dick Whitman? What are the chances? At Sally’s party, Francine admiringly describes Don as That man! But it is his handsome image that she is admiring, not the man underneath.

In retrospect, the opening train conversation seems like the event that fractures Don’s psyche and leads to his impulsive pass at Rachel, then his drunken misbehavior at Sally’s birthday party, culminating in the scene at the crossing. (The episode is bracketed by trains.) The screenplay is coy about giving up details, but we sense from the terror in Don’s eyes on the commuter train and his increasingly pathetic actions at home that the man was right: Don is not who he appears to be. There’s somebody else in there, and whoever he is, he’s so miserable that it’s a wonder he’s still alive.⁸

---

1 This episode’s director, Ed Bianchi, subtly signals how Don and Rachel’s mutual fascination removes impediments that would otherwise come between them: They face each other in a long shot that pictures them from head to toe, facing off as equals.

2 But even stereotypes can contain a kernel of truth. In American mythology, the Old West gun-fighter is a knight in a Stetson, galloping around on his noble steed, righting wrongs; there are women who fantasize about men like this, even as they recognize that the image is a cultural construct. Rachel might be one of those women, thus the cuff links.

3 The description could also apply to the hero of the then-current TV Western series Have Gun—Will Travel, who was named Paladin, another word for knight.—MZS

4 The now famous ad, which Don hates, was done by real-life ad agency Doyle Dane Bernbach and featured a blunt shot of the Volkswagen Beetle with a single large-type word below it: LEMON. The copy underneath dispelled rumors that the car was no good, concluding: We pluck the lemons; you get the plums. Discussions of the Volkswagen Beetle appear in both halves of the episode, first in the meeting where Don and the copywriters discuss the Lemon ad in Playboy magazine (when Pete pronounces it brilliant, Roger says, I’ll tell you what brilliance in advertising is: ninety-nine cents) and then at the party (Helen drives a Volkswagen Beetle, which supposedly will hurt her chances with men because the car has no backseat). The Volkswagen is one of many harbingers of the fifties turning into the sixties; the car became increasingly popular as the decade wore on, and by the end, the VW Bus was practically the official vehicle of the counterculture. The reaction to the ad offers a window into the art/commerce tension that drives every ad campaign on Mad Men (Roger’s comment sums it all up nicely). The Volkswagen conversation also feels like a preemptive comment on the obsessive scrutiny that the show would get. A fair bit of the attention asked if Mad Men was more a triumph of perception than reality, suggesting it wasn’t really as clever or deep as it seemed to think it was, and that people who liked it were just pretentious. Love it or hate it, Don says, "the fact remains, we’ve been talking about this for the last fifteen minutes. And this is Playboy."—AC & MZS

5 If Don’s home life seems particularly claustrophobic, the structure of the episode reinforces that. The episode is divided into two halves: Manhattan and Ossining, and the suburban half mirrors the city half, hammering home a sense of repetition.—RKL

6 Don needs a church key can opener to tap his beers before tackling the playhouse. Although the beer brand is generic, the lack of a pull tab is specifically 1960.—AC

7 Sally is played by Kiernan Shipka, whose first professional credit was as Little Girl on an episode of Monk. She voiced Jinora on The Legend of Korra and played Cathy Dollanganger in Flowers in the Attic.

8 Although they have little in common, plot-wise, Figaro has the distanced, despairing mood of John Cheever’s short story about a onetime track star drinking

Reviews for Mad Men Carousel

[jinjer-641812 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

UPDATE: Just finished watching the series. The book was the perfect companion. I definitely wish there was a book like this for every series that I watch.

I read the corresponding chapter in the book after watching each episode. I'm sure I'll do a rewatch of the series some day and, when I do, I think it would be good to read the chapter first and then watch the corresponding episode. Why? Because the book describes various camera shots and other interesting film-making stuff that I totally missed. For the re-watch, I would know what to keep an eye out for. I already know the plot and how it all ends so I wouldn't be worried about spoilers.
---------------------------------------
People read certain episodic reviewers because they want to have a virtual conversation with somebody who's as obsessed with a show as they are. They read multiple reviews of the same TV episode because they want to see the same show through different eyes. OMG yes!!! So it's not just me who fires up Google after every episode of a brilliant series to see what has been written about it? That's how I discovered this book. It was mentioned in the Vulture recap of Season 1, Episode 8, The Hobo Code. A brand new hardcover on Amazon is $65 so I decided I had better explore the free ebook via Hoopla first.

Saturday night I had an email from Amazon Prime asking me if I wanted to try AMC Plus for two months at 99 cents per month. YES! Thank you! Four nights later, I was done with Season 1. I've just finished skimming through the ebook and it's everything I want and more. In depth reviews of each episode, footnotes, endnotes, little drawings, endless rabbitholes...

After agonizing for hours over various prices and conditions of used hardcovers, I finally used my Chase points to get a brand new paperback from Amazon. It arrives June 3rd.

[meritocrat-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

SJW interpretation of Mad MenYou were immediately drawn to Mad Men and couldn’t quite put a finger on why. There was something seductive about a show set at a NYC ad agency in the early 60s. You could see a woman guiltlessly pursing marriage and family, or a man standing up to cry-bullying. It seemed a welcome escape from today’s matriarchy.This is what the show’s creators counted on. Let them come here with the promise of experiencing a more sane time, then we will show them by deception just how bad the period really was, how poorly women were used and mistreated, how much upper and middle class whites looked down on blacks and most of all how empty everyone’s life was.It’s how well written and performed the show is that is the problem. It takes a keen eye to see the exaggeration and manipulation. Mad Man is diabolical in its portrayal of married life in the 60s. The reality, as study after study shows, is that women were happier in the 60s than they are today. And before the rise of the welfare state blacks were doing much better. These facts must not be let out!But for social justice warrior, Matt Zoller Seitz, the show did not go far enough in distorting reality and manipulating viewers. The assassination of MLK, for example, was a missed opportunity to put a minor black character center stage. Artistic integrity be damned. Seitz clearly shares the dominant view of art within mainstream entertainment today, that’s its only real purpose is to perpetuate myths that keep the left in power.