Good grief, but I love thinking too much about this show.
- In his recent interview with the New York Times, Matthew Weiner said of his tentative seven-season plan, "My plan always, and it’s how I pitched the show to AMC, is, let me show the difference between these people at the beginning of the ’60s and the end of the ’60s. You see how adult they are when it starts. But I guarantee you when we look back after the finale, you will say, ‘Look how young they were.’ And you will look back with nostalgia." I think that's already true - at least, I was surprised by how young the actors looked to me now rewatching Season One. I particularly think that the flashbacks in "Waldorf Stories" give a different sense of where Don is at the beginning of the series - it feels more like we come in on him still shaping the myth of Don Draper.
- I liked the third season less upon rewatch than I expected. It still contains some of my favorite episodes - "Shut the Door, Have a Seat," "Guy Walks Into an Advertising Agency," and "The Grown-Ups" (a personal favorite for its take on television spectatorship) - and some moments I really love. (Nothing will match the feeling of recognizing the opening strains of "Bye Bye Birdie" - a longtime favorite of mine - at the beginning of "Love Among the Ruins" when I first watched it.) But the season's got two major issues in Suzanne Farrell - easily the worst of any of Don's conquests thus far - and Conrad Hilton. I found that knowing both will be gone by the end of the season really drains away whatever patience I was willing to employ when I watched the season live. Additionally, I think in retrospect that the third season's conceptual departures - like "The Fog" or "Seven Twenty Three" - don't work as well as episodes like "The Jet Set" or "The Summer Man." (Though now I'm convinced that somewhere within me there's an essay about deconstructing the awkward intersections of "The Fog," The Help, Medgar Evers and White Lady Problems.) The last quibble is one that may very well still be addressed - the departures of Sal and Paul Kinsey felt so abrupt, and still do with no updates on where they might have ended up during the fourth season. I wouldn't put it past Weiner to suddenly bring one of them back - he did it with Freddy Rumsen - so maybe that's a point of contention to store away for whenever the show concludes.
- One thing that feels sort of surprising looking back - we've never gone home with Ken Cosgrove. Even the subplot in "The Gold Violin" is more about Sal than Ken. Hopefully, the casting of Larisa Oleynik and Ray Wise as his fiancee and father-in-law-to-be, respectively, in "Chinese Wall" is an indicator of the show laying groundwork to finally delve deeper into its most unassuming accounts man.
- Another realization - we don't really have any sense of Joan's relationship with her mother. Could that change if we come back in on her with a baby?
- I forgot how much of the fourth season's back half is devoted to the firm's financial woes. I'm curious to see if they pick some of the seeds of potential business back up - especially the conclusion of the Honda plot in "The Chrysanthemum and the Sword" and mentions of Dow Chemical in "Tomorrowland." I'm especially intrigued by the latter. After a season and a half of mostly oblique references to Vietnam, outside of Greg Harris' plot, would Weiner now put SCDP that close to the war machine?
- It's still surprising sometimes to recall how funny the show is - to take a few moments from "The Beautiful Girls," for example, Harry's indignant reaction to finding his afghan being used to help shepherd Miss Blankenship outside the range of the clients' eyes or Don finding that Sally doused his French toast with rum instead of syrup and just rolling with it.
- Speaking of "The Beautiful Girls," like much of the fourth season it replays well. But I still don't really understand Joyce's "men are like soup" metaphor.
- Naturi Naughton's appearance in "Hands and Knees" feels super-weird post-The Playboy Club.
- A potentially big plot point I wonder about for the future is whether Don will ever get that last bit of information he's missing about Peggy's pregnancy - they go right up to the edge of it in "The Suitcase," and I think the tension around Pete being one of the only people in SCDP with an inkling of Don's background (especially with the North American Aviation debacle in "Hands and Knees") suggests that there could be interesting dramatic fallout. There's a cautious equilibrium among the three of them that's reminiscent of the dynamic that Peggy overturned in "Meditations on an Emergency."
Some leftover thoughts on "Tomorrowland" that I never got around to posting when the episode actually aired:
- It's a little thing, but I loved that Glen asked if Sally was "decent" when he knocked on her door. One, because it subtly put the lie to Betty's manic anti-Glen stance, but also because it struck me as so dad-like. (That is, to someone whose parents are roughly the same age as Sally.)
- Some interesting pop culture references in this episode. I don't think I can unpack Don's (slightly creepy) reference to The Sound of Music better than The Film Experience, (Poor Faye. No one wants to be the Baroness in that scenario.) but I think the choice of "I've Got You Babe" as the episode-closer is interesting, too: another couple with an older man and a younger woman, where the woman ultimately eclipsed him career-wise. Ten years after the song came out, they were divorced. It's always anyone's guess how much something like that is supposed to foreshadow, but given Megan's seeming ambition in the field of advertising, it seems worth keeping in mind.
- And, a note to add to that upon rewatching the episode: I wonder if that career ambition is destined to act at odds with the fact that Don clearly latches on to Megan because he wants her as a mother figure for his children.
I could say more (Suddenly noticing suitcase references in Season Two! Recalling the smarmy delight of Kevin Rahm as Ted Chaough! I can't decide whether I have things to say about the Slate pieces on the show's handling of race!) but I need to cut myself off. So, it remains to be seen what's in store for us tonight. I think the central appeal of the premieres is learning when we're rejoining the action and what's happened to everyone in the offscreen time - none of them, not even the pilot, is among my favorite episodes. I'm curious to see whether the two-hour format makes the episode more compelling overall. The weekly TV posts seem destined to start up again - between Mad Men and Game of Thrones, I'll simply have too much to over-analyze.
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