The most telling exchange on last night’s Mad Men was the brief chat between Don and Roger, after Roger expressed a particularly pungent form of revenge Don might perform. “What happened to your enlightenment?” asked Don. “Wore off,” said Roger, with Rogerly, cavalier dismissal. And indeed, that’s what the past few weeks of Mad Men have felt like: A fading away of much of the season’s promise, a settling into a deep funk, a cynicism I’d call profound if it wasn’t so superficial. Jon Hamm may well earn an Emmy for becoming the Lon Chaney of Dismay: The Man of a Thousand Weary Faces. READ FULL STORY »

One reason Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner is so maniacal about keeping plot points about his show secret until they air is that — well, as this week’s episode, “The Other Woman” proved, he reserves the right to explode every expectation you could bring to Mad Men, and then sets off a few extra firecrackers for the meticulously determined hell of it. READ FULL STORY »

On last night’s Mad Men, the ad agency sought to please a client by doing what was described as a “Hard Day’s Night campaign” — that is, a youth-oriented pitch that would leech off some of the Beatlemania energy that was in the 1966 air. Don Draper and colleagues faced a mop-topped fop of a client who wanted some cool music in the ad, and after he left, Don said to Megan, “When did music become so important?” READ FULL STORY »