So much for Beatlemania. The season premiere of Mad Men arrived Sunday night with most of 1964 behind it and Don Draper having bitten off more than he can chew in the office, at home, on a date, in the media, you name it. Independence has elevated our man from mini-celebrity to major cultural influencer, and he will not be pushed around by mere fads. Slapped around by a whore, OK. But that's where he draws the line. Let's explore.
Series creator Matthew Weiner handled the writing duties on his own last night, making the crucially important (and smart) decision to invite the audience's imagination from the start. No more conceptual bloat of season-opening, depression-era-orphan flashbacks, no more on-the-nose period detours contemplating the enduring question, "Who is Don Draper?" Just Don and Jack Hammond, a journalist from Ad Age, summoned to help boost the "scrappy upstart" Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce out of the primordial Madison Avenue muck. Don deflects the inquiry -- such introspection is anathema to his humble Midwestern upbringing, he says. And it's too bad! They could have bonded over Korea: Don's identity theft and Jack's faulty prosthetic leg, the latter of which seems included only to later draw the quintessential Roger Sterling bon mot, "They're so cheap they couldn't even afford to send a whole reporter." Haw.
With that Don, Roger and Pete bounce off to another meeting, this one with the father-son combo behind the Jantzen bikini two-piece bathing suit concern. They're a little frustrated to see their market share decline as the competition plays up the flesh; Jantzen is a family company, they say, and they need a campaign that appeals to buyers' taste, not their prurience. We've seen these guys before -- the old-fashioned clients who know exactly what they want when it'd just be easier, quicker and more humane to shoot them in the head upon entering SCDP's trailblazing creative domain. The preliminary meetings always end, and their results always yield the same crushing inertia a few weeks later. At least some things never change.
But getting back to that trailblazing creative domain: How about our first tour of the new offices? It was like some kind of erotic revelation, peering behind the door, winding into this narrow space of color and light and modularity and youth and potential and experience and power, swinging and alive, yet awkward and imperfect. "You don't know how tiny this place looks to a stranger," Bert groans, more wracked with existential horror than anything like his partners' (and viewers') own nagging self-consciousness. (He gripes about the lack of a conference table, but what really seems to be missing is his carefully calibrated workplace feng shui.) Its corridors won't rival the old office's open floor anytime soon, but what it lacks in space it more than compensates for in electricity.
Take Peggy for example, playfully entangled in mock-singing with newbie part-time copywriter Joey when Pete walks into her sprawling office -- definitely a step up from the shoebox she inherited at the old joint -- with a Sugarberry ham. Here's another client sweating over market share during the holiday season (this is the first we've learned it's approaching Thanksgiving), and it'll take a few drinks and a three-way brainstorm to sort out a solution. Peggy takes the lead, sitting on the table, feet on a chair, sipping whiskey and batting around ideas; Pete engages her awfully well for someone whose baby she secretly carried and abandoned, but hey. How could anybody resist this Peggy, who conjures a plot (!) to hire two women (!!) to squabble over a Sugarberry ham (!!!) in a grocery store. That'll attract the attention of the press and provide the peg on which to hang a new campaign. The catch: No one can know about the stunt (as if they won't figure it out anyway).
She's no direct descendant of P.T. Barnum, but at this point Peggy might be the best asset the new agency's got. Don's colorless Ad Age profile dazzles exactly nobody, even prompting HoHo Cook Jr. to yank the National Jai Alai Association from the firm ("You didn't mention jai alai," Pete tells Don) after Harry Crane has sold a special to ABC. Lane and Bert are exasperated; the extent of Don's competitive fire is expended kicking a chair across the room while Joan reminds him things will be fine. OK, so maybe Joan is the top asset. Point is, things aren't going well for the once-superhuman Don Draper, and his vulnerabilities are wearing off on the others.
At least there's the dating front, right? No woman can possibly withstand his bachelor wiles -- not least of all the 25-year-old ex-gymnast with whom Roger fixes him up... right? "It's not like I've been a monk," Don explains to him, though the drab, dark recesses of his apartment suggest the last real vestige of monasticism in Greenwich Village. Don's housecleaner Celia occupies the one pocket of light in the whole place, and all he can do is chastise her for not leaving his shoeshine kit in the middle of the floor. In return, she nags him to eat something. Yes, Don, you are living large.
Not long afterward, at Jimmy's La Grange, his nubile dinner Bethany partner cops to deigning to a blind date with a divorced man; in the cab in front of her building, she indulges his kiss while freezing his libido until New Year's. It takes a whore on Thanksgiving to give him -- a regular customer, it appears -- what he wants, which amounts to some serious face-slapping during sex. Interesting. Better still: She has to hurry off to Thanksgiving dinner while Don idles alone at home, handing out bail money to Peggy for one of the ladies charged the PR stunt-turned-criminal assault case.
Which brings us to Betty. Betty, Betty, Betty. I think it might be over for Betty, who makes her first appearance at the Francis family's turkey day celebration and yam-spitting battle of wills with Sally. I'm not sure exactly what purpose Don's ex serves here beyond living in his house with his kids and her new husband, rent-free for almost a year. She seems to relish her newlywed lust and resent the albatross that her kids have become, which sounds about par for the course for her. Yet whereas Betty's quirks, flaws and contradictions once exercised leverage against Don's own, with his secrets out and their new lives begun, all that's left are the first little fascinations of this revised coexistence. Like seeing Betty and Henry in bed together? Weird! Seeing Betty and Henry and Don in the same tense shot as the latter picks up the kids? Really weird! And a kitchen showdown over their untenable living arrangements? Beyond weird!
Also: Boring. If ever a TV character were a victim of her own success, it would probably be Betty Draper. The extraordinary pitch of last season's climactic episodes established a pretty formidable presence -- a moral and philosophical force that vanquished its primary opposition. Yet after all that, now she's a lusty, freeloading, irresponsible, crappy mother whose philandering ex-husband has reclaimed the high ground and whose in-laws wonder how Henry "can stand living in that man's dirt"? Like, I get it, Weiner -- so things still aren't working out for Betty the way she intended. But she was much more sympathetic (screw sympathetic; she was much more interesting) when we witnessed her repressing her dreams of modeling or world travel, or humiliated by Don's conspicuous flings. Now she's just a garden-variety bitch with no roots to her rage. It's facile. We were faithful, and yet it's like walked out on all of us.
She does, and this next interview -- with its candid recounting of what led to his new firm in the first place -- should be exactly the kind of stirring stick this potboiler requires. And thank God. It's Mad Men, after all, not Inert, Milquetoast, Hooker-Patronizing Men. Let's get mad.