MAD MEN SEASON 3
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MAD MEN SEASON 3 REVIEW
by Mitchell Bard
In my sixth column for WILDsound, back in 2007, I reviewed a new program called "Mad Men." I reread the article today, after watching the third episode of the show's third season (AMC, Sundays at 10:00 p.m. Eastern), and I was struck by how "Mad Men" has managed to grow into one of the very best shows on television, all while taking risks and evolving into completely new worlds. And how the show has done so in a subtle way that leaves the viewer feeling like not much has changed at all. That's no easy task.
| MAD MEN SEASON 3 PODCAST September 6 2009 - PRESS PLAY TO LISTEN |
That's not to say that "Mad Men" still doesn't aim to unnerve its audience. Watching Betty Draper (January Jones) down whiskey while eight-plus months pregnant is hard to watch. And in what has to be one of the most shocking, daring and disturbing moments anyone will air on television this year, agency honcho Roger Sterling (John Slattery) sings "My Old Kentucky Home" to his new bride, Jane (Peyton List), at a party while in blackface (including crooning the line, "'Tis summer and the darkies are gay"). "Mad Men" constantly reminds us how different the world was in the early 1960s, but at the same time, how little has changed.
But despite the lack of big show-changing events, the episode was a riveting hour of television, with smaller moments ruling the day. Don's disdain of Roger comes to a head, first when he walks out during Roger's racist musical number (even though none of the other guests seem to mind, including Betty, who beams while listening), and later when Roger confronts Don on his surliness. Don's conversation with a wedding guest at the club (each found a desolate bar to escape their events), in which the two successful men admit to their more modest roots and disdain of the country club existence, was special. (I can't help wonder if Don was telling a tall tale or a true story when he told the older gentleman that when he parked cars at an upscale night club as a 15-year-old, he urinated in the guests' trunks when he had to go because he wasn't allowed to use the establishment's bathroom.) Peggy's chance meeting with a smitten older bachelor who wants to feel her pregnant belly was the kind of offbeat, nearly surreal scene that nearly no other current program could even attempt to pull off. When the two are introduced later, guilt hangs in the air, the two having shared an innocent moment that nevertheless felt intimate and illicit. It recalled Peggy's one-night stand in the back room of a bar in last season's finale.
A stoned Peggy's speech to her new secretary, nailing that Olive was more scared to work for a woman than she was worried about Peggy's future, was brilliant, both in the writing and Moss's performance. When Peggy leans in and says to Olive, "Don't worry about me. I am going to get to do everything you want me to do. I'm going to be fine. I really am," it's a "wow" moment.
Joan gamely playing the accordion and cooing a French song for her guests, despite her lack of practice, all to turn the attention away from the almost off-hand revelation that her slimy husband had screwed up at work, showed the power of Joan as a character and Hendricks as an actor. Knowing that her husband, threatened by Roger's money and power, raped Joan in Roger's office last year hung over the whole dinner party like an approaching storm. It was subtle, but powerful nonetheless.
Even in the lighter, more comedic scenes revolving around Peggy, Paul and Smitty getting high with Jeffrey, little factoids emerge. Jeffrey, jealous of Paul's set-up at Sterling Cooper (and, probably more importantly, impressed with Peggy), pokes a hole in Paul's hipster persona and accent, outing him as arriving at Princeton as a poor kid from Jersey in need of a scholarship. Similarly, as Don and Betty help the blitzed Jane to her seat, Jane drunkenly reveals that she knew of Don and Betty's separation (she was Don's secretary at the time), sending Betty into a bit of a tizzy, which may or may not have been resolved by the episode's final moment, Don and Betty's kiss in moonlight, with the camera at a respectful distance.
The way Weiner quietly and skillfully moves his characters around, and the moods he creates in doing so, is nothing short of masterful. The third episode didn't even overtly address the office drama of the first two episodes of the season, which largely revolved around the takeover of Sterling Cooper by a British agency. It didn't need to. As an audience, we were interested just the same.
Throw into the mix the show's almost fetishistic attention to period detail in its wardrobe and set-dressing, the uniformly pitch-perfect cast (including the guest turns), and the clever, dramatic writing, and "Mad Men" is nothing short of an American classic, in the same ballpark with some of the great plays and films of our time.
Now in its third season, the program is hitting its stride, even as its creator has deftly blown up so much of went before. The show cleaned up on Emmy nominations, and based on the steadily increasing ratings, more and more people are finding out what they've been missing with "Mad Men." All of the attention is well-deserved.
In my 2007 review, I spent a lot of time talking about Don as a potentially unsympathetic lead. But in 2009, I can't think of a group of characters with whom I'd rather spend an hour.
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