MAD MEN Studies

. . . are being pursued in earnest by the distinguished LEAGUE OF ORDINARY GENTLEMEN—one of the best blogs around. There’s an empty open thread there. Please contribute.

The reason for hope we can have for the future of the series is that it might take a show or two to set up the new direction.

The new insatiable kinkiness of Don is that his new wife is very okay—well, much more than very okay—with having sex with Don and Dick Whitman (his real identity) simultaneously. So he’s all for isolating their virtual threesome from his so-called friends and colleagues, who, of course, can’t really know him. He now orbits above them in serene superiority—coming to work when he pleases, making cameo appearances in meetings to quickly and perfectly solve issues, and is so lost in new erotic life that he no longer has any advertising ambition. Not only that, his unencumbered new wife gets to come to work with him, and it’s not for nothing that they’re referred to enviously by their male co-workers as Mr. and Mrs. Masters and Johnson. To me, this is not a promising line of development.

Pete, we’re reminded over there at THE LEAGUE, is striving to become the most interesting character. His life is starting to develop the way Don’s did in the first season—wife, kids, advertisng ambition and prowess and such. He has a more normally desirable and hyper-supportive wife, which is nice but, of course, boring. And Pete himself remains pretty boring. Who cares about his feeling all entitled to a bigger office? Aren’t his more sophisticated and interesting colleagues still right to regard him with condescension? His character and ambition ain’t all that much. That’s been the point so far, at least. Can we quickly find out there’s a lot more to Pete than we thought? To me so far, this is also not that promising a line of development.

And then, as djf and others have noted, there’s the completely unimaginative and needlessly overbearing intrusion of the race issue, reminding us that it’s THE SIXTIES!