It never ceased to amaze me how joyously nervous I would feel in the hours leading up to each new Mad Men this year. For 12 weeks I was on a cocktail mixed with the kind of white-knuckle excitement and pants-shitting fear you get when clicking up the rails of a tall rollercoaster; I wound up having literal nightmares about reviewing the show weekly, worried I’d have nothing to say. Thankfully, that never proved to be the case, because the passion and conversation Mad Men inspires, week after week, season after season, is the exact opposite of what you’d expect from the “homework television” appearance it has at first glance. Period dramas are a lot of things, but fun is rarely one of them.
Yet Mad Men still knows how to put on an entertaining show, despite its morbid obsession with watching one man and and a culture have their first class existence dive straight headfirst into a tailspin. It’s understandable that some felt Don circling the drain all season made the show feel like it was running in circles, but Mad Men has always been just as interested in obstinacy as it has legitimate change. And if you’re going to spend 13 hours caught in a holding pattern, you can’t pick a better bunch of characters to share the waiting with.
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