Kelsey Grammer , it’s not great.

I must tell you that this saddens me greatly as Frasier is not only my favorite sitcom but also one of the best, with out even a single bad season, and only a few episodes that I don’t watch.

After evaluating the pilot I know what the series is missing,

three little words

David Hyde Pierce.

To explain after watching literally hundreds of hours of Sitcoms, I have come to understand that what makes  situation comedy’s are its side characters.

think about it,

would Seinfeld work without George, Kramer, and Elaine.

would Arrested development work without Gob, Buster, and Lindsay.

The answer is no.

This show has a good cast

firstly

Melinda McGraw as Hank’s wife Tilly. Having seen her work on Mad Men as Bobbie Barret,  I can definitely get behind her as an actress.

Nathan Gamble as Hank’s son Henry. If you don’t recognize that name then you must not have seen The Mist (you should)

David Koechner as Hank’s Brother in law Grady. Now I like Mr. Koechner but only in small doses and these doses are small but pointed, just enough to make you hate him and then he is gone.

as for the young actress playing his daughter Maddie,Jordan Hinson

she hasn’t done anything of note yet.

but they do not click and I just hope that they can work together.

All that really needs to happen is for the writing to tighten up and for the characters to become more fully formed.

after re watching the “The Good Son” (Frasier’s pilot) it is amazing how well that cast clicked together.  That kind of magic only happens once in a lifetime, and I am just scared that lightning will not strike twice in the same spot.

I love Frasier and for that reason I will keep watching “Hank”, but I understand the friends of mine that say they have know interest in this show.

Please post any questions as comments and I will answer them to quote Frasier “I’m listening”

Jerimiah Wolfwood

If you have not seen this episode, and ever intend to, DO NOT read the rest of this review.

Seriously.

Stop.

Stop, Dave.

Won’t you stop, Dave?

Alright, jackanapes, you’ve been warned.

This episode — which is almost certainly one of the better episodes of the series to date — is an instant classic, and what people are mostly going to remember is one very specific moment in which … well, we’ll get to that later, but suffice it to say that it was one of the most shocking moments I’ve ever seen on a television show.  Another review I read — I believe it was HitFix’s, but I could be wrong about that — compared the moment to something one would expect to see in a Tarantino or Coen film.

They weren’t wrong to make that comparison.  More on that later.

The setup here is that Sterling-Cooper is getting a visit from the overseas owners, who are coming in to evaluate the lay of the land and, as it turns out, to reorganize things a bit.

With them comes Guy MacKendrick (Guy walks into an advertising agency, indeed), a smooth-talking, handsome fellow who will be taking Lane Pryce’s position.  Poor Lane is being shipped off to Bombay, where, it is hoped, he will do as fine as a job as he’s done in New York.

As Roger notes, this Guy is a born account man, and it’s clear that a major shakeup to the status quo is in the offing.  Heck, they even left Roger off of the flowchart showing the new structure!  Supposedly an “oversight,” but Guy seems too slick by far to permit that sort of an oversight.

He’s not too slick, though, to avoid another oversight: failing to notice a drunken secretary plowing stright toward him astride a riding lawnmower.  In a spray of blood both horrifying and (in the “holy-fucking-shit-did-I-just-see-that?!” manner of Tarantino) comical, the secretary — one of several whose name I can never remember — plows right over Guy’s foot, and then crashes through a door into one of the offices.

I believe I shouted “Thafuck?!” so loudly that at least three of my five cats went tearing straight out of the room, possibly fearful in their dim, feline way that some sort of end-times-level calamity had struck.  The one thing I can say about Mad Men before this episode is that I would never have expected to see a foot mown off by a John Deere; after this episode, well shit, what isn’t fair game?  Expressing that with the sort of reflexive verbosity with which I expressed it will apparently send cats headed for the nearest beneath-a-bed location, but hey, whattaya gona do?  Sometimes, you’ve got to just blurt it out.

Thing is, that mower vs. foot collision is more than just a water-cooler moment of grand guignol; it’s also a powerful reflection of what is going on in the lives of multiple characters on the show.  Several of them have had similar happenings in their lives recently.  I say “similar” not in the sense of having had various body parts subjected to the cruel touch of sharpened steel moving at lightning speed, but instead in the sense of having had something unexpected and (emotionally) painful happen.

Don has been led to believe the visit from overseas means that he is being eyed for a position at the London branch, but finds out suddenly that this is not the case; Lane Pryce is delivered the news that he is being despatched to Bombay, to be a sort of snake charmer; Roger has discovered that he is so far beneath the esteem of London that they’ve forgotten he’s even part of the team. 

Joan, meanwhile, has found out that her husband didn’t get the job he was expecting, which means that she is going to have to keep working … and since she’s just resigned from Sterling-Cooper, this means she’ll be starting all over again in some new job somewhere.  Not only that, it also seems to mean that she is never going to be the wife of a highly-esteemed surgeon, which is what she’s been expecting.  Instead, it seems more likely that she’s going to be the bread-winning wife of a drunken boor who, once upon a time, used to be a doctor.  The future is not looking at all bright for poor Joan; I suspect it may contain more instances of surprise sex.

Sally Draper, also, has had the emotional equivalent of a John Deere drift into her path.  Still wrestling with her grandfather’s death, the anxiety over it is manifesting as jealousy — and fear — of her baby brother.  She reasons that he’s named Gene, he looks like her grandfather, and he lives in her grandfather’s old room; he may as well be a ghost.

Don tells her that she ought not to feel this way, that her new brother is just a baby, and that they don’t know who he is yet, so he can’t be anybody to be afraid of.  Don, of course, can sell anything to anybody, and as the episode ends, he and his daughter and new son are sitting in a chair together, bathed in moonlight, seemingly at peace.

Similarly, some of the other characters are able to find ways of turning their new adversity into opportunity.  It’s unclear how Roger and Joan will be affected by their bad news, but Lane Pryce benefits from Guy’s misfortunes by finding himself in a position to stay in New York instead of departing for Bombay.

Don, meanwhile, gets a phone call from Conrad Hilton, the hotel magnate.  Turns out, the guy Don met in the bar at the country club a few episodes back was in fact Mr. Hilton, who remembered the chance encounter, and took the initiative of finding Don so he could ask his advice on an ad campaign.  There’s every indication that Don may have just inadvertently landed a whopper of an account.

In the world of Mad Men – this episode, at least — that’s how it goes: on the one hand, you might get run over by an intoxicated woman in a beige skirt, and on the other, you might get a phone call from a multimillionaire who wants your advice, and is willing to bring you up in the world to get it.

There’s a great little trio of scenes in which at least some of this is eloquently rendered around the theme of light fixtures.  After Joan has found out her husband isn’t getting his job, she tells him to go to bed, and then goes to one of the lights in her apartment; she lingers for a moment in the light, and then turns it off.  Cut to Don, who still thinks he might be headed for London; he’s lying in bed, in the dark, hands behind his head, smiling up at the ceiling, looking at the overhead light wich is turned off.  Cut to Sally in her bedroom, with a little nightlight providing some lessening of the gloom; she huddles near it like a cavewoman near one of the first fires. 

Earlier in the episode, Sally has told Don that she’s afraid of the dark because she is afraid of what will happen when the lights are turned out.  In this collection of moments, Don is the only one who is clearly comfortable with the dark, and maybe it’s only because he has optimism to cling to.

And after all, the darkness is nothing to fear.  Guy MacKendrick is proof of that: the offices of Sterling-Cooper couldn’t possibly be better lit, and none of that light helped keep those whirling blades from kissing his toes.

The darkness and the light are both merely what we make of them.

“Tonight’s” episode is titled “The Fog,” and thankfully, not only is it better than the crappy horror remake with the same name from a few years back, it’s also better than the original John Carpenter movie of the same name.

Why do I mention that, you ask?  Well, I thought it, so I typed it.  Not much more to it than that.

Moving along…

No, there are no ghostly pirates lurking in the night waiting to give you the gift of throat avulsion as an act of retribution from beyond the veil of life, but that’s not to say there’s nothing creepy going on in this episode.  Quite the opposite.

As has been the case with much of this season, there’s ooginess aplenty lurking around every other corner.  Maybe it’s just Halloween season creeping up on me, but here’s a list of some of the more cringe-inducing moments from Mad Men‘s “The Fog” (all of them the best kind of cringe-inducing):

*     During a parent/teacher conference with Sally’s teacher, there is an intercut shot of Sally — who has gotten in trouble for being in a fight with another student — smearing what looks like blood across her cheek.  This is a distrubing little snippet of film that maybe can’t quite compete with similar cutaways in The Exorcist and The Shining, but coming in the midst of a mostly no-nonsense drama like Mad Men, it is deeply unsettling … all the more so because we don’t really know what it is or what it represents.  We have just enough information to make wild guesses, which of course, is the quickest way to existential terror.

*     Speaking of Sally’s teacher — you remember her from the Maypole dance and Don’s fingers-in-the-grass moment, right? — she calls the Draper house and begins the process of flirting with Don, only to be interrupted by Betty announcing that it’s time to go to the hospital.  The teacher is obviously well on the way to being drunk, and seems to be partially coming out of her clothes.  Never what you want from your daughter’s teacher; in this instance, she seems even more fucked up than Sally, who is pretty fucked up to begin with.

Will future episodes find Don Darper puttin’ the Polish to Ms. Farrell?  Surely not; he’s a new father!

*     Betty’s stay at the hospital seems about as unpleasant as you’d ever want to see.  Everything feels sick and green, and at one point when a nurse tells Betty it’s time for a shave and an enema, I knew this was not a place I wanted to be in.

*     Then again, I don’t much want to be out in the solarium with Don, either.  He’s stuck out there with a creepily intense prison guard whose wife has apparently been in in the process of a breach birth for quite a few hours.  This fellow is just normal enough to pass a ’63-style decency inspection, but also just drunk and violent enough that it inspires a bit of a shudder at the thought of him being a prison guard, a husband, or a father.

Later, when Don is visiting Betty, he passes the guard and his wife; he’s rolling her in a wheelchair down the corridor, and while both of them have strange expressions, neither of them has a baby.  I’d be hesistant to say for sure what that means, but I don’t think it’s a good thing.

*     Drifting away on a cloud — nay, a fog — of drugs and pain and exhaustion, Betty goes into a reverie in which she imagines herself back at her home.  She walks inside, and finds her father mopping the floor, apparently using blood instead of water.  She also finds her dead mother, standing over Medger Evers, who has recently been murdered in the timeline of this episode, and who now sits at the Draper kitchen table, a bloody rag held to the back of his skull.

In another reverie sequence earlier in the episode, Betty — looking impossibly gorgeous in the way she must see herself in her dreams — walks calmly down a street, and cups a caterpillar in her hand, presumably so it can become a butterfly. 

In the Gene/mother/Evers reverie (and indeed during some of the real events in the hospital), Betty acts almost like a child, and this spectre of her father reinforces the idea: “You’re a housecat,” he says; “you’re very important, and you have little to do.”

People have on occasion accused Betty of being an uninteresting character, but nothing could be further from the truth.  The fact is that she just never quite managed to grow up, and despite giving birth to her third child, she still hasn’t managed it.  I’m fascinated to see where this all leads.

*     Pete corners Hollis the elevator operator to get him to spill the beans to Pete about why Negros buy certain types of televisions.  This is, oddly, not as off-putting as it seems like it might be; nowhere near as bad as, say, Roger Sterling singing “My Old Kentucky Home” in blackface.  The things is, even though I know Pete is a racist, I also know he’s racist out of ignorance moreso than out of hatred or outright bigotry.  He honestly wants to know why Hollis behaves as he behaves regarding the purchase of television sets, and while Pete is certainly guilty of assuming that this one person can act as a stand-in for a multitude of other people … well, isn’t that what advertising is all about? 

Pete, at least, wants to let the Negros have their own place, and then determine how to make money off of it; Roger, and Bert Cooper as well, would rather pretend that such a place doesn’t exist at all.  With that in mind, I don’t think Pete comes off looking too bad here.

*     Peggy goes to Don, emboldened by the idea that Duck Phillips wants her to come work for him, and asks for a raise.  She is shut down entirely, and it’s impossible not to root for her.  She’s right to point out that women deserve equal pay; she’s also right that she frequently does a better job than Kinsey.  Don’s rejection — which was possibly brought on more by exhaustion than by workplace chauvinism — will doubtless have consequences.

*     Finally, we see Betty getting up in the middle of the night, woken by baby Gene crying from papa Gene’s old room.  In the hallway, Betty pauses, almost as if she has to summon the strength to make herself go into the room.  It would be easy to say that this is due to sad feelings over the room having briefly belonged to her now-dead father, but we know better: this woman wishes she was anything other than a mother.  She is usually strong enough to put up a good facade, but here, in the middle of the night, in the dark where nobody else can see, the true Betty appears.

And the episode is over.

Another great hour of television come and gone.

Another fine episode, this one picks up the Gene-centric plot elements from the previous episode and builds on them.  The episode begins with Gene taking Sally and her brother out for a drive in his Lincoln … with Sally driving.

My first reaction to seeing this little girl seated on a stack of notebooks, piloting a car while an old man with senile dementia or some such ailment controls the gas pedal from the next seat over was the feel a little bit of a panic coming on.  I was convinced something bad was going to happen along the lines of Betty losing control of the car and crashing it way back in the first season.

That didn’t come to pass, but it was hardly the only instance of Gene behaving in that manner.  Throughout the episode, he seems determined to pass experiences on to his grandchildren.  With Sally, he obviously wants to urge her into what he feels is her potential: he teaches her to drive, and then later has a conversation with her in which he tells her that she can be something, that she is smart and talented, that she shouldn’t let her mother discourage her.  Gene obviously wants Sally to begin growing up, and by the end of the episode, she has started to do so in an unexpected way.

With Bobby, Gene wants to pass along his WWI experiences.  He shows the boy a Victory medal, and tries to give him a helmet formerly belonging to a Prussian soldier he killed; the helmet has a bullet hole and dried blood, and Don, angered, refuses to allow Bobby to keep it.

Gene’s plotline comes to an abrupt end when he drops dead (offscreen) in an A&P.  We get this news through Sally’s eyes; she is sitting on the front steps waiting on her grandpa to come home, and what she gets instead is a visit from a policeman with some bad news.  There had been hints that this might happen — “This tastes like chocolate,” Gene has said earlier while eating some illicit ice cream, “but it smells like oranges” — but it still shocked me.  I’d expected the element of Gene being in the Draper house to continue to play out over the course of the season; now, it appears, that will be replaced by the story of how Gene’s passing will affect Sally. 

And, possibly, Betty.  Apart from the one scene in which Gene tries to discuss his final arrangements with Betty, we don’t get much reaction from her about her father’s death.  You can feel it coming, though.

There are at least two other parent/child relationships at the forefront of this episode.  Peggy has determined that she wants to move to Manhattan, and her mother — deep in a funk over the death of the Pope — is bitterly upset by the decision.  She’d be even more upset if she’d ever seen any of the episodes of Californication that Carla Gallo, the actress playing her daughter’s new roommate, had co-starred in.

Also, Pete Campbell has brought in a major new account from a well-to-do college friend with more money than sense.  Pete’s friend — he’s called “Ho-Ho” rather than Horace Jr. — wants to give Sterling/Cooper $1 million to turn Jai Alai into the new American pastime.  Don knows that Horace Sr. is a friend of Bert Cooper’s, and alerts the man, who all but says to go ahead and fleece his son, figuring that the failure will do him good.

Apparently, nobody’s got nice parents on this show.

Elsewhere, Sal finds himself unexpectedly given the grand opportunity of directing the “Bye Bye Birdie” mashup commercial for Patio.  He does so, and while the Patio people reject it, everyone else seems to feel that Sal has given them exactly what they asked for.  Looks like he might have a burgeoning career as a commercial director, and you can practically see him preening with pride.

Not so happy about it…?  Sal’s wife, Kitty.  She tries to seduce her husband, who turns her down cold and then begins showing her what his actress will be doing in the commercial when it films the next day.  He reenacts Ann-Margert’s seductive, flirty movements, and you can practically see Kitty realizing that he husband must like dick.

It’s a great scene … par for the course on this show.

Read on anyways, won’t you?

“My Old Kentucky Home” is the name of this episode, and that title comes from a song that Wikipedia assures me is the state song of Kentucky, and one abolitionist Frederick Douglass didn’t think was so bad.

Nevertheless, when you see Roger Sterling in blackface, singing it to his child bride, it’ll make your eyes bug out a little bit.  No pun intended.

Following up on one of the predominant themes of the previous episode, this one begins with Gene sitting in bed, having Sally read aloud to him from a book titled The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  When Don comes in and tells Sally it’s time for her to go to bed, Gene points at the book and tells her, “You just wait, all Hell’s gonna break loose.” 

At this point, it’s clear that the third season of Mad Men is leading up to some sort of titanic shift.  This not being a science-fiction or fantasy show, there’s a fairly limited range of posibilities in terms of what this could amount to, but there are already hints that it may involve the (first) Kennedy assassination.  Or it could be that all hell breaking loose here may be restricted to more personal apocalypses.

Certainly, the seeds continue to be sown for that sort of thing throughout this episode, and overall, there’s just a vague sort of doomish feeling in the air.  One of the primary plot threads of the episode involves Sally having stolen $5 from her grandfather, and his frantic, sulky attempts to figure out where the money has gone.  He never comes right out and accuses the Drapers’ housekeeper, Carla, of having taken it, but it’s strongly intimated that such is on his mind … and the racial overtones elsewhere in the episode certainly do nothing to lessen these feelings.

Eventually, though, Gene susses out that it was Sally who took the money, and there is a great moment in which he crooks a finger at her to beckon her over that is just plain scary.  Believably scary, too; not overdone in any way.  This is all very uncomfortable.

The episode is filled with uncomfortable scenes, and I’m not at all sure Roger Sterling pretending to be a “darkie” is the worst: no, that may be the scene in which another country club guest hits on an obviously pregnant Betty, who in turn does nothing to rebuff the man’s advances.  They should both be very thanful that Don didn’t see this stranger with his palm on Betty’s stomach.

Then, too, there is a bit of a scene between Don and Roger.  Jane, drunk and stumbling, has told Betty that she always knew her and Don would get back together; Betty storms off, and Jane grabs Don’s belt and asks him why he doesn’t like her.  This is seen by Roger, who seems to want to jump to the wrong conclusion, and ends up accusing Don of being jealous of Roger’s happiness.  “No one thinks you’re happy,” Don counters, “they think you’re foolish.”

How much of Betty’s reaction to Jane’s accusation can be attributed to Betty’s guilt over her own unfaithfulness at the end of last season?  Or of her flirtations with the man at the country club?  He turns up again, later, introduced by Bert Cooper; Cooper is talking about divorce being political suicide, and in the background Betty is glancing at this man with somewhat interested eyes.

Anybody else got a bad feeling about where this might be headed?

Elsewhere in the episode, Joan is hosting a dinner party for some of her husband’s colleagues, and there are signs that things aren’t going too well for him.  At one point, he goads Joan into playing “C’est Magnifique” on the accordion.  She doesn’t want to do it, but is a cordial host, and obliges; she shoots him a wonderfully subtle “you’re in deep shit” look at one point.

The remainder of the episode is devoted to Peggy, Kinsey, and another of the creative people (I don’t know his name) having to work on Saturday to brainstorm ideas for Baccardi.  Kinsey calls a former school friend, who brings over and sells them all some pot.  Peggy, much to the chagrin of her secretary Olive, gets stoned.

Peggy continues to be one of the show’s best characters.  Unlike Kinsey, who seems to use the weed merely as an excuse to eat chips and do nothing, Peggy never stops working, and while the others are crashed out in the floor, she is having Olive hook up a dictophone so she can get her ideas down.

Even more admirable, when Olive cautions her to think of her future, Peggy looks at her and replies that she’s already got a job, that she’s already living her future.  And, she says, she’s not afraid of it; not of any of it.

I’d be remiss in my duties if I didn’t mention two other factoids:

One, the guy who shows up to sell Kinsey the weed is played by an actor named Miles Fisher.  I strongly suspect his mother of having received seed from Tom Cruise at some point during 1982 or 1983; this dude looks, sounds, and acts a LOT like Tom Cruise.

Two, there is a nice little dance scene between Pete and Trudy.  Both Vincent Kartheiser and Alison Brie appear to be rather good dancers, and as for Ms. Brie, well, anybody who can look good while dancing in that hat deserves some sort of award.

Well, prompt payment of the cable bill helps prevent it there’s no way to say for sure, but here’s something for sure: this week’s for gettin’ caught up.

Staring with 3×2, “Love Among the Ruins.”

The episode begins with some of the creative crew screening a scene of Ann-Margret singing “Bye Bye Birdie,” which a prospective new client — Patio diet soda — wants them to recreate for an ad campaign.  Depending on what you think about this Ann-Margret number, you may come away from this scene feeling any one of several things: that it is awesome and sexy, or that it is campy and pathetic, or that it is just plain bad and therefore a fine example of how misguided parts of the ’60s were.

Here are some other key events from the episode: Roger argues with his ex-wife and daughter over his daughter’s impending nuptials (the date is set for November 23); Paul’s leftist ways cause a meeting with the Madison Square Garden execs (who want to build where Penn Station currently resides) to go awry; Don saves the Madison Square Garden business, only to be told by Lane Pryce that the London branch is turning down the account; Don, to placate Betty, determines that her father should live with them so that his deteriorating mental condition can be dealt with; Peggy, upset by her perceived inability to measure up to Ann-Margret (and to Joan?), hits the bars on the prowl and goes home with a stranger for the night; and at Sally’s school, Don watches the children dancing around the Maypole in a celebration of renewal (more specifically, Don seems to be closely watching Sally’s teacher … and as she dances, he lets his hand drift down to the green grass and begin stroking it).

In some ways, this episode feels more like a collection of scenes than it feels like a singular episode with a strong throughline.  This isn’t really the case, however: all of the episode’s disparate story strands are related to the idea of “love among the ruins,” the ruins in this case being New York City specifically, and perhaps America in general.  The overwhelming feeling I got from the episode was of things getting ready to start going very, very wrong; and while some people might be able to survive it, nobody is going to be unaffected.

During his meeting with the vp from the Madison Square Garden project, Don mentions having recently been to California, where the people are bright and optimistic; in comparison, he says, “New York City is in decay.”  His idea for the Madison Square people is that they should pitch their project as a “city on the hill” sort of thing, and offer the citizens of New York City — who are angry over the idea of Penn Station being demolished – a beacon of hope and optimism.

The characters on whom this episode focuses are all in the process of doing some version of that for themselves, and mostly failing: Roger, for example, whose new marriage has caused his daughter to hate him to the extent that she doesn’t want her new, sisterly mother-in-law to attend her wedding at all.  Obviously, none of this is headed anywhere good for anybody involved, and as if the characters’ interactions weren’t enough to tell us that, think back to the date of the upcoming wedding: November 23, 1963.  That’s a day after President Kennedy’s assassination.

Roger’s relationship with Don also appears to be more strained than has been the case in the past.  There are any number of psychological reasons this could be the case, and I don’t want to get into them here; I’d rather let the rest of the season play out, and look at it only in retrospect.  For now, I think pointing out the strain is probably sufficient.

Betty is similarly failing in her attempts to reconcile herself with her father.  Their relationship has apparently always been strained, but Betty insists on trying.  She, too, is a daughter dealing with a remarried father, and in this episode we discover that Gene’s new wife has left him.  Betty’s brother wants to put their father in a nursing home, and move into his father’s house; Betty resists, and it’s not clear whether she’s more upset over the idea of her father being abandoned to strangers or over the idea of her brother getting that house.  Either way, she’s plainly fumbling for a solution to a nasty emotional problem, and Don gives her the solution in the form of having Gene move in with them.

Finally, Peggy deals with things in her customarily odd and mysterious way.  She takes offense at the Ann-Margret footage, and is plainly upset by such blatant sexualization for the Patio ad, arguing that the campaign they produce ought to be more related to female fantasies, not male fantasies, since it is women who are the target consumer base for diet sodas.

Later, we see Peggy performing a bit of Ann-Margret’s “Bye Bye Birdie” for herself in front of a mirror; this is a creepy scene in some vague way, and yet it is also endearing, and a little sad, as many of Peggy’s scenes tend to be.

And yet, later in the episode, spurred on by seeing how confidently Joan interacts with some men in the office (and by Don’s cavalier dismissal of her concerns over the Patio campaign), Peggy is prompted to go out to a bar, where she picks up the first guy who will talk to her, and goes home with him.  He doesn’t have a Trojan, but, she tells him, “there are other things we can do.”  Naughty, naughty!  Naughty, but also admirable: Peggy goes after the things she wants, and in that sense is somebody we have to respect.

Excepting Don, Peggy is consistently the most interesting character on Mad Men, and in some ways, they have a lot in common.  She is mysterious at her core, and capable of doing whatever she needs to do in any particular moment to get out of that moment exactly what she needs.  I interpet her taking the schmo in the bar home and conquering him as an act of symbolic renewal of her own feelings of sexual self-worth; in other words, this is her own sort of dance around the Maypole.  (That might sound crude; not so much if you know anything about what the maypole represented in the pagan ceremonies from which it originated.)

Don also attends a renewal ceremony, of course, and therefore it may not be at all an accident that the episode ends with Don and Peggy sitting in a room, having a moment of silence before they begin talking about a new campaign.  Their acts of renewal seem to have been successful, for the time being; for other characters — Roger and Gene certainly, and perhaps Betty as well — the luck hasn’t been as good.

One last thing I’d like to mention: the scene of Don sitting in the dark, watching Ann-Margret sing “Bye Bye Birdie,” strikes me as being particularly haunting.

Especially if you recall that Betty’s nickname is Birdie.

AMC’s Mad Men will continue past 2009 according to the folks at Variety.

With any season premiere of any returning series, it’s been months and months since last season’s finale aired, and the first episode back has the unfortunate task of not only having to re-immerse the viewer in the world the show has lived in for however many previous seasons, but also having to set up the story for the current season.

It’s an unenviable task, and it is my unpleasant duty to report …

… that Mad Men begins its third season in such a solid and thoroughly awesome fashion that, frankly, it’s going to be hard for other shows to not look like chumps in comparison.

Why, what’d you think I was gonna say?

Thing about Mad Men is, when it’s on its game — which it almost always is — it’s not just good, but great.  And not just great, but GREAT.  By which I mean, Mad Men at its best is basically as good as television gets.  I have similar reactions to Lost, and had them with Battlestar Galactica and a handful of other shows, most of them once found on HBO.  AMC has two of these things right now, the other being Breaking Bad.

The dark secret I carry around about these shows is that I almost always expect them to start sucking.  I know Mad Men is a great show, and I’ve recommended it to people; what happens to my reputation as a notoriously awesome judge of television excellence if Mad Men all of a sudden turns into the equivalent of the third season of Millennium?  That’d be a catastrophe; I’ve still got my hands full convincing people that the final episode of Galactica was not garbage.

And for now, it looks like I don’t have to worry about that particular fear coming to fruition.

The first scene of the episode is a particular highlight, with cinema-quality editing and shot composition.  (Nothing new there, but worth pointing out.)  We see Don come into the kitchen in the middle of the night; he begins warming milk on the stove, presumably for Betty.  All of a sudden, we hear a woman sobbing, and I think the only rational thing to think at this point is that we’re hearing Betty weeping for some reason.  My first thought was that she had lost her baby, probably at some point weeks or months in the past.

In fact, what we are hearing is the sound of Don’s stepmother weeping after delivering a stillborn child.  I say “in fact,” but literally speaking, this is not true.  What we are hearing is the sound of a reverie Don is having about his past.  As the reverie — you can’t quite call it a flashback, can you? — continues, we see Mr. Whitman talking a $1 whore into selling herself to him for $0.85, and then we see that whore dying after giving birth to a child.  The child, of course, is young Don, or Dick as he was originally named; and as it turns out, he got his name from a midwife, who thought that the dying prostitute’s final wish — that Mr. Whitman’s dick ought to be cut off and boiled in hog fat — was a suitable one.  The midwife was also at Mrs. Whitman’s unlucky birth, and had promised her that God would give her a child; she now delivers Dick to Mrs. Whitman.

It is important — crucial, probably — to remember that we cannot trust that what we see during this reverie is what actually happened.  How, for example, would Don/Dick have ever learned how he got his name?  It seems like a bit of a stretch to imagine that the midwife told him at some poin, and the thought of either his father or stepmother having told him is simply not worth considering.  It seems entirely likely that this is simply a fantasy Don has created for himself, one with enormous truths as the foundations, but a fantasy in all the finer points.

This opening scene is nothing more than a look into Don Draper’s brain.  Specifically, it is a look at Don’s self-image.  I say “nothing more” as if that were disappointing; as it turns out, a look into Don Draper’s brain is more than enough to make fine drama.  Odds are, if you are reading this review or watching Mad Men at all, then you already knew that.

Don, of course, is a man whose notion of who he is runs like very deep, complicated waters, and your reaction to him as a character is likely to be deep and complicated, as well.  You might have thought that after his troubles with Betty last season, he’d be done with the philandering, but you’d be wrong; first opportunity we see him get, he’s putting the pork poker to a stewardess.  Has this man learned nothing?  It’s possible that he’s learned to keep his ding in his pants unless he’s out of town; I guess that’s something.  This is a scene that will probably make a lot of people get back on the I-hate-Don bandwagon.

Another scene is likely to have an entirely different effect, at least on some.  Sal is finally getting himself some hot pork poker action, or at least is on the cusp of it, but is interrupted by a fire alarm in the hotel.  As Don is rushing down the fire escape, he looks though Sal’s window and observes him with a half-undressed man in his room.  The rational thing to expect here is for Don to refuse to work with Sal, or possibly even to fire him and leave him stranded in Baltimore.  Instead, he settles for indirectly warning Sal to be more careful.  He does so in the guise of pitching to Sal an ad for London Fog raincoats, with the slogan “Limit Your Exposure.”

This is a great scene, and while it surprised me, it only served to show me that Matthew Weiner is approximately three thousand times smarter than I am.  It makes perfect sense from a characterization standpoint that Don would behave this way.  He’s got a tremendous amount of sympathy for people who are not actually who they appear to be.  On many another show, I can imagine Don exploding with indignation at Sal, and Sal threatening to blackmail Don with information about his indiscretion with the stewardess.  On some shows, trash like that might take up an entire season.

On Mad Men, the situation is dealt with elegantly, and in a scene that does nothing more or less than teach you even more about who Don and Sal really are.

Returning to the London Fog raincoats for a moment, the notion of that company forms not only a great metaphor for this episode, but for the entire series.  As the new financial officer Lane Pryce — played brilliantly by Jared Harris — points out, London has no fog.

The company’s success is built upon an illusion, one which people buy into willingly; it’s the job of advertisers to make them want to believe the lie and people, as it turns out, believe what they want to believe.  I’m certainly not going to start listing examples of this from previous seasons; if you watch this show, you know they’re there, and can probably name seven or eight of them right off the top of your head.

Elsewhere in the episode, we find Peggy having trouble getting her secretary to work; Pete and Ken both being made head of accounts in the wake of Bert Peterson being sacked; and Joan dealing with a male secretary from England, whose idea of what his position entails differs a bit from what Americans consider a secretary.  Not much going on for Roger, though he gets a couple of good lines.  We also don’t see a great deal of Betty, and if I’ve got one complaint about this episode, it’s that Betty seems a little too reconciled with Don.  For now, I’m going to assume that this plot thread will be picked up again, and that somebody decided they just didn’t want to deal with it right at the beginning of the season.  I’m okay with that.

One last scene I’d like to mention.  When Pryce comes into Cooper’s office prior to Bert’s sacking, he sees a painting on the wall that Cooper has gotten from Japan: an octopus, its head perched between the legs of a naked woman, the tip of one of its tentacles poised at her mouth.  Pryce looks at the painting, and Cooper explains that he likes it not only for its sensuality, but also because it reminds him of their business.  “Who,” he asks rhetorically, “is the man who imagined her ecstasy?”

“Who indeed?” responds Pryce, and as if on cue, in walks Don Draper.

“We were just talking about you,” Cooper says.

The ecstasy, of course, might well be a lie; this painting is a sort of litmus test, and once again it allows people to believe what they want to believe.  Cooper here is saying what we already know: Don is good at selling people the lie because he himself is an accomplished liar.  So accomplished, in fact, that he turns a lie into the truth.  I am reminded of Cooper’s response to finding out from Pete that Don was actually somebody named Dick Whitman.  He essentially didn’t care; Don had turned that particular lie into the truth, and that was all that mattered from a business standpoint.

I might have mentioned earlier that television doesn’t get much better than this.  What I ought to have said is the truth: that fiction doesn’t get much better than this.

And with another season premiere under its belt, this particularly fine peice of fiction is off and running again.

Harris will appear in ten episodes as Lane Pryce, the financial officer for Sterling Cooper.

Filming on the award-winning AMC series’s third season began yesterday.  New episodes will air beginning in August.