By Michelle Lerner

I read an article this week that HBO passed on MAD MEN, and is now sort of regretting it. Tonight’s episode is probably one of the reason’s why. It manages to explore actual issues, while flowing along dramatically, like some slow moving river with gorgeous scenery.

Jon Hamm as Don Draper, our “hero,” is pitch perfect navigating his very full love life, while trying to put his ad campaign for the state of Israel together. He romances his wife for Mother’s Day. In a very good scene, he makes puppy dog eyes at Rachel, a retail heiress he wants to bed. Don ostensibly wants to pick her brain about Israel, and what it’s like to be Jewish, for his campaign. She takes him seriously, and gives the subject its due weight, but sighs wearily as he tries to hold her hand. The latent, guilty, anti-semitism of America in the fifties and sixties is not a topic that’s very trendy these days, but it is handled very elegantly in this show.

It must be exhausting to be Don Draper, and after a long day of seducing, get back on the train to the suburbs, and his perfect family. But in tonight’s episode he manages to fit in one last escapade. Clearing his schedule for a romp with his downtown mistress, he begrudgingly ends up at the Gaslight, a prototypical Greenwich Village club. At the club, Don out-ironics Roy, a hipster, and you can see in Don’s eyes that he is thrilled to win the duel. Don flourishes in the seedy places. Suburbia is who he wants to be, docile and married, but underneath is a very angry person looking for a fight.


The 60’s seems like a fun place to work. Especially in advertising. The colors are brighter, the heels are higher, and the drinks flow all day. The c-story in tonight’s episode revolved around a lipstick campaign. The men were stuck about what to say, so they took it to the stenopool, or the “chickens” as they called them. Then they watched all the secretaries try on the lipstick through two-way glass. It seems an innocent scene, but it was actually almost degrading to the women. They had no idea they were being observed, all except for Joan, who bends over to give the men a nice view of her rear. Peggy, Don’s secretary, has a good idea, and one of the men says that it was like watching a dog play the piano. My 21st century post-feminist ears cringed at that. But then they gave her a chance to write the copy. It was a perfect demonstration of how rapidly things were changing at that time. Women were starting to be able to build careers, and live more freely. But social evolution happens slowly.


Take the liberated Joan, who’s having an affair with Don’s boss, the silver-maned Roger. She’s happy with her life as a career girl. She loves having parties and going out. Roger wants to get her her own place, so instead of shacking up in a hotel, she can cook for him. You can see her cringe at the very thought of such a thing. She may not like to eat in hotel rooms, but the sneaking around is what gives her, and him, a thrill and she knows it. Joan jokes that she would have half as much fun without a roommate, and Roger offers to buy her a bird. She laughs it off, and he goes and does it anyway. At the end of the show they shoot her walking out the hotel room, holding the birdcage like it’s poisonous. You wonder if she thinks it’s her in there.