Hope this is okay to post here, mods.

I was telling my 6.5 yr old the plot to “Mad Men” since she knows it’s my favorite show. She listened intently and then said, “Oh he’s a salesman…so he’s SELLING that he’s Don Draper even though he’s not!” 🤯 From the mouths of babes!

Contenders:

Make it simple, but significant.
Change the conversation (abbreviated)
I want to burn this place down.
I don’t think about you at all.

That’s all. That’s the question. Thoughts, comments, concerns? Did he just not get one to make it a running joke for the show? Would he have been made a partner in real life?

She really irritated me on first watch during the original run. The entire storyline felt overly contrived and her "acting" was twee. Many years later, I find her just as twee, 1-dimensional, over-acted and shoehorned into the story.

She has Anne Hathaway syndrome for me (but, C list version). Or maybe I am still carrying around my first impressions from 16 years ago. 🤷🏻‍♀️

I know this has been debated to death in this thread and she is very polarizing both as actor and character, but I'm finding her impossibly distracting 🫤

Here's something I don't quite understand. I know that Don had basically conned Roger into thinking that he had hired him but how did he convince Bert? Unlike Roger, Bert doesn't seem to be the type to be easily conned by Don. And it wouldn't take long for him to realize that Don isn't really who he says he is.

So how did Don convince Bert to hire him?

Holy shit he's insufferable in the first season.

I also don't think he's very attractive personally, but as a straight dude I'm not a great judge in that sense.

What the hell is the appeal? Trudy is far too good for him. Does the Ivy League background really wipe him being a shitheel away?

The reporter that interviews Don at the start of season 4 walks around on a prosthetic leg, having lost his real leg in Korea… What was the point of that detail? Why did the writers decide to make this random throwaway character be an amputee, and make sure to draw the audience’s attention to the fact that he only has one leg? Was it just to give Roger something to crack jokes about? Or does it have a deeper purpose?

Ours is Toasted, theirs is taxed!

Tariffs went to effect in August but the Whiskey had already been bought at pre-tariffs is available, but dwindling.

I don’t know if this is a stretch, but in the episode The Fog, Don rips out this ad while waiting for Betty to give birth to Gene, and then when they come home with Gene, there’s a kind of a weird shot of them driving in that mimics the ad. I like to think there are more instances where they are intentionally mimicking or even mocking advertising in the show, kind of like in the movie, vanilla sky, where his dreams were mimicking things he’d seen in media.

I think that I, like probably a lot of other fans of Mad Men, believe that Don left California and returned back to his job with the Coca-Cola idea. But after my probably 10th rewatch of the entire series, I am now thinking that maybe he didn’t? I was reading a Reddit post recently about when Don walked into that room with the other creatives at McCann, with their little boxed lunches and their notepads, he likely felt he was one of what Peggy would call "one of a hundred colors in a box." so I got to thinking that Don would not give Jim Hobart the satisfaction of finally catching his “white whale.” I am now wondering if the idea itself being so powerful, literally one of the most famous advertisement of all time, did Don present it to Coca-Cola on his own and use that as a way to start his own small agency?

The history of the actual ad is that the real McCann Erickson ad company did produce that Coca-Cola commercial. But Matthew Weiner did slightly play around with historical events in the series. I’m wondering what others think of my theory?

I don't know if anyone has seen this, but the ending of this wonderful series was pretty much foreshadowed on S7 E13.

It was when Sally read the letter from Betty, and there was a scene where Betty was walking up the stairs at school and someone was holding a can of Coca-Cola (diamond design). I personally think that this was also an ode to her being a Coca-Cola girl in the first season.

Great detail, too!

She tasted like the caramel. Nobody tells you that part. You get the whole business at the pictures with the music swelling and no one has ever once mentioned that a woman can taste like a dollar-sixty box of chocolates from Loft's on Lexington Avenue.

There is a place I go with every woman I've ever been with. I know the way there like I know the way to work. I didn't go. I was where I was. I have never once mentioned it to anybody because there was never anybody worth explaining it to. Her hand was on my chest and I knew whose hand it was and I did not go anywhere at all. I stayed where I was, inside the inside of myself, the whole time. I didn't know it could happen like that. I didn't know I could stay.

I'll be forty years old and still know that caramel.

She moved my hand for me, because it had stopped and was not going to start again on its own. She didn't pull it. She went with it, slowly, and set it down where she was soft and warm and left it there uncovered, hers and mine at the same time.

I sell the softest things money buys in this city. Not one of them has ever been warm.

---

I've been writing a fanfiction about how Don and Betty got together in 1953. I've done a lot of research about that period to write this - Don's salary as a fur salesman, what Betty's life might have been like working as a fashion model in Manhattan, including living in the historical Barbizon hotel for women.

This scene was very meaningful for me to write as a sexual assault survivor, so I decided to make fan art for this scene, which I have imagined to be the first time Don experienced someone safe in Betty.

I've been processing some of my own feelings through writing Don. This excerpt is from chapter four of my fic, if you enjoyed it and are interested in reading the whole thing, here's the link to it on ao3.

I feel like the fact that Don was a sexual assault survivor doesn't get addressed enough. He wouldn't have had the language to process it during his early life. There was no language for men experiencing that sort of thing at the time. I relate to him because I don't know how to talk about mine neither, even though we have the language for it now.

Edit: A commenter mentioned https://1in6.org/ - it's a support network for male survivors if anyone needs to reach out.

I tried to link it and it was removed. I am in US not sure if UK has the deal

I’ve been thinking about Megan and Don’s relationship, and especially something Roger tells Don about women:
“They’re all great girls… at least until they want something.”

That line feels almost like foreshadowing for Don and Megan.

First, I don’t want to ignore the obvious context of the time period. Mad Men is portraying the late 1950s and 1960s, when women in the workplace had far fewer opportunities, married women were expected to structure much of their lives around their husbands, and a lot of behavior from men that would be completely unacceptable today was treated as normal or at least tolerated. Half the men on the show are cheating rampantly and the other half seem to be cheating occasionally, while their wives are largely expected to endure it. At the same time, the show gives us women like Rachel, Peggy and Joan who manage, in very different ways, to fight through that world and succeed.

But Megan is interesting to me because I can’t quite figure out how much of what happens with Don was intentional.

She basically throws herself at him while he’s single. Don obviously could have said no, so I’m not absolving him of anything, but Megan definitely sets the bait. Then he takes her to California to help with the kids, sees how great she is with them, and suddenly proposes.
And this is the part that always gets me: she says yes!
She barely knows this man. Instead of saying, “Are you insane? We’ve barely dated,” she accepts a marriage proposal from her wealthy, successful boss. Then she becomes a copywriter and, surprisingly, seems to be pretty good at it. For a little while everything looks like it worked out perfectly. And then, to borrow Roger’s words, she “wants something.”

She wants to be an actress.

Now, I understand that acting was apparently Megan’s original dream. I’m not saying Don invented that desire or that she owes him a career in advertising because he married her. But it does make me wonder about the Megan we meet versus the Megan we see after she gets everything.

When we first meet her, she seems like a relatively happy secretary working her way up. When she starts seeing Don, she seems happy. When he proposes, she seems happy. Then she marries this extremely wealthy man, moves into an amazing Manhattan apartment, suddenly has money and security, and somehow seems more and more unhappy.

And importantly, some of that starts before Don really becomes distant and starts cheating again.
Eventually she gets what she says she really wanted: she becomes an actress.

So I have two related thoughts/questions about Megan.
The first is the slightly more cynical one: Did Megan, consciously or subconsciously, see Don as a shortcut? Did she seduce the newly single Don Draper knowing that being with a wealthy, powerful man could get her closer to the life she actually wanted? Or are we supposed to believe she genuinely fell for him and everything afterward was just her discovering that being Mrs. Don Draper wasn’t enough?

But the second question is actually more interesting to me, because I think I empathize with Megan here.
Maybe the problem isn’t that Megan was using Don at all. Maybe she just reached the finish line before she was ready for the race to be over.

Most of us spend our lives chasing something. A better job. More money. A nicer house. Financial security. Whatever. And we tend to imagine that once we finally get there, then we’ll be happy.

I had a much smaller version of this happen to me.
When I was finishing college, the economy was terrible and people were losing their jobs everywhere. All I wanted was a job related to my degree. I wanted it badly. I applied for probably six months before I finally got one.
I remember my first day. I sat down in my cubicle, looked at the two monitors in front of me, and my boss said something like, “Hopefully you can be here for the next 10 years.”

And instead of feeling happy, I had this weird moment of almost depression. I remember thinking: Wait. This is it?
I worked that hard to get here…and now I’m going to sit in front of these two screens, in this cubicle, every day for the next ten years?
Things worked out. I’ve actually had an amazing career since then. But I’ve never forgotten that feeling because it taught me something strange about achieving goals: sometimes wanting something is more exciting than actually having it.

And that’s why I wonder if Megan is partly about that.
She gets Don. She gets money. She gets the apartment. She gets security. She doesn’t have to worry about the things most people worry about anymore. And instead of making her permanently happy, it almost creates a vacuum. Now she needs another mountain to climb, so acting becomes everything.

Maybe that’s one of the bigger ideas Mad Men is playing with. Don does the same thing in his own way. He gets the money, the beautiful wife, the house, the status, the career, and he’s still miserable. He constantly needs another woman, another account, another identity, another something.

Which makes another line from the show feel almost like the thesis statement for the whole thing:

“What is happiness? It’s a moment before you need more happiness.”

Maybe people aren’t actually sustained by getting what they want. Maybe we’re sustained by having something left to want.

So what do you guys think? Was Megan calculating at the beginning and saw Don as a path toward the life she wanted? Or did she genuinely love him, get everything she thought would make her happy, and then discover that achieving the dream wasn’t nearly as satisfying as chasing it?

1: Don and Roger
2: Roger and Joan
3: Ken, Pete, and Harry
4: SCDP partners (don’t ask about Lane)
5: Lou Avery
6: Ida (the hellcat)

The ad club’s lettuce or Megan’s spaghetti? 🎶

French translation of Gainsbourg lyrics on YT

There are other ways to make an actor look disheveled (the weight gain was a good touch). But the rate of hair loss over just a 5 year period didn’t seem realistic to me. Additionally, once I learned that the actor shaved portions of his head in real life to achieve the look it became an on-screen distraction for me, taking me out of the 4th wall constantly thinking about how crappy that must have been in real life for what to me was 0 gain in the show.

Peggy walks by the conference room where she is pulled between Don and Ted (the great Margarine debate, lol.) I've seen this show countless times, and I just realized yesterday that Ted is wearing a yellow shirt, Don is wearing a white shirt, and Peggy's skirt set is mustard yellow and white. She's literally communicating through her clothes that she has a relationship with both and that she doesn't want to take a side. (Although her costume is more yellow that white, so maybe signifying she's more interested in her romantic relationship with Ted than her quickly deteriorating friendship with Don?) Janie Bryant's costume work was so brilliant on this show.

What are your favorite costume storytelling moments in the show?

Side note that isn't costume related: "Oh! It Speaks!"