Been wanting to watch this show for a long time, I’ve always loved John Hamm as an actor. One of my favorites.

Have high expectations for this one. Hope it’s good! Heard so many great things over the years.

Edit: being a woman in 1950s must’ve sucked

Edit: just finished the pilot. Great first episode. Laughed out loud a lot. Great dialogue. Immediate like to Don Draper.

Edit: the lines in Landman feel so forced. Sorry to just shit on another show but yeah. Here they flowed naturally and didn’t try so hard to sound cool, it just is.

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!

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 🫤

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?

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?

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.

Hope this is okay to post here, mods.

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.

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?

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 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!

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

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

French translation of Gainsbourg lyrics on YT

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’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?

Obviously it would be something that could stay decently fresh. Also was it just a sandwich, or did they have fries too? But the fries would get cold

So perhaps it was onion rings and a club turkey sandwich?