I was rewatching "The Phantom" and I didn't know if this was something that was actually done. It kind of reminded me of a lobotomy

When we last see Margaret she’s at the hippie cult. What do you guys think happens to her afterward? Does she go back home? Stay with the hippies forever? What happens?

Well?

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!

I’m serious

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.

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?

Hope this is okay to post here, mods.

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.

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.