Looking back on my review of the second season of Mad Men, it’s clear that I was trying to avoid causing a ruckus. I’m not sure why, because it made me angrier than just about anything since Shakespeare in Love beat Saving Private Ryan for Best Picture back in 1999. It was the Phantom Menace to season one’s Empire Strikes Back. It took everything that was so carefully constructed about the show thus far and scattered it to the four winds, bringing in poorly advised subplots and introducing plainly appalling characters (to further the Phantom Menace comparison, the Barretts are easily equal to Jar Jar Binks in terms of irrelevance and annoyance) that snuffed the show’s potential before it even got the opportunity to really show what it could do. Having said that, season three is a step in the right direction, even if the show may never fully recover from wounds incurred during the writer’s strike. Herein lie spoilers:
When we last left the creative department at Sterling Cooper, they had just endured a number of personal crises that appeared to affect them not in the slightest. Peggy (Elisabeth Moss) was continuing her upward ascent at the firm, Betty (January Jones) was managing to become so cold and bitter that she was beginning to make the most cheated on character in television history unsympathetic, and Don (Jon Hamm) was still doing things so lacking in motivation that everything mysterious about him was just becoming plain frustrating (the significance of his trip to California is still totally unexplained this time around). In this season, Don and Betty continue to try and repair their marriage with mixed results (further complicated by the arrival of a new baby and of Betty’s father Gene, Ryan Kutrona, who comes to live with them), while Don contends at work with the frustration incurred by the sale of Sterling Cooper to a British firm, represented here by Lane Pryce (Jared Harris). Meanwhile, Joan (Christina Hendricks) is getting the married life that she always wanted, only to find out that it isn't anything like she imagined.
One of the things that made season two so disappointing was its inability to credibly expand on the world so successfully established in the first season, and it is in this area that season three most noticeably regains its footing. After contributing almost no meaningful new characters or settings in the second season (save for Colin Hanks’s Catholic priest), here we are introduced to a number of factors that both bring more perspective on the world that these characters inhabit while still bringing them forward into the future. In ‘My Old Kentucky Home’, one of the stronger episodes of the season, Don and Betty attend a Kentucky Derby party at Roger Sterling’s country club, a move that makes the insulated world of power that they live in simultaneously more exclusive and repellant. Don’s new affair for the season (that probably doesn’t count as a spoiler) is Miss Farrell (Abigail Spencer), his daughter’s teacher who suggests flower child without spelling it out. Additionally, the show handles major historical events and figures with a good deal more subtlety and relevance than it has in the past. Reality contributes its first recurring character in the form of Conrad Hilton (Chelcie Ross), a new client and surprisingly grounded force in Don’s heady world. Kennedy’s assassination is covered here (where it distastefully coincides with the wedding of Sterling’s daughter), as well as the encroachment of American involvement in Vietnam, which is foreshadowed pretty strongly for upcoming seasons, but still not quite in an ‘I just bought my ticket on the Titanic’ kind of way.
In the character and story department, as a rule, the show also makes great strides forward, even if it never quite regains the authority that it had in the first go round. Betty, in particular, is allowed to develop a life of her own outside of the house, as she becomes involved in some political organizing (and simultaneously her own sexual rebellion against a stifling life with Don) and regains some of her humanity after becoming so unlikeable in season two. Roger (John Slattery), also, is finally revealed in full as the creep that he really is, as is Pete (Vincent Kartheiser), who has a sexual encounter halfway through the season that subtly exposes how their work environment postures as a professional boy’s club, but quietly fosters and supports rape. The weak link, once again, is Don Draper himself. Jon Hamm is as commanding a presence as he’s always been, but the writers have provided him with little to do here other than yell, frown, or grimace disdainfully at the perceived sheer idiocy of the people around him. They’ve dressed the character up in a polished suit and tie, but for all intents and purposes, he has been reduced to the emotional range of a crabby adolescent, and an almost passive character in a show that he used to almost effortlessly pull into his orbit with sheer ballsy swagger. This is redeemed somewhat by an uncommonly explosive finale, which puts more on the line than this show has previously shown itself willing to, suggesting that the deliberation that had turned so many viewers away was merely a slow burn preceding the cataclysms that all of these characters will inevitably face.
The final act of Mad Men has yet to be written (and clearly won’t be for some time, as the show’s still pulling in great ratings for AMC), but when it has been, this will probably be seen as the turning point when the show turned from nostalgic playground to cultural crucible, in which everything that was once fun and light hearted becomes antiquated and irrelevant. Whether the show pulls any punches in eviscerating the world it has so lovingly constructed remains to be seen, but one thing has been made clear: it’s coming. The final judgment of this season will only be truly available once its place within the entire construct is visible, but for the time being, it reengages the dual nature of this show’s appeal: we can shame this world from afar, but deep down, we’d really love to be a part of it.
Blu-ray Bonus Features
One thing you have to hand to AMC is that they know how to put together an attractive set. In addition to the wide panoply of audio commentaries on the part of the cast and crew, there are several short documentaries, including ones on the tobacco industry and Medgar Evers, as well as short spotlights on the March on Washington and the illustrations behind the show. And if you had to ask, this show does look fantastic on Blu-ray. One of the great pleasures of the format is its ability to bring out vibrance in its colors, which obviously plays a great part here, and bringing out the full potential in all of their delicately composed compositions.
"Mad Men: Season 3" is on sale March 23, 2010 and is not rated. Television. Directed by Andrew Colville, Barbet Schroeder, Dahvi Waller, Daisy Von Scherler Mayer, Jennifer Getzinger, Matthew Weiner, Scott Hornbacher. Written by Cathryn Humphris, Matthew Weiner, Andrew Colville, Kater Gordon, Robin Veith, Andre Jacquemetton, Lisa Albert, Marti Noxon, Brett Johnson. Starring Lina Leandersson, Abigail Spencer, Chelcie Ross, Robert Morse, Ryan Cutrona.
