Breaking Bad — Season 3

[Warning: Contains spoilers for previous seasons]

The perpetual moral free-fall of Breaking Bad should not be as sustainable as it's proven to be. By the start of its third season, which begins only with the show's 20th episode, Breaking Bad has already traveled such dark territory the question arises whether it can keep going before slipping into absurdity. However, the program already had a built-in black comedy that underscored its drama, and somehow the greatest show currently on television only gets better as things continue to spiral.

Breaking Bad — Season 2

*Warning – contains spoilers*

Breaking Bad's second season leaps so far above the bar it set for itself with the first seven episodes to such an extent that television audiences did not even have to wait a full year to watch a show in the same league as The Wire after David Simon's masterpiece went off the air. Clearly the series struck a nerve, as the opening moments of the season premiere, itself actually a flashback of the final moments of the previous finale, looks crisper despite being recycled footage. AMC rolled out the high quality film stock for its critical smash, and the visual upgrade serves as an immediate symbol of the extreme boost in the quality of the show's writing, placing the series into the pantheon of great shows with only 20 total episodes to its name.


The first season ended with Walt and Jesse having solved their distribution problems by hitching their wagon -- or RV -- to drug dealer Tuco. The partnership immediately created a new issue, however, in that Tuco's insanity made them expendable at a moment's notice, likely for no reason at all. Indeed, the final act of the last season, and the first part of this one, showed Tuco beating one of his crew to death with his bare hands simply for talking tough to the amateur meth producers on his boss' behalf. After the ordeal with Krazy 8, Jesse and Walt were understandably wary of getting in over their heads, but they clearly entered a whole other realm of danger with Tuco.

Sure enough, the crazed dealer rounds up his new suppliers by the end of the first episode, convinced that the increased DEA pressure on him is less a result of his horrific, hyperviolent management of his territory and instead the product of someone in his crew being an informant. Walt, increasingly withdrawn from the family he's attempting to care for with his new trade, botches several opportunities to reconnect with his pregnant wife due to his paranoia, only for his fears to be founded when Tuco shows up to kidnap him just as Skyler nearly sets an ultimatum for Walt to spend more time with the family.

That increasing strain between Walt and Skyler forms one half of the larger arc of the character development. By this point, Walt has told too many lies to keep track of, and he must continue to spin fabrications as he dedicates himself even further to meth production to cover the costs of a surgery that will run his family nearly $200,000 and to satisfy the demands of his "customers." Where he could once get away with a few lines about "needing to get away," now Walt has to explain his days-long absence by stripping naked in a store and pretending that he blacked out for several days. Even worse, he uses the excuse of visiting his mother in a rest home to tell her about his disease in order to spend the weekend cooking up a massive amount of crystal meth.

This marks a shift in Walt's personality from a man uncomfortable with deceiving his family even as he did what he did to help them to someone who can lie with ease and base his mendacity in horrible personal areas that will cause unbearable pain if and when someone finally pulls a thread and unravels his falsehoods. Reflecting this change in his personal life, Walt's attitude toward the drug trade takes a much darker turn. His chemical ingenuity saved his and Jesse's lives more than once in the first season, but these were last-resort methods of self-preservation. But when Walt stands over a gut-shot Tuco after he and Jesse manage to overpower the dealer and escape his desert hideaway, we can see that this is not the same man who reluctantly killed Krazy 8 despite knowing that the first distributor was going to kill him. That Walt even apologized to his attacker as he choked the life out of the dealer, but this bald, hardened man looks down on Tuco and decides to let him bleed to death in agony rather than put a bullet in his head for instant gratification.

Over the course of the season, Walt increasingly identifies with his alter-ego "Heisenberg," the sobriquet he chose for his business dealings that becomes a hushed whisper among the drug community. Hoping to avoid yet another incident with a dealer, Walt finally decides to distribute his stuff himself, using several of Jesse's friends as street-level dealers. He speaks knowledgeably about infrastructure and the need for foot soldiers and enforcers as if he'd been in the game all his life, and even forces Jesse to handle two thieves who rob one of their dealers lest word get out that Heisenberg's crew are easy marks. By the end of the season, he's viciously warning wannabes to "stay out of [his] territory" and going to incredible lengths to stop a blackmailer from pushing him around. He even hires a lawyer, Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk, who gives maybe the greatest performance of a sleazy attorney ever seen), to take care of busted dealers and find a way to launder his cash.

Bryan Cranston more than earned his Emmy for his work in the first season, capturing the stress of Walt's condition and forcing the audience to consider what might drive anyone -- not just an innocent (and white) high school teacher -- to get into the drug trade. What he proves in the second season, however, is that a show doesn't need a likable protagonist to be captivating. Walt may not be a psychotic on Tuco's level, nor a calculating killer like Krazy 8, but the game is changing him, making him more ruthless. Consider how he reacts to the incredible news of the chemotherapy's success, driving him to flashes of anger and a need to repair the whole house to vent his frustrations with normalcy. Even Skyler, so desperate to help her husband through his ordeal despite being in the advanced stage of her pregnancy, begins to pull apart from him in disgust. Cranston handles this shift without breaking a sweat: where neurotic bemusement and outright fear creased his face, now his shaved head furrows in choked rage: rage at Jesse for his constant screw-ups, at rivals for infringing on his profit, even at his family, who continue to ask questions of his behavior that he grows tired of excusing. Only rarely does he betray humanity, such as seeing his son make a web site about his dad's struggle that praises Walt to the entire world, or arriving to see his newborn daughter after missing the birth due to a drug exchange.

At all times, Cranston and the rest of the cast are backed by the writing. "Down," the single best episode of the show's first two seasons, plunges both Walt and Jesse into personal crises. Jesse's parents, aware of the DEA breathing down his neck after the Tuco incident, finally crack down on their son, and the cardboard painting of a future that Jesse made for himself gets torn apart when he suddenly finds himself homeless. Meanwhile, Walt has the chance to at least partially explain himself to Skyler and ultimately chooses, perhaps permanently, to place his new occupation above his own family. It is one of the most heartbreaking episodes of television I have ever seen.

Elsewhere, however, the same comedy that made so much of the first season a riot comes back into play, particularly the scenario in which Jesse accidentally drains the battery of the RV out in the middle of nowhere and subsequently puts out a minor gas fire in the backup generator by pouring his and Walt's entire water supply onto the machine, shorting it out. Even Walt's slow breakdown into a monster contains elements of dark comedy, seen most visibly in the celebratory party Skyler throws when they get a favorable diagnosis, a party Walt ruins by making his son drink until he pukes and starting a fight with Hank. And who can forget the mad image of a cartel snitch (Danny Trejo!) named Tortuga -- Spanish for "turtle" -- beheaded and placed onto a tortoise with the words "Hola DEA" painted on its shell?

That mix of comedy and horror is but one small facet of Breaking Bad's vise grip on emotion. Even when the show moves quickly, it takes its time to subtly build and break down characters: when Jesse pulls some of his affairs together and gets an apartment, he befriends the young landlady, Jane (Krysten Ritter), a tattoo artist who runs the apartment for her dad. They enter into a relationship, and Jane's status as a recovering addict, combined with Jesse's wake-up call, creates the hope that the young man might finally straighten himself out. When the Mexican cartels begin to push on "Heisenberg," however, the pressure leads Jesse to old comforts, and he and Jane enter into a frightening spiral that hooks Jesse on even more dangerous poison. If Walt is slowly being undone by Skyler's growing distrust of him, Jesse suffers even more by finding someone to care for; it seems as if no one can win in their line of work.

Even the direction adjusts to this nightmarish turn of events. With Jesse and Walt involving themselves more personally in the business, the various directors take us into a dark underworld only briefly glimpsed in the first seven episodes. When Walt dispatches Jesse to deal with those meth thieves, the partner stumbles into a cracked-funhouse-mirror vision of a home, littered with various pilfered goods and uncleaned food remnants, with a malnourished child who barely has the strength to turn on a television as his parents, covered in festering sores, spend their days robbing and shooting up. Jesse inadvertently walks away from the situation with some credibility, but he looks as shaken by the end result of his addictions as we are, and the world of Breaking Bad slowly comes to resemble the hell that Walt makes for himself across the season's 13 episodes.

The most crystalline moment of this downward trajectory, however, involves the random intersection of two characters who don't understand how close they really are. Jane's father, aware that she is using again, happens to sit across a bar from Walt, and the two strike up a conversation. As both can only think of the addicts close to them, each speaks vaguely of the frustrations of watching young ones destroy themselves for nothing, and they share a moment of understanding despite not knowing who the other really is. Afterward, Walt commits his most heinous act yet -- without even lifting a finger -- and Jane's father will himself be responsible for an action that could be marked as a jumping the shark moment if it wasn't hauntingly teased all season and ultimately such a perfect metaphor for the cataclysmic place in which Walt has found himself by the end. I came away from the second season not knowing if he could possibly redeem himself, yet the true beauty of the series is that such a big question is among the least of my worries for these characters as they move forward into an apocalyptic situation.

Breaking Bad — Season 1

Breaking Bad has ridden such a tidal wave of critical adulation -- perhaps the most effusive since The Wire earned every plaudit under the sun -- that I reached the point where every day I didn't get around to trying it out felt like a missed opportunity. Finally, I couldn't wait any longer, so I set aside the various TV series I'm catching up on to give it a go. Naturally, this AMC series about a cancer-stricken man cooking crystal meth lives up to the hype, and while this first season contains a few wrinkles at the beginning, by the end of its truncated order it establishes itself as great television and leaves plenty of room for growth.


Walter White (Bryan Cranston), a high school chemistry teacher in Albuquerque, works a second job at a car wash to supplement his meager income to account for his wife, Skyler (Anna Gunn), taking off for maternity leave. After collapsing in a coughing fit at the car wash, Walt discovers that he has inoperable lung cancer, which he cannot bring himself to tell his family. Concerned with leaving his wife, his palsy-stricken son and his coming daughter deeply in debt, Walt decides to build a nest egg for his family. Following his brother-in-law, Hank, a DEA agent, on patrol one day, Walt gets the idea to cook meth to make fast, easy money to leave behind. What's life in prison when you've only got months to live?

Initially, Breaking Bad has such a deadpan absurdity to it that I wondered if the show was a black comedy instead of a drama. While watching the lab bust that inspires him, Walt sees a former student of his, Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), flee the scene. Rather than rat him out, Walt tracks the boy down and decides to make him his partner: Walt cooks, Jesse deals. The kid is as incredulous as the audience, and the insanity of it all only compounds when Walt ends up cooking the purest batch of meth in the Southwest, which he modestly chalks up to basic chemistry. (When the DEA eventually gets a sample, agents note that their own chemist could not make a batch this good.)

The madness only piles up from there. Jesse's old partner, Emilio, got busted, leading him to believe that the kid ratted him out and threatening Walt's attempts to sell his product wholesale to dealer Krazy-8, Emilio's cousin. The two dealers come to kill Walt under suspicion of him being a cop, and once again his chemistry skills avail him when he suddenly throws his materials together to create mustard gas, killing the two. Well, not quite, and the tough-talking Krazy-8 suddenly comes to fear Walt when he comes to and sees the mad genius who can kill him with a few mixed powders.

For all of the attention to scientific detail -- with necessary gaps in editing to prevent people from getting ideas for recipes -- Breaking Bad does not conform to the same realistic elements that made The Wire so memorable. Hell, it doesn't even try to play it as straight as CSI. The show introduces a succession of grotesques in quick order and then tries to make sense of them through the grounding element of the chemical accuracy. Mild-mannered Walt tries to set a standard for himself as a meth manufacturer, as if a proud entrepreneur slapping his name to a quality product, and he evolves over the seven episodes into a surprisingly hard-edged figure completely at odds with his weak frame, made even weaker through chemotherapy.

The rest of the characters are just as insane: Marie, Skyler's sister, shoplifts while husband Hank uses FBI connections to get his hands on illegal Cuban cigars. Jesse slips in and out of meth-induced paranoia, and his wannabe gangsta demeanor begins to fade as the quality of Walt's ice attracts dangerous men. Amusingly, he begins to follow Walt's example somewhat when he attempts to cook some of the teacher's pure meth with another junkie friend and spends most of the time chastising the other for the same childish behavior Jesse himself exhibited in the pilot.

The first four episodes generally play out as high comedy: when Krazy-8 survives the attack and Jesse locks him in his basement, the kid and Walt argue over who will kill the dealer. Walt tries to pawn all such responsibilities onto Jesse and thinks that his instructions -- in this case to dissolve the bodies in strong acid -- fulfills his end of each bargain and leaves the heavy lifting to the boy, but Jesse will hear none of it. Jesse wins a coin toss, setting in motion a long, tense subplot of self-doubt as Walt questions whether he can kill a man. There can only be one conclusion to the situation, but the depths Cranston plunders with minimal face movement and hesitant body languages makes the two episodes over which the question of his action plays out unbearably suspenseful, even tragicomic in his conversations with Krazy-8 (or Domingo, as his parents would call him). And then the writers can break up the tension of this plotline with the hilarity of Jesse ignoring Walt's instructions to get plastic containers in which to dissolve the bodies and simply melting Emilio in his bathtub, only to discover that the acid also eats through ceramic, metal, wood and anything non-plastic, thus burning a hole through the second floor and dropping wet mounds of soupy flesh all over the place. Shaken by the experience, Jesse attempts to quit the game and return to the upper-middle-class parents who threw him out, only to be cast out again for not ratting on his preppy, younger brother when discover the tween's pot (perhaps explaining how Jesse could have thrown away such a nice life).

The series takes a turn for greatness, however, in the fifth episode. After Walt's cancer is finally revealed to his family and friends, the he tries to argue against getting chemotherapy, knowing that he'll just put his family in debt before dying. Episode writer Patty Lin finds just the right balance between the snatches of drama seen up to this point and the black comedy that defined most of the early episodes when Walt's family stages an intervention, a subtle irony that tics across Cranston's face as he ponders it, only instead of drugs they plea with him to save his life by undergoing a treatment that will force him to down dozens of pills a day. It starts funny, with meathead Hank typically unable to share his emotions and Skyler trying to find some stability after hearing the news by insisting that no one speak unless holding the "talking pillow." Yet the show undermines and breaks expectations by structuring the severe parts of the intervention in a way that doesn't turn out in a pat manner. Walter Jr. gives a moving speech about the difficulties he faces with his disability and asks his father point-blank, "What if you gave up on me?" that brings Walt to the verge of tears. Then, however, Marie, who sees chemo patients every day at the hospital, says that Walt should be allowed to make a choice for himself and bluntly notes how many chemo patients seem as if they'd prefer death to their suffering.

At this point, Cranston proves why he got the Emmy over more well-known names. He quietly tells his family that he feels he never had a choice in life, suggested earlier by seeing his former co-worker, Elliot, who runs a lucrative chemical company with his wife Gretchen after Walt dropped out in the company's infancy to teach. When evidence comes to light that he and Gretchen shared something that might have driven Walt not only to sever his partnership but even refuse Elliot's financial aid in this time of need, the impoverished pointlessness of Walt's life takes on a deeper sadness. He notes that chemotherapy could prolong his life, but to what end? What is life if he's too weak and nauseated to move? Though he eventually agrees to the treatment, Walt shatters the normal way these interventions play out on the screen by calmly but urgently requesting that he be allowed to die.

There's something ingenious, insane yet oddly plausible about Breaking Bad's premise. Cranston's bent-over, nervous frame carries that hint of authority present in any good teacher, broken down by a crap paycheck and youthful defiance and apathy but still able to silence an unruly teenager with a growl. Watching his arc from nervous law-breaker who hangs his good clothes outside the RV in which he cooks to avoid getting odors on his clothes and rousing suspicion to a bald, Stoic presence in the drug trade who can brew false meth to act as explosives when someone tries to harm him or his partner is as fascinating as television gets.

Still, the writers never lose the comedy. The first great deadpan of the series showed Walt finding an outlet for his shock at receiving his diagnosis by fixating on a mustard stain on his doctor's coat, and the central gag of the finale involves Walt having to cook several pounds of glass in Jesse's basement to appease a dealer while a realtor shows up to hold an open house in the place. By the end of the season, Walt is set to make more money than he's ever dreamed of but he's also under the thumb of a psychotic dealer. This produces a sinking feeling in one's stomach but, in context of what came before, all you can do is laugh, and that's Breaking Bad in a nutshell.

Mad Men — Season 2

The first season of Mad Men proved to be a surprise success: for a show with barely any driving plot and deliberately offensive, period-appropriate dialogue, it was an irresistible snapshot of American decadence in the era of postwar greed. Its lack of a solid story arc outside of character development moved the season with all the speed of molasses, but I couldn't help but love the immersive experience. Still, I hoped that the second season addressed this problem and gave us something to keep the episodes moving.


For the first half to 2/3 of the season, I didn't get my wish. The second season of Mad Men inherited a great deal of intrigue and loose ends from the previous season finale, which it must labor through despite the two-year advance in the timeline. Don is still struggling with his marriage, Peggy secretly carried Pete's baby to term when she couldn't get an abortion, and the rest of Sterling Cooper crawls toward the impending tumult of the decade.

As with the last season, focusing on the characters yields far more interesting rewards than keeping track of its lethargic story arc. Don worked in the first season because his past was shrouded in mystery, and I was slightly concerned how Weiner and the writers would handle him now that we knew enough about him to strip away the audience's perceived need to learn about his secrets. However, I found Don more captivating than ever, because he evolves from a mysterious ad king into the perfect symbol of the typical American man as he changed throughout the '60s.

The illegitimate child of an impoverished, abusive farmer, Don was born Dick Whitman and assumed his current identity when he stole it from his dead comrade in Korea. His postwar reinvention matches America's own (albeit with different wars defining them), and his lack of a traceable past makes him the ideal candidate for change. Don wavers between the traditional values of gray flannel suit America with a hint of progressiveness. Notice that the women he chases are all proto-feminists: last season, he engaged in affairs with a Jewish store-runner and a pot-smoking beatnik. He lost both of them by the season finale, and now he pursues the ambitious, business-oriented wife of an obnoxious comedian Sterling Cooper hires for an Utz Potato Chip campaign.

Don cares for these women more than he does his complacent Stepford wife, but he also cannot fully commit to any one of them. He admires, perhaps fetishizes their independence, but he also wants them ultimately to answer to him. When he begged Menken to run away with him, she knowingly saw through his desperation, saying that he didn't want to run away with her, he "just wanted to run away." Don was simply too busy placing these women on pedestals to realize how much he wanted them to conform to the standards of the day. Slowly uncovering her husband's infidelity, Betty begins to assert a certain independence, to Don's horror. He clearly loves his wife and children, but he'd grown bored with the complacency of suburban life. Now, he experiences the sting of an independent woman, and it nearly destroys him.

Betty's growing dominance dramatically alters Don's life views, but he must also weather disillusionment with the men in his life. Roger Sterling and Bertram Cooper represent the noble older generation to which Don aspires, and they both move in directions that challenge Don's notions of the greatest generation. Roger gets wind of Don's marital strife and his projected indifference over it and decides to divorce his own wife. After confronting his wife with papers, he declares his love for new secretary Jane (am annoying character created solely for this plot point). The old generation stuck to marriage until death, and for Sterling to throw it away on an adolescent fling with a woman half his age scratches the veneer we place on our elders.


Compounding Don's growing resentment of these older men is their decision to hire a new executive to increase revenue. Duck (Mark Moses), an abrasive alcoholic, cares only for business and sees ads as nothing more than avenues to more profit. "This place has more failed artists and intellectuals than the Third Reich," Don once joked, but his words contained a surprising truth: the ad men on Madison Avenue were, at the start of the decade at least, pop artists years before Andy Warhol lent this work a bizarre credibility. Compare Don's brilliant, genuinely moving speech about the possibilities of the Kodak Carousel in the previous season's finale with Duck's behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing; Duck is the dismal future of heartless advertising, while Don's view of semi-artistic endeavors already seem nostalgic. Personally, I see Don and his old team working toward the same goal, but Duck serves as a sort of Michael Corleone to Don's more endearing Vito.

As always, though, the women prove to be the real focal point of the show. The three main women of the series -- Betty, Peggy and Joan -- held my attention as much as Don did when I sat down with the first season, and they are even more interesting this time around. Betty gradually imploded under the pressure of domesticity, and she appeared well on her way to some murderous rampage when the discovery of her psychiatrist's collusion with her husband only steeled her. Now, she readies herself for the crumbling of her marriage, and a slow fire builds in those eyes. Betty only grows stronger as she converses with a new neighbor, a divorced woman, who informs her that the hardest part of confronting your husband is "realizing you're in charge."

Where Betty's arc reflects the growing changes in home life for women, Peggy Olson must struggle in the workplace. To the chagrin, even outrage, of the men at Sterling Cooper, she continues to climb the corporate ladder. Her aptitude in marketing to women (and men) makes her an invaluable asset as women like Betty begin to make their own decisions. However, her pregnancy threatened to ruin all of that, so she managed to hide it and gave the baby to her sister, who suffered a miscarriage. Peggy strikes up a friendship with a young priest, whom she helps with fliers for church dances and such. Their relationship sours, however, when Peggy's sister tells the priest about her illegitimate child out of spite. Peggy's arc remains the most interesting on the show to me, because her advancement demonstrates a woman coming into her own subconsciously; she does not actively seek to break the glass ceiling, but her ingenuity and resourcefulness cannot be ignored, even by the chauvinists who run the agency.


I must say, however, that Christina Hendricks walks away with the season. We saw her Joan as a fiery temptress in the first season, a woman who, unlike Peggy, knew exactly what she wanted out of her career but resigned herself to the barriers placed on women. So, she exploited her -- shall we say, talents --- and bent the rules around her voluptuous frame. Here, though, we see a woman more constricted than any other, caged on one side by a woman who actually does advance the ranks (Peggy), and on the other by the repercussions of her sexual strategies. When Roger pursues the new secretary, he abandons Joan as much as his wife for a younger woman. As a result, she flees into the arms of a doctor who's threatened by her sexual knowledge and compensates by establishing a cruel dominance over her. She catches a small break when Harry creates a television department for Sterling Cooper that will monitor shows and films to ensure that ads do not clash with the preceding programming. He asks her to help him read the scripts, a job she takes to with vigor. Then he brings in a man to take the job full-time, and Hendricks deserves an award just for her single moment of completely concealed yet plain-as-day pain.

The season kicks into high gear in its second half, when the marital strife between Don and Betty forms a solid storyline that propels both characters as well as shaking things up at Sterling Cooper a bit. Combined with the uncertainty these people feel as the Cuban Missile Crisis looms overhead, Mad Men attains a level of tension it never had in the first season. The finale leaves a number of interesting threads to explore with the new season, and it cements the series as the best show on television. This is must-see TV, people.

Mad Men — Season 1

It's rare enough to get a show with natural character development, but even they are fueled ultimately by plots. After all, what would Buffy be without her vampires to slay? If President Bartlet's administration ran smoothly and without incident, we'd still have wonderful characters, but would we care so deeply about them? Mad Men takes a bold new step; it is, quite possibly, the most slowly paced drama in television history. This, of course, could have heralded a disaster, a turgid piece of self-involved pablum that promoted its aimlessness as "art."


Instead, it might just be the best show on television in the massive wake of The Wire. A meticulously and gorgeously crafted recreation of 1960s America, Mad Men not only commits to the look of the era but depicts the sexism, racism, nationalism and rampant capitalist greed with frank honesty. The creator, former Sopranos writer and producer Matthew Weiner, does not inject an anachronistic character who reflects the P.C. views of today to let the audience know that he doesn't believe what these chauvinist men are saying. He's secure enough not to taint his art with numerous pleas that insult the audience's intelligence. (Then again, Joss Whedon's Dollhouse came under fire as misogynist for not clearly taking a side against the organization, even though anyone with half a brain could tell you that the Dollhouse is full of villains, albeit villains with redeeming characteristics. Stop make our head goo overhot, Joss!)

The title derives from the self-professed nicknames of the advertisers who worked on New York's Madison Avenue throughout the decade. Set in the fictional company of Sterling Cooper, it charts the lives of the company's employees through the '60s. This first season starts in 1960, and Weiner says that he will advance the timeline two years each season for a planned five seasons. If this season is any indicator, a major historical event will factor into the story; the Nixon/Kennedy race forms the closest thing to a recurring, purely narrative plot in the entire 13-episode run.

Central to the show is Don Draper (Jon Hamm), a ruggedly handsome, deep-voiced, high-ranking executive at Sterling Cooper. He knows just what buttons to push to get potential clients on-board, and he can find a way to market just about any product to the masses. Rarely does he lose an account, but his ratio of success to failure ensures that he never gets too down about it. At home, he has the perfect postwar wife, Betty (January Jones), and two adorable little family units. The only way life could be any better is if he climbed that last rung on the corporate ladder to the top.

Yet he is anything but happy. His interactions with his family appear stiff and insecure, far removed from his relaxed, commanding demeanor in the workplace. It's not that he doesn't love his wife and children, but he looks as though his only experience with dealing with a family comes from magazines and movies, as if he watched a training film before some unseen entity handed him his very own collection of people. Eventually, we're given shards of a dark past that he's spent the last decade or so burying from everyone.


Complementing Draper is a rich cast of characters that make Sterling Cooper a microcosm for the social climate of 1960 America. Draper is at a position where he still has something to strive for without having to push himself constantly. Providing him with a nice foil is Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheister), an up-and-comer who sets his sights on Draper's job from day one. Whereas Draper destroyed his past and made himself on his own (even when we see snippets of his background, they show a poor upbringing), Campbell exploits his family's wealthy ties to get his job; heck, if it weren't for their ties to some big clients, Campbell would have been quickly almost as soon as he joined. Kartheiser, who of course most know as the insufferable Connor in Angel, is marvelous as this oily snake in the grass; he spends all of his time trying to conquer Draper (not to mention any of the secretaries in the office), but underneath he's insecure about both his family and his new wife's wealth, and he wants to make his own way without living off of their "charity."

Most interesting, however, are the women. Caged in by a glass ceiling so low they practically must crouch to get around, most of the ladies of this world consider finding a well-off husband as their primary job, with the only promotion being a doting wife and mother. The secretaries are sexually harassed in such an open manner it'll turn your head, but they know how to play the game. In a world of gray flanneled suits, the women wear garishly bright colors, and it drives the fellas crazy.

Three women in particular showcase the narrow yet subtly shifting confines of the decade. Betty does all of the household chores, but she, like Don, is slowly unraveling. The pressure of turning a blind eye to Don's own issues and her inability to do anything in life other than clean and cook are taking a toll, and early in the season she begs her husband to let her see a psychiatrist. Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks) rules over the den of secretaries and instructs them in the ways of flirtation. If Betty is boxed in by all the constraints, Joan knows how to play the game and bend those prison bars enough to get what she wants.


Most importantly, however, is new secretary Peggy Olsen (Elizabeth Moss). Introduced as a plain, timid, assumed virgin, Peggy falls under Pete's spell and enter in an on/off relationship dictated by Pete's sense of guilt over cheating on his wife. Joan gets her to buy nicer clothes, and she has a breakthrough when she suggests an idea for marketing lipstick to a group of men who can sell something to anyone in America, as long as it's not the 50 percent who are female. She finds herself placed in a position of importance no woman at Sterling Cooper has ever held, making her the character to watch as the show progresses through the '60s.

If I've neglected to discuss plot by this point, it's because I can't find one. This is a show entirely about character, in which the only major developments are insights or status changes. This makes the show move like molasses, but that only makes it all the more interesting. Watching character arcs form not only the heart of the show but the brain makes for television that rewards multiple viewings.

Everything about this show seems to be just right. The perfectly recreated sets, dapper suits and flashy dresses pop off the screen, especially on Blu-Ray. The falsity of American confidence in Draper's mannerisms make for an interesting allegory for the tumult that was about to explode in the country, while Peggy's slight social mobility also hints at what's in store for these blind chauvinists. While it could do with a bit of speeding up and some plot to move the episodes, Mad Men sets a new standard for period television, and I can't think of a show still on the air that can compete with it.