Friday Films: Mad Men Returns

I know it's not exactly a film, but since I don't have a day dedicated to television, I want to use this "Friday Films" to talk about the return of one of my favorite shows, AMC's Mad Men.

Maybe it was because of the insane amount of hype leading up to the premiere of the third season--every website, from Etsy to Fred Flare had some kind of tie-in going on--but I found the premiere to be kind of anticlimactic. It accomplished what I guess the goal is for a season premiere, to get a bunch of plot lines going and to establish the mood for the season, but overall it was not one of my favorite episodes.

The opening--Don imagining the events that surrounded his birth, and the strange way he got his original name--was really strange but well-done, and I did love the subplot between Joan and the new British (male) secretary. It left me wondering if she set him up for embarrassment on purpose, to show him that she was in charge. Don's discovery of Sal's secret--and the subtle way he let him know that he knew and would keep it quiet--was really awesome, and very typically Don Draper, and the Pete-Cosgrove rivalry will be a great plot for the season. But where was Peggy? And what happened to Duck?

That was probably my biggest compaint--there was a weird scene where they fired a random guy, presumably Duck's replacement, but it was kind of empty. We don't know this character, despite a lot of talk about his wife's cancer. Wouldn't it have been much more interesting and tragic to see Duck walking Spanish?

Maybe this will be one of those episodes that becomes better once we've seen the rest of the season. If the theme for the third season is instability and chaos, as hinted by this poster, we got a healthy dose of that in this episode. Because I have faith in this show and its writers, I'm interested and still exciting to see where they're going. It's 1963 in the show's world--are we heading toward one of the biggest moments of chaos and instability of that decade? I'd say there's a pretty good chance.