The Brits Have Landed
MAD MEN: “OUT OF TOWN”
AMC
THE NATIONAL POST
Mad Men is back in top form, if you can access it
Canadians used to be able to watch Mad Men on CTV. That arrangement has now lapsed, so unless you have a highly specialized cable package (I'm with Bell, and they don't offer it), you'll have to download the new third season from iTunes. This means a brilliantly written show with a sophisticated visual style has to be squinted at on tiny computer screens with muddy sound. The arrangement also, of course, discourages communal viewing, though this is one show that you actually want to share. Truly, civilization as we thought we knew it is coming to an end.
Which is how the characters on the show itself often seem to be feeling. The Season 3 premiere, which aired on Sunday night, was still feeling its way back, at least compared to what's been promised in all the advance publicity. We've been told that the boys and girls at the Sterling Cooper ad agency will be increasingly discombobulated by the advance of the 1960s. Not too much of that so far, though I thought I noticed one speck of prophetic irony. The firm, you may remember from the end of Season 2, has been taken over by a bigger concern from Britain, and this week the new bosses briskly disposed of a third of the New York workforce. The old head of accounts went down, not gracefully. "You're the dying empire," he told his tormentors. "We're the future." It's 1963, and it's impossible not to hear the bells of the British Invasion tolling in the near distance.
The invading Brits' subsequent behaviour was no more endearing. On the divide-and-conquer principle, they appointed two replacement heads of accounts, leaving each to believe for a time that he was the sole anointed, before humiliating them both at a meeting with a casual announcement of the true state of affairs. One of them was our old and endearingly wormy friend Pete Campbell, and this isn't going to do anything for his already troubled marriage. The younger and slimier Brit is a dead ringer for Pete, and I still haven't decided whether this is careless casting or inspired. I think I'd be happier with it if the audio on my laptop allowed me to make out their accents.
"There's no such thing as London Fog," the big English cheese instructed the remnants of Sterling Cooper's ancient regime; it was a purely chemical phenomenon, not a meteorological one, and Charles Dickens got it wrong even if he turned out a great piece of prose in the process. The reason this cropped up is that the clients the guys were buttering up this week were the (American) raincoat manufacturers of that brand. Don Draper and Sal the Closeted Designer were sent out of town to reassure them, a task at which Don is spectacularly good, and to discourage them from diversifying. "There will be fat years and there will be lean years" said Don, "but it's going to rain." Back at their hotel Don almost got it on with a forward but coy air hostess, with whom he clinched the deal by telling her it was his birthday. This may even have been true; as a man with a double identity, he must have birthdays to spare. They were disturbed by a fire alarm, and while scuttling down the escape, Don was able to observe Sal similarly interrupted with a young male member of staff. Hard to believe that Don hadn't at least suspected Sal's orientation before this but, Don being as canny and close as he's sophisticated, Sal's secret is safe with him. Don himself is back with his wife, who is newly pregnant, and - the odd flight attendant aside - he seems to be making an effort. Back at Sterling Cooper HQ, both Sterling and Cooper are, shamelessly and mercifully, unchanged.
We saw disappointingly little of Joan this week and even less of Peggy but, on past form, Peggy is likely to lay low for episodes at a time and then suddenly take centre-screen - which, of course, is how the character goes through life. All the acting is as good as ever and so, on this showing, are the scripts. Mad Men effortlessly resumes its place at the very top of the heap. I just wish it could have resumed it a little more accessibly. Maybe the producers think Canada's part of the dying empire as well. They should heed their own wake-up call. Or at least be a little more polite.