The ‘Mad Men’ Episode(s) That Got Us Hooked

Hello, welcome back to the Prestige TV podcast feed.

I'm Joanna Robinson.

I'm Rob Mahoney.

We're here with another episode of Hooked, the miniseries that we've put together as an excuse, a thinly veiled excuse for Rob and yours, Truly, to watch some of our favorite shows, re-watch some of our favorite shows and talk to you about them.

But

really, Rob,

what is this mini-series about?

I'm glad you asked.

Everyone's been talking about it.

A lot of chatter about hooked, which is our way of proposing, if you were trying to get someone in your life to watch a show with you, what is the one episode of that show you would use to get them hooked?

Register trademark.

So Today, we're talking about a little show called Madmen.

And something that we did not intend to do when we sort of shuffled around which shows we would talk about in which order is to do back-to-back AMC shows that premiered one year apart from each other.

But that is, that is where we have found ourselves here to talk to you about Mad Men,

which happens to be our producer Kai Grady's favorite show.

So this episode.

like many are is dedicated to Kai Grady.

Of course.

I'm going to hit the spoiler warning here at the top, which I didn't do last week, and I'm just going to do it here.

We're going to talk about three episodes of Mad Men essentially today.

We're going to touch on the pilot, which, you know, per the premise of this podcast is not, we think, necessarily the best entry point for Mad Men.

We're going to talk about season one, episode three, which is my pick for what I think is the episode that'll get you hooked into Mad Men.

And then we're going to talk about season one, episode 11, which is Rob's pick for the episode.

So, spoilers, I guess, up through episode 11 of season one of Mad Men.

I think we'll be gentle about it.

Very gentle, but just wanted to give people warning in case they were particularly squeamish about it.

So

why

Mad Men other than that it's Kai Grady's favorite show and that is very important to us?

Madmen ran on AMC from 2007 to 2015, seven seasons, 92 episodes.

It's set during from March 1960 to November 1970,

and it won

four outstanding drama series Emmys and 16 Emmy wins total across seven seasons.

And it, I mean, pretty good.

And I'm going to credit it with, actually, this is true.

I was trying to sort of figure out what it is culturally that Mad Men did besides being excellent TV series.

Is that not enough, Joe?

Change our lives forever.

It,

the, the quote-unquote Mad Men effect

changed the most popular liquor in the U.S.

from vodka to whiskey.

Yes.

for the first time in decades, vodka's come back.

Tito's vodka, no free ads, cannot be stopped.

It is our preferred alcohol here in America.

But for a brief shiny moment, it was whiskey.

It was bourbon.

And that is because of Bad Men.

I think tomorrow it could be celebrity tequila.

You know, there's growth, there's change, there's evolution here for all of us.

And I think the closer we get to, or like aviation gin, no free ads.

But like,

I think this is the direction we're moving in.

Listen, if any celebrity tequila wants to sponsor this podcast, you can reach us at press teachtv at spotify.com.

Sure, why not?

The rock, if you're listening, I'm ready.

Yeah.

Kendall Jenner, if you're listening, I'm ready.

George Clooney, you're soldier tequila, so the window's closed on you.

Okay, so Ramahoni.

Other than all those accolades we just mentioned and what it did for the whiskey industry,

what does Mad Men mean to you?

When did you start watching it?

What's your relationship with the show?

All-time great show.

And I think it's a perfect hooked show as well, because it's so hard to put your finger on exactly what it is.

It's not an easy show to easily encapsulate.

You can give them the setting, you give them the period dressing.

You can say it's about, you know, like an ad executive and the people who work in this, this office around him.

That doesn't really cover, I don't know, the eighth of it.

There's just so much happening here in terms of the complexity of character that you kind of need to see it to get it.

And that, I know that's a problem for a lot of people, especially in the early stages of the show is understanding what mysteries matter, which ones don't, which character dynamics are important, which ones are going to be dropped off.

You just kind of have to stew in it for a while.

And once you, once you kind of put yourself in that place, it transforms into one of the richest television experiences we've ever had.

I was checking out some of the early reviews and some of the early, like, what were some of the negative reviews?

Because, you know, overwhelmingly positive reviews.

Madman was deeply well received in the beginning.

That's no mystery.

But I think the people who didn't click with it immediately often cite tone, like struggling to find the the tone.

Is this a satire?

Is this a dramedy?

Is this a drama?

Is it a comedy?

Is it a mystery show?

You know, what exactly am I watching here?

And I think because Mad Man operates on multiple levels, you've got basic like sort of plot and character levels.

You've got literature, you know, like college level lit.

class level symbolism and motif, et cetera, et cetera.

And then you've got this third level, which is just sort of a portrait of a decade.

And like sort of what did this, what did the 60s mean?

And how did we get from 1960 to 1970?

And

without giving us a really boring sort of bio pic-esque beat by beat.

And then this historical event happened.

But what did that historical event, how did it push us culturally and personally, totally, you know, throughout throughout the decade.

All of that under.

the umbrella of moving out of the Bush era into the Obama era, which is sort of like the background of like where we were meeting the show at the time, which I think is really interesting.

And I think to your point about

the impossibility of defining mad men to people is not just those multiple levels that it works on, but also,

and this is what puts a lot of people off, I think, at the beginning, is the way in which the characters are drawn in many ways like ciphers.

They have like deep interior lives.

They're cipher characters, but they're not one-dimensional.

They're not flat.

They have a lot of depth to them, but there's a lot of space inside of these characters for us to sort of put ourselves

into the mix.

And then it becomes this deeply personal show where we get emotionally attached to these people because we just sort of put ourselves in the blank spaces.

Uh, is sort of that was my experience anyway with watching the show.

I think that's a huge part of it.

Like you just can't tell someone how to feel.

about Don Draper, about Pete Campbell.

And I think, you know, we're going to get into a little later why the pilot isn't necessarily the best entry point for the show.

I think this is one of those reasons where in the pilot everyone is a little bit flat everyone is a little two-dimensional as is often the case with these sorts of exercises where it's like don is smooth and kind of only smooth pete is a slime ball and kind of only a slime ball you know peggy is new and naive and like even characters like joan who become incredibly well-rounded by the end of the show is just kind of like a mean girl in the pilot effectively and so yeah Selling people on that is difficult.

Selling people on the ambiguities of all that interaction between all of these characters who are ciphers.

like i don't know how you can how you can tell someone what the show is or is about without projecting so much onto it so we're i guess we're going to do that today joe i guess you and i are going to project how we feel about these characters and mad men and that probably informs which episodes we chose to yeah it's almost like we should i don't know employ like a projector of some kind that will take us an emotional journey okay um

This is where we would sit, we would talk about our picks.

When we did the Breaking Bad episode, we agreed on what the episode should be.

In this case, we we disagreed.

And that is sometimes going to happen.

How do we want to talk?

Do you want me to go first because mine comes earlier chronologically, or do you want to go first?

Let's do this.

Why don't you lay out, make the case for episode three, Marriage of Figaro?

Okay.

So season one, episode three, Marriage of Figaro, written by Tom Palmer, directed by Ed Bianchi, in which we discover Don Draper is actually Dick Whitman.

And also the kind of guy who drunkenly runs away from his own daughter's birthday party and tries to make everything better with a pet puppy at the end of the day.

Pretty chill.

Parenting?

I really like this episode.

One of the tricks that the pilot does is presents to you Dawn Draper, Man in the City, and only at the very end

it lets you know that Don Draper has a wife and kids in Austin, New York.

This episode is an even split between Dawn Draper in the City and at Home Dawn.

But the two sections of the episode are complete mirrors of each other.

There are things that repeat again and again in the city section and then in the upstate New York section.

And all of it centers around this opening where a guy approaches Don Draper, this character we've come to know as Don Draper on the train and says, Dick?

Dick Whitman?

And everyone home goes, What?

So this idea of who is Don, who is Don Draper, actually?

What is he constantly running from?

What do trains have to do with it?

And many people are wondering all these things, Jill.

And sort of the ways in which he cannot fit in at all

in his work life and cannot fit in at all in his home life.

And the way in which the home life pre-packaged American Dream, which he is responsible for selling people in his

job, is a complete empty facade disappointment to him, Don Draper.

So all of that, I think, paints such an interesting, well-rounded portrait of Don Draper as a character who is still a cypher who you know they say in this episode he could be Batman for all we know we don't know anything about Don Draper still a cypher but

the nature of his mystery is much more apparent inside of this episode so this episode I think is a perfect way to get you hooked into the idea of Don Draper however when you told me what your episode was I was like I think I know what Rob's angle is which is a really good angle as well so Rob what's your angle on your episode?

Yeah, you make a great case for selling a show of Mad Men, the Don Draper show.

I'm just not so sure Mad Men is the Don Draper show.

And in particular, even though like Marriage of Figure is a great episode, I think it does exactly what you say in terms of splitting Don's work life and specifically like the very like Norman Rockwell home life that is then kind of splintering apart.

All that stuff executed very, very well.

Almost no Peggy in the episode.

Yeah.

And if there's no Peggy in the episode, is it Mad Men?

I was like, Rob's going to show up to this podcast.

A better feminist than me to be like,

but don't you care about Peggy, Joanna?

I do.

Tell me.

Tell me what this episode, episode 11, accomplishes.

I would say the primary pitch is two things.

One, not only the Peggy-Don relationship, but it really hits on almost every critical relationship of the early stages of Mad Men.

And that's getting into all the elements of the office.

We're going to dig into those a little bit later.

I also think one of the things that Mad Men is most concerned with, almost obsessively, is where ideas come from, like the germination of like how things come to be.

And so, getting, you know, Indian Summer is in part about how the sausage gets made of turning this object that no one quite knows what to do with into a product.

And so, you get all of that, you get the office politics, you get Don's double life, you get the Peggy Don stuff, you get mad men, as far as I'm concerned.

And everyone in this episode is super hot and bothered.

There's the air is like thick with this feeling that some shit is about to happen.

And what better way to hook people than here's a suicide, here's some people on the edge, here's a mysterious box, and we don't know what's inside it.

I think you make an excellent point.

And again, once I watched, as soon as I saw which episode you picked, I was like,

my episode is no piggy.

Oh, no.

So fair enough.

However,

I guess a question I will ask,

I'm not here to say you're wrong, but a question that you're- Joey, you are here to say I'm wrong.

That's what

we're doing.

A question we wanted to ask ourselves as we did this experiment was, how far into a show is too far in to name something a hook episode?

And so, episode 11, uh, you know, gentle spoilers for episode 11, uh, but we're deep inside of what's going on with Peggy in season one.

Uh,

Roger is like returning from an important event.

Um, you know, so there's just like a lot of context here that I'm wondering if people need in order to really feel like they understand what's going on in episode 11.

I think it does sell the events well enough to understand what's happening in the episode.

And it does something pretty critical for our hooked exercise, which is it makes you wonder how those things happened.

Like what happened to Roger?

Like you're immediately kind of, your interest is peaked to understand how these things came to be the way that they are.

Why are these characters behaving the way that they are towards each other?

Like how did, how did this dynamic fester to the point where this is where everybody is?

I think you could walk into this episode basically cold and have that exact kind of experience where you're interested in what's happening on screen, but more importantly, you're interested in like everything just on the edge of it.

All right.

All right.

We've made our cases here.

Are we going to do a voting component?

What are we like?

Should we have people email us at prestige TV at Spotify.com?

Sure.

Well, yeah.

I mean,

throughout this whole process, I want people to email us if they disagree with the episodes we chose because certainly people have strong opinions about this on the internet.com.

And so, of course not.

You know, if you feel like like the Mad Men pilot is perfect and how dare we imply that it's not.

And something I will say, you know, that maybe helps Rob's.

Well, actually, I have a counter to that slightly, but

when I've tried to show Mad Men to people who have bumped on Mad Men, the thing that they've bumped on is,

and

to be honest, mostly women have bumped on.

I don't want to watch a tour of like how terrible it was to be a woman in 1960.

Like that's the pilot is just sort of wall-to-wall horror show.

What I do like about the episode that I picked, episode three, because episode 11, the one that you picked, has a like

career wins for Peggy, which is

and so key to what her character will become.

What my episode have that it has that I find really interesting are these like all-female spaces.

You've got Joan and Peggy and some of the other women who work in the office talking about Lady Chatterly's Lover, right?

This, the D.H.

Lawrence book that was, you know, there was a massive court case in 1959 about the like unedited edition of Lady Childhood's Lover, which involved a lot more smut than previous editions.

And so you've got the women of the office sort of talking about this book.

The office paperback is disintegrating.

It has been passed around so many times.

My favorite detail is that it's it's sort of waived the way a book is when you read it in the bath.

And I was like, it's just been that book has been everywhere.

There's ways in which the

patriarchy beats women down that is key to understanding Mad Men and

its

what it has to say.

And then there are ways in which women are directly involved in that.

So the way in which the women in Betty's orbit are ostracizing this divorcee who has moved to town, Helen Bishop.

How dare she walk around the neighborhood?

She's just walking.

How dare she drive around in her little Volkswagen?

Come on.

How dare she wear trousers?

Like, what is she doing?

So

I was really enjoying those moments where it's just like women talking to women, which like actually throughout Mad Men is is pretty rare, but it exists here in episode three, which I really liked.

I enjoyed it for that reason as well.

Like, again, these, I think the beauty of Mad Men is there are a lot of good entry points, and there, there are, it just depends on kind of what is it, what it is that resonates with you.

What are the scenes that are going to really hit?

And in particular, I think the work and domestic split.

Like, are you going to be more intrigued by everyone talking shit at the kitchen, in the kitchen, at the, at the draper household?

Or are you going to be more intrigued by the big pitch meeting or the smoky bar where, you know, two people are meeting to discuss whatever.

It's like, there's a lot of things that can grab you.

You just have to find your madmen in that cyphery way.

Right.

Exactly.

In terms of like

the setting or locale, we've already discussed how mine is sort of split between office like and home life.

How would you characterize the setting location of your episode in terms of it operating as a hook episode?

I would say it's pretty much the same.

I think both of our episodes hit the big three, which again is the office, the draper household, and a two-top at a New York restaurant.

Like if you're in some of those settings, you are in Mad Men.

And I think we're, we're checking all the boxes right now.

Yeah.

Your home, home life plotline is Betty entertaining the fantasy of a...

Yeah.

Would you say like the Kmart version of Dawn Draper as an air conditioning salesman coming door to door?

Perhaps.

Shout out to Parker from season four of Buffy for making an appearance here.

And also shout out to the real new friend that Betty makes, which is her washing machine.

We're all making meaningful changes in the relationships in our lives in these episodes.

Yeah, the spin cycle is really, really doing it for Betty in this episode.

I love that as soon as Parker from Buffy season four shows up, I'm like, I don't trust that guy.

And Betty's like, I don't trust this guy.

And I'm like, you're right.

She didn't quite either.

But okay, like not to dig in too deep into like specific scenes, but that exact encounter in which Betty is deciding whether to entertain or admit this air-conditioning salesman into her house.

And from the second she decides to, and even before that, it's like she doesn't know what to make of this guy.

It's hard for us to read him exactly in terms of how, is he just being slimy in the way that a salesman is being slimy?

Is he after something else here?

Is he being intrusive in a way that's deeply uncomfortable?

Yeah.

I love all of the weird gray area of that entire sequence.

And like, again, that's the kind of stuff that Mad Men really thrives on.

And there's also what I do like about both of our episodes, and this gets into sort of the

specific scene question that we like to entertain as we go through these episodes, is

there's a there's a

fancier meta element to both of our episodes.

You've got sort of an imagine sequence with Betty inside of your episode.

I have this, what I think is a really, really interesting thing that they do early on in the season is Don is taking home video footage of his daughter's birthday party and capturing more than the kiddos, he's capturing the dynamics between different couples inside of this

fake home life, this fake happy ever after.

And sort of, so this idea of the admin at home making a movie and capturing something and what is authentic here and what is grimy here and what can't be ignored, but like through the lens of the home video,

you know,

aspect ratio, I just think is a really fun, creative visual flair that Batman will get deeper and deeper into the more the show goes on.

It's also perfect for a character who, for as smooth as he may be, just like doesn't really know how to be a human being in lots of ways and is evasive anytime he's asked to be.

And so the idea that he's kind of stalking around the party, observing human behavior, really a perfect character note this episode is brought to you by pretty litter if you track your steps your sleep even your screen time why wouldn't you track your cat's health too pretty litter is like smart tech for your litter box this color changing litter actually monitors your cat's health by detecting potential issues in their urine things like pH changes or blood so you can catch problems early Plus Pretty Litter ships for free right to your door so no heavy bags to carry and no last minute pet store runs right now save 20 on your first order and get a free cat toy at prettylitter.com/slash prestige.

That's prettylitter.com/slash prestige to save 20% on your first order and get a free cat toy.

Prettylitter.com/slash prestige.

Pretty litter cannot detect every feline health issue or prevent or diagnose diseases.

A diagnosis can only come from a licensed veterinarian.

Terms and conditions apply.

See site for details.

Which is the scene in your episode that you would say like most exemplifies what Mad Men can do?

I think for me, it's Peggy going on a bad date.

It's Elizabeth Moss's favorite scene of season one, she has said.

And who am I to disagree with that?

I think you have in this scene, Peggy is set up on a date by her mom, goes out with this truck driver, like a long-haul truck driver.

And she's just like constantly chafing against the person, person she's supposed to be in this context, in any context.

It's like she wants to be assertive, but she also needs to be polite.

She wants her date to respect what she does for a living, but she does not respect him basically at all from the moment that they sit down.

And so it's like, it turns into, as many things in Mad Men do, a scene about capitalism smuggled into a scene of like dating social mores, smuggled into like the awkwardness of just this like very specific.

exchange between two human beings.

And so like getting those layers working, again, with Peggy, someone who we're just getting to know over the course of this season, and a guy we've never seen before.

And you can just feel all the dialogue, all the dynamics clicking into place.

Like, I think Mad Men does that about as well as anybody else.

Like quick introduction of a character who comes to represent something very identifiable very quickly.

What I really love in that scene is

it's so human what Peggy is doing because Mad Men refuses to, in both the case of Dawn and Peggy and Roger and Joan and everyone else,

give you a clean person that it's easy to root for or someone that it's easy to hate.

You wind up like, I wind up being very emotionally attached to Pete, who is an absolute slime ball, et cetera, et cetera, as the show goes on.

For the record, I love Pete is a great TV character.

I love Pete.

He would be the worst person in my life, but he's a great TV character.

But like, is he going to be okay is actually something I care.

I want to know.

Yeah.

But Peggy at this date continually mentioning like, things about being in the city and cocktails she's had in this city and what it's like in her office.

Like that, that deeply insecure,

let me remind you of all the things that I think are impressive, that I want who I want to be.

I want to present to you that I'm this sophisticated city girl, even though I feel like I'm not there yet, but that's who I want to be.

And isn't that what Mad Men is all about?

Like I'm Don Draper, I'm not Dick Whitman or whatever the case may be.

Or in this case, just like going from the contrast of being the person, whether it's with Joan out on the town who's being shown around to all these places or in the office, but having to constantly get up to speed.

It's like by contrast, now she feels like the worldly one.

She feels like the experienced one.

And she's trying to flex that in a way that isn't obnoxious, but it's also obnoxious.

It's a bit obnoxious, but I feel very soft towards her as she's doing it.

The question we wanted to ask ourselves, I skipped ahead to this scene thing, but let's go back to this idea of like the character dynamics.

You mentioned, of course, the Peggy-Don relationship, which is Mad Men.

And so,

do you want to talk any more specifically about how that is underlined in the episode that you picked?

Absolutely.

I mean, it's a huge episode for kind of the early stages of the mentorship that starts to take place between the two of them.

And I think getting Peggy these early wins, getting Don stepping into this role that up until this point, basically, before Peggy kind of starts to move forward in wanting to be a copywriter by sheer force of will,

we mostly see him talking down to people, kind of shooting people down, nudging them out of the way.

And specifically, Pete, just like anytime Pete tries to buddy up to him, smacking him down, it like absolutely despises him.

And so, to see Don

showing an investment in someone's future beyond whatever it is he's doing today and tomorrow, because that seems to be all he really cares about, that's peeling back completely new like layers of that character.

And for Pecky, like she's getting these big wins, she's also finding a place in the office in terms of so far, she's being handed very like woman-oriented products that the men just like don't even know what to do with.

yeah they also don't really know what to do with her like they don't know how to talk around her they don't know how to be around her they don't know the like once she is kind of into the pitch room they're used to this being their space to make right like locker room style jokes and now that that space has been like infiltrated they're they're like over explaining things to peggy they're like trying to over articulate their entire dynamic and all their past telling those jokes they're still telling them yeah but they're gonna try to explain them by the way his wife is not mitch's wife just so you know

One of my favorite moments in that sequence is at the end.

Like, she does a pretty good job.

And Don has notes.

And at the end, Ken is like, good job, Peg.

He just doesn't know how to contract.

Little punch on the arm.

Good job, Peg.

Within that mentorship.

You're right.

Don does have notes for her.

One of the notes he gives her is like, maybe chill on the academia of like getting into the Latin etymology of the product you're trying to describe, which if you've seen Mad Men, you know, Don basically apes to great effect much later in the season.

So it's like, yeah he's he is a guy who's always talking out of both sides of his mouth a little bit but he's awfully persuasive and at this point in the game he's very like really useful for peggy's education on how to do this stuff

i think uh because i can't claim the peggy and don relationship inside of this episode which you and i both agree is is a core relationship of the show

what i can claim in my episode is Don's relationship with himself.

Yeah.

And the fact that this show

starts with the back of Dawn Draper's head in that sort of iconic Mad Men silhouette.

Um,

and

skip ahead a few seconds if you don't want to hear about the famous final shot of Mad Men or whatever, but like

ends on Don's face.

Like, this is a real journey inside of the heart and soul and mind of the character of Don Draper.

That is what Mad Men is.

And

why do we care about Dawn Draper?

In a lot of reasons, because he cares about Peggy.

So, like, that is part of it.

And I'm not saying she's just part of his story.

She has her own story.

But fundamentally, the show is most interested in Don Draper.

And

I think his conflict with himself

and the way in which he's mirrored back via Rachel, played by Maggie Siff, this character that he has

an affair with in season one,

echoed back by his fam, like, you know, his storybook family, and how he just doesn't see himself there.

This is who he's supposed to be, and he just doesn't see himself there.

How he's mirrored back by all the other guys, all the other fellas in the office, and he just doesn't see himself there.

And so Dawn in search of a reflection that accurately bounces back to him

is

what the show is about in many ways.

And this episode is a big entry point inside of that that I really love about episode three.

Absolutely.

I also think, to your credit, Joe, I think your episode more accurately and enticingly captures the relationship between Don and his libido.

Like, you're getting the early flirtations of his relationship with Rachel in a way that we will see over the course of Mad Men spoiler alert, I guess, many times with many different women.

Right.

And so it's just like portrayed and hits in a different way, you know, like the subtlety of kind of nudging the cufflink back and forth, basically.

Like things like that really, really hit and really, really work

and are such a huge part of that character.

And his want to not just see himself reflected in home life versus alternative, but in all of the alternatives that are out there.

All of these women that he meets, they're an infinite number of potential daunts.

And one of them is with Rachel.

And he seems to be invested and interested in exploring that version a little bit.

But seeing the early stages of it is...

obviously going to be a really captivating experience.

We are going to talk in a minute about the pilot and why we maybe think it isn't like the perfect specimen of what Madman can be.

But there is, you know, a quite famous speech from that episode, the happiness speech, where he talks about like advertising is basically you're selling happiness.

And he talks about the smell of a new car.

And like when he talks about

that idea, when he talks about the smell of a new car, I'm like, that's just dawn every time he says like a new woman.

Like, you know, he's just like, new car knew me, new woman knew me.

Like, who can I be in this person's eyes?

Like, you know, you know, can I, can I feel good about who I am in their their eyes?

And in this episode, episode three, it's all going swimmingly until he smooches her and then is like, guess what?

I'm married.

And she's like,

what the fuck, dude?

You know, and all of a sudden he's the, the, the shining, the knight in shining armor cufflinks, all of a sudden he's quite tarnished.

So

I, I really love that.

Do you have an MVP of your episode?

I think for me, it's Peggy for mine.

Again, she gets like the big wins.

She gets to be such a huge part of it.

She is finding purpose and her role in the office in a way that's really unique.

And I think it's unique even among the other kind of like junior executives who all seem to be sort of swirling about, trying to play the zero-sum game of office politics, wondering if like Roger dies, does that mean one of them gets promoted?

Because Don gets promoted.

Peggy's one of the only people in the office who has like a clear direction.

Like she's getting a raise.

She's getting more responsibility.

She gets to have her moment to kind of gloat in the sun.

That sounds like a winner to me, Joe.

The fact that yours is Peggy and mine has to be Don, I think,

is kind of perfect.

We're a little like matched set, I think.

And I think I do think you could make the case for Rachel for yours.

I was going to say, if I had to pick anyone other than Dawn, I would pick Maggie Sith as Rachel inside of this episode.

That would be my runner-up for sure.

Anything else you want to say before we get to sort of like how this episode sets up the rest of the series?

I mean, kind of a bummer that neither of us, just by pure coincidence, picked very Roger-heavy episodes.

I love Roger.

Another character I think is really important in understanding how Don sees himself.

He wants to be a counterpart, especially at this point in the story, to Roger, so clear, like, wants to be his equal, wants to be someone to bounce ideas off of.

And there's always like that tension between them where that's kind of true, but kind of not.

And so, having his absence in the story in my episode in particular, creates a vacuum for Don to suddenly fill.

But I just love having him around.

Yeah.

Your episode has a great Joan and Roger scene, Alzheimer.

Alzheimer.

And

I do like the imagery inside of your episode of Dawn inside of Roger's office and Pete inside of Don's office and this idea of like constantly striving upwards.

Like, who can I, whose shoes can I step into next?

I think all of that is really good.

That Joan and Roger scene in particular, again, one of these things where it's like, I can't really tell you with any kind of certainty how some of Roger's lines land with Joan, in which they're

kind of

when he says she's the best piece of ass he's ever had, and he doesn't care who knows it.

He doesn't care who knows it.

Not as romantic a line as Roger might think, but also is like the charms of it are not totally lost on Joan in that process.

And there's something about just the intimacy of she is in his office to rouge him up to make him look more lifelike after having a heart attack, is as close as these two people have been, sort of emotionally speaking, over the course of the season so far.

And to have him deliver a line like that, just as like, as

kind of cold and crass and guys, guy as Roger Sterling can be.

And it's like, I kind of think Joan likes it and I kind of think she's devastated by it.

And that's, that's the whole game right there.

And I think, um, you know, this reminds me of some of the conversations we had about the breaking bad pilot and sort of this idea of finding the characters who are going to matter as the show goes on.

The idea that John Slattery read for Don Draper.

Yeah.

And then they pulled him in for Roger and John wasn't sure he wanted to do it because he was like, this is a tiny character.

this is a nothing character.

And then Roger just blossoms into becoming so important and is the career defining role for John Slattery, like without question.

And then similarly, like I would say, Betty's importance comes and goes inside of Madmen, but she's a footnote in the pilot.

Yes.

And then she's...

the second half of this of episode three.

And so once again, January Jones just saying sort of like, I read for Peggy.

Then they cast me as the wife who had like two lines in the pilot, but like, we'll go on to be more important.

I think that's really interesting.

In terms of how my episode sets up the rest of the series, something I just want to really underline about Mad Men is how successfully it hit.

It wasn't the highest rated show on television, and it didn't ever get as popular as something like Breaking Bad did.

But the fact that it could hit on so many different levels of

depth and interest, I think, is really exemplified by my episode in the introduction of the Who is Dick Whitman mystery.

Yeah.

You've activated the Reddit detectives, which I think is an underrated aspect of

like the longevity of any show.

Do I think that fan theorizing or Reddit theorizing is the most important lens through which you could watch television?

No.

But I think it is an interesting

element of particularly this this era of television, you know, like when we get into this era, the first, you know, kicked off in many ways by the Sopranos, but definitely embodied by a TV show like Lost.

And then you have people who I was watching a panel with Matt Zollersites, who wrote, you know, two great books on Mad Men.

And

Mark Harris, great author, was on this panel and he was talking about,

I think it was him.

It was either him or matt said basically any show you care about that much will become a mystery show yeah uh and and so who is dick whitman is uh is like

at the end of the day not the important most important question that mad men is asking but it is a hooky thing that got people engaged and then

brought people into a world where we could be talking about like symbolism and motifs and ennui and like, what does, you know, what do D.H.

Lawrence and Mozart have to do with the themes of this episode?

I think is all just in the mix inside of episode three, which I really love.

We can all pretend that we're above that stuff, but it just is so instrumental in exactly that way.

And you see it in shows right now too.

Like White Lotus is exactly this, right?

This idea of like, oh, it's a murder mystery.

Really, it's just a super dense character study.

And Mad Men is that stretched out over even longer with all these other trappings.

But you need something easy for people to grab onto until the other elements will grab them.

And I think that's what the Dick Whitman stuff does as much as anything.

That's what all these, like, you know, the suicides and the boxes and just like all these mysterious elements, the dog, you know, the dog tags, like all of these things are just trying to keep you on the line long enough that you want to be on the line.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me.

What do you want to say about how episode 11 sets up the rest of the series?

I think we covered a lot of it already because I think a lot of it is relationship driven.

It's a lot of understanding the playing field for all of these different people.

Like we talked about Don and Peggy.

I also think like the Don and Pete stuff is so important.

And 11 really hammers home how adversarial their relationship has become, how quickly things have shifted from Pete like licking Don's boots to effectively like being incredibly skeptical of everything that he's doing, both in terms of the credit he receives, in terms of who he says he is, like how he presents to the world.

There's just this like disconnect between Pete not understanding why his shit doesn't work on other people, but Don's does.

And that's something that can carry like incredible narrative thrust for a show like this.

That's the kind of thing that isn't, it's the mechanism for some of these mysteries we're talking about, but at the same time, you're getting at the core of who these characters are.

One last thing I will say about my episode in the like

less spoilery way is to talk, just to circle back to this idea of how Mad Men incorporates historical moments into the show in a way that feels character driven.

So if if the bullet point in history is in 1959, there was a court case about Lady Chatterly's lover.

Yes.

Like that, that's the boring

historical footnote.

And then what does this mean to the sexual liberation of the women inside the office

is how it is entertained.

Or on the ad side of things,

here's a famous ad from 1960, Volkswagen, the famous lemon ad.

This comes up in episode three, where they're all discussing it.

So it's sort of like this existed is the boring bullet point, but sort of like, what does it do psychologically to this met these men whose whose job is to sell something,

the 1950s ideology, and here we are in 1960 and here's something kind of weird and quirky,

but it is.

it is

the death of something it is the death of the 1950 norman Rockwell into

the birth of the wilder 1960s and what that will all

bode for all of these people, not just like increasing Paisleys and florals in their wardrobe, but like, and the length of their sideburns and stuff like that, but all the other things, all the other ideas that come along with it.

So I just really love the way that the show throughout can weave those things into natural seeming conversations and character moments inside of the episodes.

Absolutely.

I mean, it's really hard for shows to make narrative drama out of people not changing or standing still.

And I think one thing that Mad Mun does really well is like time is marching on.

The circumstances, the world around them are changing.

But like, here's this room of guys talking about all of the supposed research saying that cigarettes cause cancer, but they're all still puffing cigarettes.

Like it never occurs to them for a moment to stop what they're doing and reconsider it.

They are just like stones against the tide until all of a sudden that stone gets turned over.

And I think Mad Men turns that into something really exciting and really thrilling on a really regular basis that I frankly don't understand how it's possible, but I want to keep watching it.

It's so funny.

When we were covering Breaking Bad last week,

I was looking at, you know, reading all the old reviews about it, reading various essays about it, re-watching the episodes.

And I was like, is Breaking Bad the best?

TV show that's ever existed?

I think we're going to do this every week.

Wax saved the experience of Mad Men.

I was like, is Mad Men the greatest TV show that ever existed?

And like, if you asked me today, my answer might be, yeah, I just want want

like the, I guess this, this speaks to the very premise of the show, but each time I'm like, is it time for a complete madman rewatch?

Is that what I'm going to do now?

I don't know.

The answer is yes.

But for both of these shows, as you alluded to up top, being on AMC at the same time, and they could not be further apart.

Not, I mean, obviously they have the sort of like problematic anti-hero leading men type of thing happening, but like Breaking Bad is as plot heavy a show as you will find.

Not to say that it doesn't come from a place of character, have other things going for it.

I could not tell you what happens, quote-unquote, happens in season four of Mad Men, but I can tell you two dozen things that happen between characters that I care about a lot more than that.

And so it just, it just hits in a totally different register and yet is no less effective in doing it.

I was actually thinking, I had like a sort of a sideways thought, which was that

You know, I we uncovered a similar story when investigating this pilot as we do with Breaking Bad, which is that this is a pilot that, you know, Matthew Winter really wanted to go for at HBO.

He wanted this to be an HBO show.

And HBO, even though he had done all this work on the Sopranos, HBO didn't even look at it.

So then it gets picked up by AMC, who wanted an HBO-like show.

And so it becomes an HBO show on AMC.

And I would argue Breaking Bad becomes an FX show on AMC.

And AMC has a few of these steals and wins over the course of his existence.

But it's why, even though it was a giant for a few key years with Breaking Bad and Mad Men, it didn't endure past in its stature past the beginning of the show.

It's like not a coincidence, show that if you're just poaching these one-off shows that were meant for other networks, then you zoom out.

It's like, what is AMC's broadcast identity?

What is the ethos of this network?

To this day, I don't really know.

Exactly.

I, you know, I still have my AFC Plus subscription because I love Interview with a Vampire, but what is an AMC show is not a question they ever answered satisfactorily.

And so this is

when you look at the pilot of this show and when you look at the pilot of Breaking Bad, you can see even more the identity of the original networks that they were intended for.

And then

just to talk about the pilot a bit more, the.

Well, before we even do the pilot,

should we hit your standout scene for a marriage of Figaro?

Yeah, I would say it's kind of a tie.

It's either Don Draper through the lens of his camera at home, or it's the Rachel and Don Draper scene on the roof of the store.

A lot of good dogs up there.

Really doing the work.

Some good voice up there.

Are you ready to talk about the pilot?

Pimoni?

Okay.

Smoke gets in your eyes, what it's called.

Directed by the great Alan Taylor, written by Matthew Weiner.

I think

this is a show that doesn't quite have a firm grasp of its tone,

doesn't have a firm grasp of its style, its visual style yet,

but hit pay dirt with its casting.

Yes.

And it has great writing because there's, you know, there's, there's not only

the happiness speech that he gives,

but there's the line about, you know, what you call love was invented by guys like me to sell nylons, which is like the thesis statement of Mad Men.

So

there's a lot to love about this pilot.

I've just heard from so many people that they can't get into the show from watching it.

So it was sort of the perfect candidate, in my view, for this series.

What do you want to say about the pilot?

What works and what doesn't?

I think a lot of what we talked about earlier resonates with me in terms of like, if you just don't want to spend time watching women get berated in the workplace or just the general like state of society at this point in human history, you're going to bump up against it.

And I think in the pilot in particular, everything is so much more broad where it's just a little too cute about the like, isn't it funny that doctors used to smoke in the office?

Isn't it so weird that they used to drink this much on the job?

Like, it's lingering on that stuff in a way that makes it feel like that is the show versus that's just sort of some of the texture of the show.

Right.

And they find that over time, they broaden up, or they, they kind of deepen the characters to the point where they're not these sort of like outlines of the people that they are in the pilot.

And in doing so, you get into all the juicy stuff that is enticing us back to Mad Men over and over again.

I would say I don't even really recognize Joan in the pilot episode.

So, who might who might just straight up be like the best character on Mad Men by the end of its run?

Like one of my absolute favorite pieces of the show.

And so deliciously complicated, but the nuance isn't like the shades of her are not there in the pilot episode.

So yeah, and I think, you know, as we discussed with Breaking Bad, the pilot has a lot of work it has to do in terms of like establishing the who, what, where, when, why

of this world.

But

it's not selling what Matt, the depth that Mad Men is capable of.

And especially, yeah, when you get scenes like

all the guys in the elevator sort of leering behind Peggy, you know, like all of that, everything that's ever happened in Elevator in Mad Men is interesting to me, but like that's the most cartoonish version of something that will become, it's never, the sexism of Mad Mad Men is never, I would say, subtle.

Not terribly, no.

But it is more nuanced and shaded than what is presented in that episode.

So yeah, I would say so.

I think that's on all fronts, right?

It's about the way that that sexism like is articulated in the workplace and the behaviors that it influences.

It's also how the characters interpret it.

And in particular, you see Peggy, who has like almost like an allergic reaction to the way that she's being leered at in the office over the course of this season, like almost like on a molecular, like physical level, starts sort of rebelling against it.

I think there's a lot of stuff you can unpack there in the same way that as we were talking about with the historical events, where it's not about oh this big thing happened let's talk about it or throw it on the tv it's about like how does that ripple out through all the characters through all the plot lines through all this stuff how do you give these actors who we hit home runs with honestly basically across the board a lot of really juicy stuff to do and it it is very trippy just like watching a time capsule show where Elizabeth Moss is not a starring attraction in and of herself, where John Hamm is not a starring attraction in and of himself.

Like they are holding the screen.

They have incredible presence, but, and they certainly had both been in things.

Like, I mean, she'll always be Zoe Bartlett to me,

but it's just not the same as what you would, you know, walk into a show now that has Elizabeth Moss in it, and that's a headlining opportunity.

When are you going to be doing your West Wing rewatch podcast, Rob Mahoney?

I mean, I would love to.

Unfortunately, I've been

outflanked on the left, on the West.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, Rishikeshiraway basically already crushed this shit.

So, like, what am I to do?

Fair point.

Fair point.

This is one of the negative reviews that I picked up of the pilot said this.

Mad Men seems to be attempting to be satire without a plan.

The mood is serious, not campy, and there aren't laugh out loud moments, just a lot of groaners, at which point the show simply becomes a reflection of its characters.

Depressing.

It turns out that watching moody, cruel men and unsatisfying put-upon women for an hour just isn't that much fun.

That's not how I would describe the Mad Men pilot necessarily, but if you think about things that happen in our episodes, like

in my episode, episode three,

okay, Pete comes back from his honeymoon and they've put a bunch of Chinese people and chickens in his office.

That's its own level of what the fuck passes as a joke in 1960.

But then later, when Rachel and Don are leaving the offices and a chicken just walks by and Dawn's like, it's a junior executive, like that's really funny.

They pay that shit off.

Like, I don't know what to tell you.

They really pull it together

and the very premise of what peggy has to navigate inside of your episode is inherently funny so yeah i think the comedy beats um

which better distinguishes mad men from the sopranos like mad men picks up right as the sopranos ends on tv you know and and matthew winner like taking over as the new quote-unquote David Chase of television.

But I can't speak to the tone of the Sopranos.

I know that it is definitely funny as well as being thrilling and all the other things that it is, but it's not the same humorous tone that Mad Men has to offer.

And I think that's something that only grows over the seasons and is not as indicative in the pilot.

So.

And like there are great gags and one-liners throughout Mad Men.

It's also a show that is a constant exercise in like, who gets to cut down whom and like who gets to throw the barb, who gets to like brush somebody off.

And this is something like Roger is so great at in terms of his dynamic.

And I think one thing that just isn't quite there in season one, I think maybe is a little more present in my episode than yours, but even then, not quite there.

Like you need the Burt Cooper daffiness to pop up a little bit here and there.

And you need Roger kind of coming in and smoothing things out with a joke.

And when he's not in the office, you feel that absence.

Like you feel the self-seriousness of Don's office presence really like lording over everybody.

Like it's a very delicate balance in terms of that workplace.

And

I don't even know when the show really hits its stride in that way.

It's when the cast fills out a little bit.

There's some key characters who just haven't been introduced yet at this stage in the show, but it's already hitting at a high enough level that, again, you just want to be along for the ride to see what happens.

Who's the character you're most missing in these early episodes?

I feel like it might be Stan.

It's a Stan.

It's Stan.

I love Stan.

We're Stan people.

That makes sense.

Stan Stans, truly.

Stan stands.

Absolutely.

Yeah, I agree with all of that.

Anything else you want to to say specifically about the pilot, which is, you know, is

really fun to watch, to your point, about watching John Hamm and Elizabeth Moss before they are massive TV stars, which they will become.

So

I do want to, and I think we've given it some credit.

I want to give all appropriate credit to the pilot on having a lot of the raw materials, like Don's scrawling ideas on a napkin, like some of the elements from the Lucky Strike meeting.

Like you're getting, you're almost getting there.

It's just that the characters themselves aren't quite there.

And it's just not finely tuned enough in the way that basically all pilots are not finely tuned enough.

Yeah, absolutely.

All right.

Anything else you want to say before we get to any sort of big spoilers that you want to talk about?

I would say just the idea from my episode that pastrami is Yankee barbecue is something that I will be carrying with me for a long time and I had completely forgotten about, but is a thousand percent true.

Oh, okay.

You don't find that personally offensive?

No, it's exactly what it is, like a low and slow meat preparation preparation that yields delicious products.

Like this, this checks out to me.

It's, you know, it's toasted just like Lucky Strikes.

All right.

Let's go to big time spoilers if we have any that we want to talk about.

I'm going to be honest, I don't have a ton coming off of these episodes.

And again, some of it is everything that happens in Mad Men is such a...

a deepening of complexion where it's not like there's a straight line from what happens in these episodes all the way through the end.

It's so curvy that I wouldn't even know how to spoil something to have a more thorough conversation about it.

I think only a couple things popped out to me as sort of almost

prophecies for some of these characters.

Like Dawn describing what Pete will become, you know, like, you know, with not much hair and nobody likes you.

Damn.

I mean, we like Pete, but

or Betty.

being so judgmental of a divorced woman when Betty herself will become a divorced woman in a few seasons.

Baby Kiernan Shipka is here, and that is really exciting to spend some time with.

And just thinking, just thinking about

trying to reevaluate the ending based on the beginning, like thinking about the way in which this show ends

with, again, Don Draper not changing fundamentally, but

achieving

a bit more peace with who he is.

Um,

but the bar is low, Joe.

I gotta be honest with you.

The bar is in hell,

the bar is in hell, and smeared with Coca-Cola.

But, like, it's um,

I just love that idea of the beginning of the show,

Don as like so distant and disconnected, and the end of the show,

Dawn with a smile on his face, both connected to the people around him at this like sort of Esalen meditation retreat.

Yes.

And

using that to sell Coca-Cola.

What else would you do?

What else would you do with perfect clarity into the human experience other than sell something with it?

Sell Coca-Cola.

All right.

Anything else you want to say about Mad Men in general or this experiment specifically?

Two things.

One, just to echo what you were saying about Betty's role in the show, in these episodes and going forward, like I think she gets a real short shrift in the way that people talk about Mad Men, in part because, yes, there are stages of the show where she really falls hard into the background.

But her presence at this point, in this like Priscilla locked in the dollhouse kind of role that she's basically forced into playing, and the ways that she's like starting to lash out, like I forgot how much I love this dynamic of the show.

And honestly, how expertly it's played by Jane Warri Jones, who also gets a tough rap for not being John Hamm or Elizabeth Moss sometimes, but I think it's is genuinely like pretty great on the show overall.

Yeah, Betty is a character that I really had to defrost around.

And then on every rewatch, I am more and more compelled by and interested in.

Yes.

And again, it's like goes back to that whole Skylar White thing of just sort of like the wife character who is in the way of your, but not really, because Don just does whatever he wants.

So no one is in this man's way, I can assure you.

Absolutely not.

I think if you haven't re-watched Mad Men in a while, or if you haven't tried to hook a friend or a loved one into mad men with a with an episode other than the pilot i think it's a it's a really good time to and a really good idea um

i was thinking about you know this thing we had around our breaking bad discussion was like what was the most 2008 thing about this episode yeah we didn't really do this here but i was really sort of trying to dig into how did this reflect 2007 how did this reflect the bush era how did this reflect a country on the on the verge of the Obama era?

And I think that idea of

us running on fumes of that immediate post-9-11

hoorah patriotism

that was sort of existent in our culture and how much that had soured for people by 2007.

And so an indelible image of Mad Men for me is the scene where the Draper family has had a picnic and then they just like stand up and shake out their picnic blanket and just leave all the trash on the beautiful lawn where they have been picnicking and just get in their car and drive away.

And I'm like, that's, you know, that's something that that was on the writers of Mad Men that was on their minds when they were, they were just thinking about America.

We were right on the verge of a stock market crash that happened while Madman was going on, all this sort of stuff.

So if right now you have some questions about how you feel about America and the ideas of America that you've been sold, Mad Men's a perfect sort of reflection meditation to go through as you think about that, I think.

So, I actually think it is a perfectly cynical show for this moment in time where it interrogates everything, but it doesn't feel overwhelming to the point you would be burdened by it or worn down by it.

So, it's like you're not getting the overly saccharin that feels false, and you're not getting the so bleak that you're enmeshed in darkness.

It's like we're, we're just all living here in the middle, trying to make the best of whatever circumstances we got.

And most of the circumstances are bad, and a lot of people are doing weird things.

But you know what?

We're just trying to sell Coke together, Joe.

We're just accidentally inventing vibrators together.

Heinz beans, lucky strike, whatever is up for sale.

We want to sell it to you.

A car, perhaps?

Who's to say?

Thanks, Rob Mahoney, for going on the journey through Mad Men with me.

Thanks to Justin Sales for his work on this feed and letting us do this fun experiment where we watch great television and talk about it a little bit.

And thank you to Mad Men expert and aficionado Kai Grady.

And we'll be back with another hooked episode soon.

And email us in the meantime, prestige TV at spotify.com with whatever Mad Men episode you think is the best episode to hook people with.

I would genuinely love to hear people's ideas because as we said, there's a wide range of possibilities with this one.

We did consider, we should say, we did consider the wheel, which is the finale of season one, but that just felt even a little too far for us.

Um, so, but that, I mean,

the carousel

speech

is so, you know, the carousel speech is, this is a post-credit sequence of this podcast, I guess.

The carousel speech is the

Walt and Jesse.

dissolved

body in a bathtub.

It's true.

You know, what is the moment?

So that's definitely on our minds.

But yeah, Prestige TV at Spotify.com.

Yeah.

The question we had is: does it pay off without things like Marriage of Figaro?

If you don't have the footage, if you don't see the domestic life, does it hit the way that it ultimately does?

Because yeah, once you get there on honest terms, watching through the first season, like you are radicalized to love this show.

Join us in our love for Mad Men if you haven't already, and we will see you soon.

Bye.