It’s another week! And that means I am talking to you all about another one of Mad Men character’s closets. This week we’re talking about the sequel Mrs Sterling Jane Siegel. Jane starts as a secretary and we slowly see her closet go from secretary to lady who lunches. She gets married to Roger before Megan married Don so we see glamour from her for quite a few episodes and she slays all of the looks. They put her in white a lot and as stunning as those looks are, my favorite are her in this red coat after she marries Roger, and her in this blue dress before she married Roger. I think both of these looks really show Jane’s natural beauty and I love how the stylist matched the cheetah trim coat with the hat, it’s so stunning. For the blue dress, I love the bow on it and it’s so simple yet cute and elegant. I really love how Jane’s eyes pop in it and she looks so tan and clean. I love both of these looks so much, don’t forget to share your favorite Jane look!!! ❤️❤️❤️🐆🐆💙💙💙🦋🦋🩵🩵

Apparently the original Don Draper was born on June 1 but Dick was born earlier around March or April so I guess he kept his birth year and just took the original don’s birthdate

Foreground neck for comparison.

Great gal, (obviously grinning like a dipshit here) but it was so distracting in this scene.

One of the cleverest things about Megan Draper is that she was doing advertising long before she ever became a copywriter. She was advertising herself - to Don.

When Megan becomes Don’s secretary, she is advertising herself to Don. Like the best campaigns at SCDP, she identifies exactly what her target customer wants and presents herself as the answer. To Don, she appears to be a perfect synthesis of every role he is searching for. She is young and beautiful, but not intimidatingly ambitious. She is sophisticated enough to move comfortably through his professional world, yet warm and nurturing with his children. She is sexually confident without seeming demanding. She is the cool girl, the vixen, the secretary, and the mother all at once.

Most importantly, she appears effortless.

Megan’s genius is that she creates an advertisement for herself that Don desperately wants to believe. After years of disappointment with Betty and countless failed affairs, Megan seems to offer an escape from the contradictions in his life. She promises a future where he can have passion, domestic happiness, admiration, and understanding simultaneously.

But Mad Men has always been a show about the gap between what people want, what society expects them to want, and what actually makes them happy. Advertising lives in that gap. Don spends his career creating narratives that tell consumers happiness is just one purchase away. Buy the Kodak carousel, the Hilton hotel room, the lipstick, the cigarette, and your life will finally feel complete.

The tragedy is that those promises are almost always illusions.

Megan becomes one of the show’s most brilliant examples of this theme. The version of Megan that Don falls in love with is, in many ways, an advertisement. It is not entirely false, but it is selective. It highlights certain features and conceals others. The independent actress, the ambitious artist, the woman who wants a life beyond being Mrs. Don Draper is always there beneath the surface. Eventually, the real person emerges and the campaign begins to fail.

What Don discovers is the same thing many of his customers discover after buying the product: the promised happiness never arrives.

This does not mean Megan is deceptive or malicious. In fact, the irony is that Don participates willingly in the illusion. He buys the story because he needs it to be true. Just as consumers project their desires onto advertisements, Don projects his fantasies onto Megan.

By the end of the series, Megan stands as one of Mad Men’s most elegant metaphors for advertising itself. She is not simply Don’s wife. She is a living embodiment of the thing Don sells for a living: a beautiful promise that happiness can be packaged, purchased, and possessed. And like so many of the ads Don creates, the promise is compelling enough to make people believe, but never powerful enough to make them whole.

It was Betty’s first Mother’s Day after losing her mom. She made a comment about how pretty her mom stayed until the end, and Don immediately said, “No melancholy.” Betty said she’s allowed to be sentimental on Mother’s Day, that her doctor said remembering things is good and part of the mourning process. Then Don gives the look in the shot above. He doesn’t want to hear it. He doesn’t want to deal with an unhappy wife. He doesn’t want to let her communicate, vent, whatever you want to call it… even if she thinks it will help her. Man.

Fourth time through Mad Men—the best show ever. But as everyone says, Don does get harder to like.

Season 2 episode 6 for two reasons only.

1. That terrible and random intro song. That was a choice...

2. Duck and his dog. He's done a lot of fucked up wacko shit but this was the moment I threw his character away.

Editing to add: Justice for Chauncey, he deserved better 😞

After thought: what happened to the Drapers dog after they moved into the new house with Henry? Henry didn't strike me as a dong person and really that's my biggest problem with him

season 5 shows both men devolving into the worst versions of themselves. the million dollar question: at their respective peaks, who was worse?

Did anyone else think that a cast member would meet their maker stepping into the elevator shaft after this scene?

The best, most subtle line into Harry Crane’s idiotic mind is when he, Pete and Kenny are having lunch. Harry leaves for a phone call and says, “Pete, order for me. Caesar salad, no dressing.”

So lettuce and croutons.

Anyone else find that line hilarious??

I completed Mad men a little over a year ago. And I had a blast.

Over the year I had enough time to sit and come to the conclusion that Mad men may be the best show I have ever watched.

It's the complete package. It has Phenomenal CHARACTER WORK, CAST, CINEMATOGRAPHY, SET DESIGN, ACTING, COSTUME DESIGN and Probably the best DIALOGUE on TV... Also most importantly it was consistent and It LANDS the ending.

Most shows typically lack in one of those areas. Like with the The wire ... The plot driven structure held back the character work IMO (character work is still good) or with shows like Breaking Bad using plot over character driven narrative which limits the richness and depth in its story because of the plot driven structure unlike Mad men where you could rewatch and learn something new or see something in an entirely different perspective... Breaking bad isn't that. Etc.

The show was pretty consistent through out the 7 season run. This is my rating and ranking of each season. My personal ranking and ratings.

1. Season 3 (9.4/10)

2. Season 4 (9.3/10)

3. Season 5 (9/10)

4. Season 7 (8.8/10)

5. Season 1 (8.8/10)

6. Season 2 (8.5/10)

7. Season 6 (8.5/10)

My favourite episodes would be

1. The Suitcase

2. The Hobo and the Gypsy

3. Person to Person

4. The Carousel

5. The Phantom

6. The Jet set (I hope I spelled it right)

7. Shut the door, Have a seat

8. The Other woman

9. Nixon vs Kennedy

10. Smoke gets into your eyes

With episodes they change all the time. And in different orders.

And my chatacter rankings would be.

1. Don

2. Peggy

3. Pete

4. Joan

5. Betty

6. Sterling

My favourite aspect of this show is the dialogue and the character work. Which is probably why I love this show.

Tell me what you think about this review.

Assuming you can stomach spending time with the creator of Scout’s Honor

Maybe Peter and Trudy at the end. Any others?

For me it’s Sally. Seeing her joy and sweetness as a child turn into pain and betrayal, and then into anger and jadedness - devastating.
Runner-up is Lane.

1. If Dick was the orphaned newborn baby of a prostitute, how could anyone possibly identify his biological father?

2. A childless john would agree to raise the baby of a woman he paid to have sex with —In what universe, please?

3. So he grew up on his bio father’s farm until he was 10 with an abusive evangelized “stepmother.” Who took out her revenge for Archie’s infidelity on the product of that liaison. How could this self righteous widow possibly have moved herself into a whorehouse with a pimp a minute after her first husband was kicked to death by a horse?

4. Even more improbable: Was this Christian stepmother actually serving as a cook to Uncle Mack’s prostitutes, as when she beat Dick for losing his virginity with that wooden spoon in the kitchen?

I’m lost here.

I don’t know if there are any Canadians here who saw this, but I’m watching mad men for the first time and immediately thought duck Phillips was a younger mark carney for a second. The resemblance felt so uncanny that i had to search up is carney ever ventured into acting. Do you guys see the resemblance here??

Super funny and tragic at the same time. That Tilden Katz name drop is top 10 jokes in the entire series.

https://reddit.com/link/1ts9kew/video/1o9cxniiwb4h1/player

so wholesome