Meandering along with "Mad Men"

Well, mark me down as one of those who thought Mad Men kind of sucked this season. The New York Times’ Alessandra Stanley catches a large ration of shit from commenters for suggesting as much, but she’s right: Stories you expect to be linear, like literature, have become circular, like soap opera. Plots are being recycled, and the only thing that keeps the show remarkable is its authentic backdrop of history and fashion. Especially fashion. My eyes are still red from that glimpse of Peggy’s pantsuit at the end of the episode.

Still, even at its most mundane, Mad Men is better than another damned reality show, or cop show or dumb ABC laugh-track sitcom. At this point I don’t much care about Don Draper’s personal demons, but I am curious whether he’ll grow a Peter Max mustache and start listening to Three Dog Night. Everybody else did. One thing about the world in 1968: everything was about to get worse. Maybe that’s rubbing off on the writers.

Oh well. They could transform Mad Men into a dance contest and I’d still watch it for the exquisite period detail. Those of us who lived through the Nixon years like to forget how cool we thought we were, and how stupid we actually looked in all that polyester. But Peggy’s pantsuit is right on the money. So much for nostalgia.

If I had to pick a low point in the season’s writing, it would be the business of Pete and his demented mom. And what the hell is the deal with Bob Benson?

High point? I don’t know. Maybe Sally walking in on another tawdry sexual encounter. Yeah, that’s happened before, but this time it starkly demonstrated the depths to which Don Draper has fallen. Maybe “high point” is the wrong phrase. One of the show’s few laugh-out-loud moments was when he later explained to Sally how he was “comforting” poor Mrs. Rosen. Right, Dad.