Hey, Glee was pretty good last night! I feel compelled to mention that some of its improvement was due to an absence of bad things – thank goodness, no fake pregnancy plot last episode, and in fact nothing at all from Mr. Shue’s obnoxious, unsympathetic wife. I was also disappointed that after many episodes of silence, blonde cheerleader actually got a few lines only to be revealed as an idiot. (“I find [blonde pause] recipes confusing.”) In all fairness, though, some of Glee’s improvement was also thanks to enjoyable television rather than just a lack of irritating elements.

The most impressive thing about last night’s episode was that it attempted to do a very hard thing (usually good, although yesterday’s Law and Order post points out the pitfalls) and then managed to do that thing with reasonable success (even better). It’s not easy to make an entire episode about diversity and disability without melting away into saccharine nineties-esque identity politics or running in the opposite direction and ending up with cruelty and crudeness. Making the Glee Club spend several hours a day in a wheelchair for a week could have been a heart-warming lesson in compassion, but two guys still managed to have a brawl in the hallway that started by slamming their chairs into each other. The bake sale to raise money for a handicap-accessible bus could easily have been disgustingly, tooth-achingly sweet. Happily, the bake sale’s success was contingent on marijuana-laced cupcakes, which helped downplay the “Very Special Message” tone.

Congrats to Glee for discovering that song and dance is even more satisfying when accompanied by real emotional content

Even better, the episode managed to scoop out the potentially dangerous sugary core of its handicap-accessible premise and then fill the resulting gap with emotional content that was actually poignant. The Sue-Sylvester-has-a-disabled-sister twist was visible from a mile away, especially after Mr. Shuster’s repeated demands that she must be up to something, and all credit goes to Jane Lynch for making that scene tender and loving when it could have smeared giant syrupy gobs of melodrama all over our TV screens. Still, the scenes between Kurt and his father stole the show. It was already good when Mr. Hummel showed up at the principal’s office to demand equal consideration for his gay son, but it got ten times better when Kurt decided to balance his own desires with his father’s peace of mind. As has been demonstrated before on this blog (and often in reference to this show), I am a sucker who occasionally chooses sappiness over rationality, but I don’t think there has to be a choice for this one. I was perfectly happy reconciling my appreciation for the writing and particularly the acting of these scenes with my need to feel warmth toward an awesome depiction of a dad.

All that, and I haven’t even had to fall back on, “plus, they sang ‘Defying Gravity’!” Which is good, since I found that one musical number uncharacteristically disappointing. I’m open to the possibility that it’s just because I set my hopes too high. As always, I’m happy to be able to say good things about this show. I think it’s funny and a lot of talent goes into producing it. My fear is that as soon as Terri comes back and we have to go through the whole fake pregnancy rigmarole once again, it will be like Cinderella coming home from the ball and all my warm enamored sentiment will be crushed with the reality of that millstone/plotline/lack of a ball gown and pumpkin-shaped carriage. Fingers crossed.

P.S. This might fall into overshare territory, but I just can’t leave without mentioning that “Wheels” also contains a scene where two people express their attraction for each other by wantonly covering each other in baking ingredients. And I found it disturbing (I mean, he starts to grab the ingredients she was measuring!), but also oddly alluring…

My favorite television shows, and what for me are without question “the best” television shows, are complex and demanding. They often have disturbingly ambiguous protagonists or an enormous cast of characters, many simultaneous plotlines that require active attention on the viewer’s part, and use the opportunity of being on television to dissect and portray frustrating, upsetting, complicated issues in life. When I want to zone out and not think about, say, Russian Formalism and its impact on theories of the novel, those are not the shows I watch. I watch Law and Order.

Which is why it was especially disturbing to me to flip on the most recent episode of Law and Order: SVU (Law and Order: Sensationalist Victorian plotlines Updated so they have a lot more rape) and realize that it had leapt beyond its characteristically simplistic structure and was attempting to deal with two plots in the same episode. I know. I nearly fell off my couch. The show opted for one of the traditional methods of double plotting, which is to have one story be about work and one about someone’s personal life, but as the two stories grew uncomfortably close to each other, everything about the episode collapsed into a gelatinous, undifferentiated heap of angst-ridden teenagers and father issues.

As you can see, I have placed the image of Stabler in between his son Dickie and rape vicim Nikki to metaphorically represent the pain of being caught between two plots featuring characters with suspiciously rhyming names.

It went down like this: Detective Elliot Stabler’s teenaged son Dickie goes missing from school, and Stabler immediately assumes he’s been lured into misbehavior by his addict best friend Shane. Earlier that morning, Shane picks up Dickie before school and both of them happen to mention that they’ve seen salacious pictures of a classmate on the internet. Coincidentally, the girl in the pictures is a rape victim whose attacker was arrested by Stabler and his partner Olivia Benson, and his trial is happening this very day! So here we are: Dickie and Shane are missing, a rape trial is threatened by evidence that calls the victim’s character into question, and poor Detective Stabler is caught in the middle. Unsurprisingly, things unravel quite quickly. In order to keep both plots going, Stabler has to appear unconcerned about his son’s disappearance for enough time to work the rape case, but he also has to freak out and smash things together so we understand that he’s upset. Meanwhile, everyone in the precinct has to express worry about Stabler’s son, but not so much worry that they all stop looking for pictures on the internet and instead start searching for missing children. And despite the seeming connection in the beginning, because the rape victim goes to Dickie and Shane’s school, the two plots are actually completely unrelated! So we learn that Shane has been murdered and the rape victim attempts suicide in the same ten minute segment, and we’re supposed to care about both of them equally and simultaneously, but separately.

Are we so desensitized that we need both a dead teenager and a suicidal rape vicitim to make us feel concern? Apparently yes.

Turns out, the rape victim is okay and a crazy evil homeless man killed Shane, which is such a lazy, meaningless conclusion that you’ve got to wonder why they attempted the thing in the first place. A crazy random wacko with no remorse and a drug habit does not make a satisfying resolution, but it is weird enough to make the whole rape victim plotline seem completely inconsequential. I’m not sure what prompted the foray into multi-plot territory, but someone was self-aware enough to name the episode “Turmoil.” True enough.

I bring this all up partly because last night I spent forty-two minutes smacking myself on the forehead and repeating “What are they doing?!” and I felt like sharing. More importantly, it’s easy to forget how hard it actually is to write good television. When everything goes right on Mad Men or The Wire, it’s hard to imagine how wrong it all could have been. It’s also important to remember that just trying to make things more complicated doesn’t necessarily make anything better. And for all those lessons, Law and Order is here to remind you.

After that stellar season finale, I find I’m loathe to let go of Mad Men quite so quickly, and wanted to make a few more comments before letting it drift off into hiatus-land. (For so long! Ahh!)

Most importantly, I want to point to this Daily Beast interview Matthew Weiner gave to Jace Lacob of Televisionary. It appears to be the only press piece of its kind right now, and it’s quite intriguing. Weiner describes the process of putting together each new season, admits he doesn’t know what will happen to characters like Sal Salvatore, Ken Cosgrove, or Paul Kinsey, and suggests that the Draper’s marriage is unambiguously finished (despite Alan Sepinwall’s musings to the contrary). Weiner also mentions that while he cares very little about giving the audience what they want, he does care a great deal about giving Roger and Joan what they want. My sense is that Joan Holloway would manage to reach outside her own fictional status and take what she wanted, regardless of whether Matt Weiner approved.

The most interesting aspect of the interview, from my perspective, is that Weiner describes his commitment to using all the material he has, refusing to save anything particularly good for a later moment. That sort of thinking makes dramas like Mad Men a radically different viewing experience than other shows built around perpetually delaying the thing the audience clearly wants. Often, that type of delayed gratification appears in the form of thwarted relationships (Luke and Lorelai on The Gilmore Girls comes to mind as a particularly egregious example), but it can also show up as the continually deferred explanations about the island on LOST, or even the perpetually ticking nuclear bomb on 24. Obviously, a certain amount of suspense is crucial to maintaining your audience, but there’s a difference between building tension as support for your storytelling, and building suspense with the ultimate goal of frustrating your audience. After a depressingly short length of time, the week-to-week experience of watching LOST starts to feel like an exercise in futility. Nothing will ever actually get explained, so everyone will continue to look at each other longingly while we occasionally discover that they once walked past each other in a convenience store a few years ago. When you don’t keep anything back, though, every single episode feels essential. In the middle of a season of LOST, you can be sure very little will get revealed or resolved. Midway through season three Mad Men, a secretary drove a John Deere over a guy’s foot.

Long story short, Mad Men is better than LOST, and if you read the interview with Matt Weiner, it’s not hard to figure out why. It’s sort of like that parable in Gattaca – you should never save something for the return trip.

If you, like me, are jonesing for a bit more Mad Men to assuage the grief of parting, there are Mad Men thoughts from The Daily Beast and Alan Sepinwall above, as well as Salon, the slate.com TV Club, and a nice interview with Chelcie Ross, the actor who plays Conrad Hilton, over at The Watcher.

I’ve gotten the sense watching Mad Men from the beginning that some of its episodes are built and crafted for different purposes. The primary purpose is and always has been storytelling – a great deal of plot gets packed into several seemingly mundane events, and many different characters develop subplots in a single episode, and the most important effect is always to draw audiences into the story. Some episodes, though, are more about aesthetics than they are story. Quite a few episodes in season two felt that way, particularly toward the end, and in this recent season, I’d point to “Souvenir” as well, with its extended Hilton-induced meditation on Rome and travel. Then, of course, there are installments meant to startle or shock, and for that you need look no further than “Guy Walks Into an Advertising Agency,” which went all the way to blood spewing across the office. Two weeks ago, I sat tensed on the couch as I watched Betty pull the box out of Don’s drawer. Other things happened, and there was some hefty accompanying thematic material, but the entire episode built up to that moment and then startled the audience into rapt attention.

Empty Sterling Cooper offices

What I’m trying to say is, last night’s season finale was none of those, and I think there hasn’t been an episode like this one since the finale of the first season, “The Carousel.” Terrible, upsetting, poignant things happened in this last episode, especially all of the material relating to Don and Betty’s divorce. The scene when they have to tell Bobby and Sally what’s going on was intensely painful. But for the most part, “Shut the Door. Have a Seat,” was built to satisfy. All of the changes, the dramatic divisions and reunions, were developments of plots that had already been put into place, and the season has done an excellent job of priming us for some earth-shattering shifts. When it all collided into one big, wonderful mess in the nascent Sterling Cooper Draper and Pryce advertising agency, there were some surprises and tense moments, but for the most part, it felt like inevitable, satisfying change, and it felt like we earned it.

A series of satisfying events

So many scenes from last night hit deeply satisfying notes, big and small. Perhaps the most important long-term development, the moment that has been stirring from Mad Men’s very first episode, was the final showdown between Peggy and Don when she forced him to acknowledge her worth. His pitch to her was all the more affecting because she was so aware of it, and was able to see both the pitch and the place where the campaign stopped and Don Draper began. The whole arc, from the earliest scenes of Peggy struggling to be a good secretary in season one, was given a lovely button at the end, as Roger told Peggy to get him a drink and she flatly, unapologetically, calmly refused. Perfect. In the same vein, Joan walking back into the office was as predictable as it was absolutely necessary, and I actually clapped my hands together with glee when I realized Roger would have to call her.

The whole Sterling Cooper meltdown was riddled with similarly pleasing moments. Don apologized to Roger, Lane Pryce cheerfully stuck it to smarmy St. John (has anyone good ever been named St. John? I hear his name and all I can think of is St. John Rivers from Jane Eyre, and I shudder), and Cooper begged the movers to put on gloves while carrying off his priceless Rothko. And Trudy. Maybe I loved her most of all, starting with her frantically filling the Chip ’N Dip to prepare for Don and Roger, to her strained “Peter, may I speak with you for a moment?” as she overheard Pete announce his plans to leave, to cheerfully providing sandwiches in the pitiful new office space/hotel room. Trudy has really grown on me.

Family portraits

The Draper family dissolution was awful. It was even more gut wrenching after Bobby’s hilarious line about why they were all in the living room if nothing was wrong. But even this, horrible as it was, was also satisfying. Like the doomed Sterling Cooper/PPL merger, it’s been clear from the beginning that Don and Betty’s union is shaky at best, built on deception and self-interest. There has been so much subterfuge and tense, uncertain, hidden emotion, that it was almost a relief to see it all dragged out into the open, including Betty’s relationship with Henry Francis. It was so artfully balanced with the changes in Don’s professional life, too, that what could have felt like an apocalypse instead felt appropriate. Don begged Betty not to break apart their family, but the whole process of building a new agency, and in particular the scene at the end with everyone hovering together over a meal, looked very much like a new family being made. It’s hard to see what could possibly come next between Don and Betty, but the new agency softens the finality of their split, promising challenges and growth in the future.

I have no idea what will come in the future or how long Mad Men will be on the air (at least one more season, hooray!), but this finale really did feel like a bookend to the whole show, not just for this season. The deaths of Sterling Cooper, the Draper’s marriage, and John F. Kennedy all feel like the final resolution of the themes set up from the first episode of the show. Now, at last, all of the powerful institutions from the show’s beginning have collapsed, and it feels like time to start all over again.

…but not until late next summer! Oh, the bittersweet satisfaction of a season finale.

Much as I love Tina Fey, I think it’s all right to acknowledge that 30 Rock has been of variable quality so far this season. Nothing’s gone wrong in particular, it just hasn’t been as consistently, overwhelmingly hilarious as it’s been in the past. Which is why last night’s hysterical episode was a welcome return to form.

There were a lot of things going for 30 Rock’s “The Audition.” Tracy and Jenna went looking for comedic stereotypes and discovered a “bi-larious” man and a large black woman who ate food while dancing, Dot Com recounted his experiences with Chekov’s The Seagull, and Liz recalled her own early audition traumas (“My carpets need a deep clean…”). It was well-written, there were some good Brian Williams cameos (which, for me, will automatically make anything at least 50% better), and Tina Fey did a Christopher Walken imitation. A good time all around.

Aside from Brian Williams, my favorite audition was definitely Lutz and Twofer's "Laugh of the Mohicans"

Or, it would have been, were it not for…the bedbugs (DUN DUN DUNNNN). Jack Donaghy struggles with a bedbug infestation, or as they are variously called throughout the episode, chew daddies, Ozark kisses, the woodsman’s companion, Blue Ridge quilt ticklers, and Mugabe’s concubine. His business partners refuse to be in the same room with him, a cabbie won’t even pick him up, he has to take the service elevator in Rockefeller Plaza, and finally, he ends up on the subway doing a pitch-perfect imitation of a homeless person explaining why he just needs a little help. Sure, it was funny, particularly the subway bit. But do not let the humor convince you that bedbugs are a comical, entertaining little plotline. They are evil. They are unstoppable. They are horrifying. I just worry that because the episode was so funny, bedbugs may not be taken as seriously as they should be. BE WARNED.

Jack Donaghy, ostracized from society. I know it seems like it's funny, but it's actually horrific.

P.S. I’ve never actually had bedbugs, so I suppose it’s possible that they’re not quite so terrible. But they live in my nightmares, a phobia I am no longer capable of coping with in a rational manner. It’s possible I’m biased by my powerful, pervasive fear. BUT I DOUBT IT.

It took me a long while to catch on, but I’ve been watching a lot of Sons of Anarchy lately, and wow, that show is good. Like Friday Night Lights, it’s not a premise I initially found worthwhile – Sons of Anarchy is about a motorcycle gang in Northern California who run guns across state lines and get into all sorts of mischief with other gangs. I have absolutely no patience with violence for violence’s sake, and in the beginning of the series, I found it nearly impossible to connect with and root for the main character, Jax Teller. He has stringy hair and a Spencer Pratt-esque flesh colored beard, and in the first several episodes shows nowhere near the appropriate amount of emotion given the events that quickly overtake him. It’s a show about men, I thought, being gross drunken violent men who shoot each other. It’s called Sons of Anarchy – what was I expecting?

Jax Teller, Bobby "Elvis," and Sam Crow President Clay Morrow

As the show hits its stride midway through the first season, and then catapults into a truly impressive second season run, Sons of Anarchy began feel more and more mythic, and that’s when the bell started to ring for me. The themes, especially as they relate to the men, are downright Shakespearean – fathers and sons, the conflict between honor and moral action, the possibility of justified violence, masculinity and brotherhood, loyalty and wisdom. At times, Sons of Anarchy seems to be an adaptation of the Henry Bolingbroke history plays, with Jax as a young Prince Hal and the motorcycle club as a band of brothers straight out of the St. Crispin’s Day speech. (Bobby, who works as an Elvis impersonator on the weekends and whose large stature belies his ability to ride a motorcycle, would be my candidate for Falstaff). There’s also a hefty dose of Hamlet worked into the plot – Jax’s mother remarries his father’s best friend, the club’s current president. Even more than the plot, though, Sons of Anarchy Motorcycle Club Redwood Original, or Sam Crow, has a code of conduct and an idealized mission that feel out of place in a world of post-modern irony.

Katey Sagal as Gemma Teller

If the men of Sam Crow resemble a Shakespearean cast of characters, so too do the women, although it took much longer for the show to fully embody them. Unrepresented by the show’s title and barred from Sam Crow membership, the wives, girlfriends, prostitutes and daughters that populate the background of Charming, California seem at first like incidental, throwaway cardboard cutouts. Once the show really begins to click, it becomes immediately clear that the women are without question at the core of Sons of Anarchy. Jax’s high school sweetheart Tara, now a doctor at the local hospital, drives Jax to reconsider his life and the club’s criminal enterprises. After he returns from several years in prison, Opie’s wife Donna wants him to quit the club and earn money legally, driving a wedge between Opie and Jax. The ATF agent tracking the Sons of Anarchy wears her hair down and terrorizes the local sheriff’s department. And Gemma, queen of Sam Crow, president Clay Morrow’s wife and Jax’s mother, is always at the center of everything, Lady Macbeth, Cleopatra, and Portia rolled into one. Jax’s ex-wife calls Gemma “Dr. Jekyll and Donna Reed.” She bakes, she decorates, she does the laundry, she shakes down porn stars for cash and tells her husband he’ll need to kill a traitor. Gemma is a force of nature, and the second season wisely gives her a potent, ticking time-bomb plotline.

As soon as women began to take on more significant roles, the whole show shifted. What in the beginning was a plot about a group of guys roaming the highways and trading gunfire with rival gangs quickly transformed into an exploration of motorcycle club culture, complete with oddly conservative family structures and anachronistic gender roles. Sons of Anarchy became fiction about the inevitability of progress rather than the inevitability of violence. Sons of Anarchy became awesome.

…without which, you stop paying attention, aliens surreptitiously infiltrate your society, and the next thing you know you’re surrounded by attractive people who blink veeeery slowly in an eerily reptilian way. Or at least, that’s what I took away from last night’s premiere of V.

The new show is a remake of a series from the early eighties, and the premise is generally what I described above. One morning, alien ships descend on the major cities of the world (as they are not infrequently wont to do in genre fiction) and announce their intentions to live peacefully with humans while they supply their ships with a few key, abundant natural resources. The aliens are pretty, they can cure diseases, they have awesome space ships, and by about half of the way through the first episode, it turns out they’re also evil. You could have knocked me down with a feather.

Aiiieee, aliens over Manhattan! It looks like every other alien invasion story ever told!

V’s strengths, at least in this pilot episode, are also its weaknesses. The appealing aspect of the premise is that it provides an explanation for all the ills in our society (war, economic turmoil, religious fanaticism) while also giving us a concrete, definite enemy to fight. The best science fiction has always been social commentary, and V seeks to capitalize on the current cultural mood by playing with our naturally suspicious natures. Aliens in EZ-PEEL human suits have infiltrated the government, the media, and Wall Street, and are now trying to destroy life as we know it. I knew the left wing/right wing/Darkwing Duck branch of politics were evil!

EZ-PEEL human suits

What I’m trying to say is, it’s actually kinda fun to watch a show about alien overlords who are actually absurdly transparent metaphors for totalitarianism. But the pilot episode deflates whenever the connections are too obviously topical. Things start to get silly when Anna, the leader of the Visitors, refuses to agree to an interview without a promise from the journalist that she’ll be portrayed positively, and all those familiar accusations about cable news flood into the fiction. It gets even worse when Anna mentions that she’d really love to provide universal health care for all of humanity. Aliens who clearly watch C-SPAN are not quite so satisfying. And yet, in spite of all the pointed reminders that the Vs have infiltrated the world we live in today, there’s one moment in the pilot that stretches the bounds of imagination beyond all reason. In the first ten minutes of the show, alien ships hover over the world’s major cities, people scream and run around, an eerie alien lady describes her intention to live in peace with humanity while also taking advantage of the earth’s water and minerals… and the gathered masses below applaud her. It’s just unfathomable that our collective response to an alien race, even a friendly-seeming one, would be polite applause. The first thing we’d do is shoot at it, right?

I’ve never seen the original miniseries, and so I only have a vague sense of what’s to come, but the pilot was entertaining enough to see if later episodes of the show can improve on its faults. I did happen across this clip from the original, though, and if the remake is anything like the crazy, corny, surreal alien birth below, consider my interest peaked.

All of a sudden yesterday, the internet discovered that Harvard has plans to offer a new course next year on The Wire. Although there aren’t many details about the class, the impression seems to be that it’ll be a sociology class focusing on The Wire’s depiction of urban poverty, decaying cities, and the cultural response to that depiction. Read about it here at doublex, or over here at the NY Post, or Huffington Post, or The National Review. Or, you know, go to the source.

The Wire - (quasi) protagonist Jimmy McNulty, played by Dominic West

My primary feeling about this is a sense of pleasure that this incredible television show is being given some of the credit it deserves, and pleasure, too, in the belief that it’s going to be a good class. The Wire offers ample opportunity for study and is so multifaceted and ambiguous in its messages about urban life that there will be good discussion and some great papers that come out of it. Even more, the show has been the impetus for several organizations to focus attention on the state of American urban poverty, so it will be a useful case study in the way excellent media can elicit social change. The Wire as this century’s The Jungle, or something along those lines.

Idris Elba as Stringer Bell, a view down on The Pit, Bubbles and Johnny shoot up

Underneath that glow of warm fuzzy feeling, though, I’ll admit to feeling a little bit of something else. Few of them actually express this, but there’s an unmistakable sentiment in many of the pieces I link above that they’re a part of fancy new media, and hilariously, a bastion of the old guard of culture has begun to accept the presence of a slightly-less-new media form like television. It’s a Harvard class about a television show! Worlds collide! It’s worth noting that some of that sentiment is misinformed, and that television has appeared in the academic environment for a while. There have been classes on The Simpsons, and papers on surrealism in Twin Peaks, and analyses of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (truly, there’s an entire field of Buffy Studies, and it only occasionally participates in self-mockery). There was a panel at the MLA last year on The Wire. This Harvard class may be new in its use of television for study in the social sciences rather than the straight-up humanities, but I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that sociology or anthropology have paid attention to television before. So some of my pleasure is colored by a complete lack of surprise – of course someone’s going to teach a class on The Wire. Probably there will also be classes on George Eliot and ethnomusicology. Stop the presses!

But of course, that’s slightly disingenuous. The collective surprise that such a class could exist makes it abundantly obvious that we’ve still not quite cleared the hurdle in our collective subconscious between television and high class fancy book learnin’. It’s a shame. It prevents us from thinking critically about mass media and allows us to underestimate the impact good television can have. So good job, Harvard (not that you really need to be told), and congrats to The Wire for making the leap.

I’m very glad that Mad Men tackled the Kennedy assassination an episode before the season finale (as was suggested in a comment on my blog post last week). Obviously, the event provided an impetus for the imminent collapse of the Draper marriage, which has always been at the core of Mad Men’s thematic content. The assassination also created the shift we always expected that it would – from the slowly disintegrating gleaming surfaces of the early part of the decade, we finally reach a point when disintegration rapidly accelerates and all of the collective inner turmoil leaps into full view. It was a necessary step in the show’s storyline, and it would have been unreasonable to downplay the assassination or its reception. Still, the whole event created the upheaval we expected it would create, and so I’m glad we still have the last episode for a conclusion that will hopefully be less predictable.

A meditation on watching the television

I think the challenge of the episode was to depict the event’s magnitude without losing sight of the characters and the effect it has on their development, and “The Grown-Ups” did so with moderate, uneven success. In order to recreate some of the disoriented, rudderless sensation the characters were experiencing, one of the episode’s strategies was to jump quickly between scenes and locations, leaping from the initial moment of realization at Sterling Cooper, to Don’s reaction, to Duck Philips and Peggy, to Betty and back to Sterling Cooper. Although that jerky, jarring viewing experience was effective, its downside was that it allowed some of the character development to get lost inside the almost montage-like transitions. Without question, the scenes that made last week’s episode so remarkable were the long, focused, quiet, painfully still moments between Don and Betty, and the need to embody an entire country’s response to national tragedy made it impossible to include any similarly intense, motionless scenes this week. As a result, characters made emotional jumps in time with the physical and temporal gaps in the episode. Betty switches from confused housewife to determined adulterer, Don moves from shaky-but-functioning man of the house to pleading husband, Margaret from weeping, immature child to calm bride, and Roger from henpecked patriarch to misunderstood sensitive guy without any explanation other than “Kennedy’s dead.” I understand the reasoning, but “The Grown-Ups” sacrificed individual emotional intensity for depictions of collective mood.

It didn’t help that Margaret’s wedding forced the plot to follow the same “how are a large group of people responding” concept – the wedding did allow Betty and Henry Francis to reconnect, but the primary impression was that everyone wanted to be somewhere else, myself included. The New York Times City blog published an interesting piece today about New York marriages that actually took place on the same day as Margaret Sterling’s in 1963, and their anecdotal evidence indicates that those who decided to attend weddings were relieved to have a reason to think about something other than Kennedy. That certainly was not the case at the Sterling-Hargrove wedding, and it’s a shame. This season has been so good at balancing overpowering emotional experience with wry, ironic sensibility, and the wedding missed its opportunity to offer a different tonal register.

All that being said, there were several moments in “The Grown-Ups” that I found powerfully effective, among them, Carla’s heartfelt response to the assassination, Betty’s refusal to let Don join her on her drive, and every interaction between the Drapers and their children. It was heartbreaking to watch Don and Betty struggle to interpret the grown-up tragedy for Sally and Bobby. And oddly, my favorite scenes from last night’s episode were those involving Pete and Trudy Campbell, who I often find annoying. Theirs was the one emotional journey I felt was fully explicated within the episode, starting with the news of Pete’s demotion all the way through Trudy’s complete shift in worldview. The Campbells have always been crucial figures on the show; they are young, privileged members of society whose ambitions are to achieve the same (but bigger) success as their parents. As usual, Pete is completely tone deaf, and on watching Lyndon Johnson, remarks sadly that now they have “more of the same,” and before Kennedy’s death it “felt for a second like everything was about to change.” Trudy, far cannier than her husband, suddenly realizes the immense change that has already occurred, and she shifts tactics, encouraging Pete to gather his clients and leave Sterling Cooper. Like Betty, Trudy realizes that as sad as the end of Camelot may be, change and mobility are possible in ways they were not before. Except unlike Betty in “The Grown-Ups,” we get to watch that realization happen on Trudy’s face.

Change is now possible. Next week, season finale!

P.S. Does this ad for AquaNet remind you of anything? Yeah, Peggy’s probably going to need to rewrite this one.