I should really write about Boardwalk Empire, which by all accounts is amazing, and has already been renewed for a second season based on its very strong opening ratings. That review will come soon, and I’m sure it’s something I’ll be writing about again in the future, as it seems to be the second coming of The Sopranos, The Wire, and Jersey Shore all rolled into one. But before I get there, I feel compelled to write about FOX’s new show Lone Star, if only because it looks like there may not be many opportunities to do so in the future. Because Lone Star is really quite good – it’s certainly the best new show on network television this fall (yeah, I’m looking at you, Outlaw) – and apparently, no one at all watched it last night. So just on the off chance that someone reading this watches Lone Star next week, and somehow is also chosen as a Nielsen viewer, I fell like it’s necessary to make sure this gets out while it still can: Lone Star is good, and deserves longer than it will likely get.

The premise is not unfamiliar, but is new enough to the stable of well-known television plotlines that the show feels fresh. It’s a con man set-up, where Bob travels around Texas selling shares of an imaginary oil well and touting an equally imaginary new method of harvesting natural gas, and cannily managing to skip town the moment before people figure out his scam. The underlying idea is that while Bob is a talented, successful con man, he also wants to start living on the right side of the law, except he’s unwilling to give up either of the long term cons he’s currently running. Bob’s unwillingness comes not from his reluctance to abandon the get-rich schemes of each con, but because he’s in a relationship with two different women and gets to be two very different kinds of men. In Midland, Texas, he has a lovely girlfriend, a comfortable, relaxed suburban home, and a group of friends who love him. In Houston, he has a rich, attractive wife whose oil-magnate father wants to push Bob up the corporate ladder. Confronted with the necessity of picking one life or the other, Bob chooses both.

James Wolk as Bob on FOX's Lone Star

The pilot episode of Lone Star ends with this crucial decision, ensuring Bob’s continued commitment to both cons despite his grief over tricking honest people out of their money. It’s a slick, well-made episode of television. James Wolk is great as Bob, and manages to look and act a lot like Friday Night Lights’ Kyle Chandler, which could only be a positive thing. In an actual FNL connection, his wife is played by Adrienne Palicki, whose was amazing as Tyra Collette. Some of the pilot’s musical cues were a little overstated, but it’s easy enough to forgive in an otherwise enjoyable hour.

My hope was that Lone Star would have a chance to prove it could pull off the much harder part of its premise – carrying out a con man story over a long narrative, and figuring out how to keep its protagonist appealing while forcing him to continue lying to his loved ones. I have no idea what this plot line would look like eight episodes from now, much less a season from now, but I would love to find out. Maybe if we all pull a Tinkerbell and clap our hands if we believe in Nielsen, Lone Star will stick around for a while.

Thankfully, my prayers were answered and last night’s Mad Men featured none of Don’s Carrie Bradshaw-esque voiceovers. As though it were determined to do a Sex and the City riff one way or the other, however, last night’s episode focused on the women of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce and all of their different but equally upsetting dissatisfactions. It’s a good thing Mad Men switched from playing with that show’s narrative style to addressing its thematic concerns, because Don makes a poor Carrie Bradshaw, but Mad Men does a great job of exploring femininity, changing social positions, family politics, women in the workplace, and women’s rights as an ongoing social inequality.

It was an episode about the women, and emphasized its focus by eliminating or downplaying the presence of many of the male characters, and by positioning those it retained (Don, Roger and Bert, Peggy’s adversary Abe) as foils for Sally, Faye, Joan, and Peggy. Pete only got an appearance in the Great Ida Blankenship cover-up, and Harry Crane’s one line was a thematically-appropriate quip: “my mother made that!” Faye, Peggy and Joan’s roles in the episode were all variations on the same questions – how can you be a professional woman? How do you negotiate between traditional choices and the nascent possibility for professional careers? These aren’t new questions for Mad Men, but it was fun to watch the show grapple with placing those three women side by side, teasing out their common desires and diverging priorities. I do think that final shot of them in the elevator did a disservice to how complex these characters have become. We see Joan on one side, having chosen marriage and lower status in the workplace, Faye on the other, with no husband or children but a flourishing career, and Peggy in the middle, ostensibly caught between the two choices. It’s true, but it’s a little too black and white, and obvious enough that it’s distracting rather than revelatory.

To my mind, the most interesting and heartrending aspects of “The Beautiful Girls” lay at the opposite ends of the spectrum with Sally Draper and Ida Blankenship, the bookends to Joan, Peggy and Faye’s triptych. Ida’s death is played mostly for laughs, given the macabre game of Hide-the-Corpse and Roger’s wry eulogy (“she died as she lived, surrounded by the people she answered phones for”), but it’s easy to see the tragedy in that statement even without Bert’s far more elegant obituary. But their connection is made explicit by the overt sense of displacement each portrays, and their mutual frustration with the contemporary moment. Ida is a relic who can barely cope with this new workplace environment, and Sally is an unhappy child of divorce in a time when no court would ever grant her father custody. As if to underline their affinity in the most unpleasantly literal way imaginable, Sally and Miss Blankenship are also visually paired in the episode. Miss Blankenship’s dead weight propels her head face first onto the desk with a darkly humorous thunk, and then that image of a lowered head comes back in Sally’s desperate, furious flight from her father’s office and her subsequent wipeout in the hallway. It’s an awful, brilliant correlation between Miss Blankenship’s literal death and the collapse of poor Sally’s hope for freedom as she is strong-armed back to her thoughtless, resentful mother.

It’s a testament to the story’s compelling quality, but also certainly to Kiernan Shipka’s talents as an actress, that although this episode included Joan and Roger’s mugging and public tryst, Peggy’s growing awareness of civil rights, and some excellent verbal sparring between Stan the brutish art director and Joyce the lesbian Life photographer, all I really remember is how terribly I feel for Sally Draper.

So, I haven’t been watching much of the new TV this week, as I’ve been barreling through season two of Parks and Recreation. (One of my friends is here visiting, and I try to be a very accommodating hostess by allowing my guests to watch whatever television they’d like, taking for granted of course that what they’d like to do most is sit and watch hours of television. I’m quite hospitable.) Obviously, it’s a terrible burden to watch Parks and Rec again, so it’s been a rough few days.

Which brings me to the point – as excited as I am that it’s fall and television is returning, I am so disappointed that NBC has chosen to push Parks and Recreation back to a mid-season premiere in favor of the new “aren’t people from other countries with funny accents funny?” comedy, Outsourced. I haven’t seen Outsourced yet, so it’s not completely fair to write it off, but  re-watching this second season makes it so obvious that Parks and Rec was the strongest comedy on NBC last year, The Office-be-darned.

In other news, Telephonoscope may be spotty this week, as the awesome computer elves are transferring the blog so that it will now live in a brightly lit blue box under my desk. Yay!

Listen, I don’t know what to say about the True Blood finale, so I’m just going to complain about it. In my last post on True Blood I did this whole bit about how absurd it was to call such an overly plotted show “boring,” and yet… okay. Uncle.

The big ending gesture was that Sookie and all of the as-yet-uncharacterized faeries disappear in a burst of golden light. That whole strange Lafayette plotline ended in a ho-hum declaration that his boyfriend is a witch, nothing at all happened with the Arlene-is-carrying-a-devil-baby story, and honestly, the most emotionally moving bit of the whole episode was that Sookie got mad at Bill. Yeah. They didn’t even leave a little “Is Eric going to live?!” cliffhanger action to propel the audience across the season hiatus. I suppose I do have to give some credit for the horrifying appearance of Russell Edgington burned past the point of recognizable humanity, snickering even as his blackened, flakey skin floats enticingly through the air. Even he was a figure meant to gross you out rather than frighten you – his whole appeal has been his insane invincibility, and by the end, he was barely putting up a fight.

So let’s just set this season aside and think about what would need to change for True Blood to return to its former gory appeal. For one, it would be nice to see not quite so many plotlines Maybe we don’t need Nazi werewolves, insane vampire lover, shapeshifter dog fighting, the King of Mississippi, inbred addict werepanthers, an evil fetus, a cute perpetually re-virginizing baby vamp, voodoo gay boyfriends, and long-lost faerie relatives in the same season, mmkay? It would also be appealing to me, from a narrative standpoint, if perhaps the multiplicity of plotlines were to come together in some sort of meaningful relationship with each other by the end of the season. I’m not saying the Nazi werewolves have to kidnap the voodoo gay boyfriends and take them to a long-lost faerie family reunion or anything ridiculous like that, but just maybe, it could appear as though all of these characters actually lived in the same small town and knew each other.

I think that what True Blood needs to learn from this last season is that a small amount of organization and background structure are better support for the crazy aesthetics than a free-for-all in Bon Temps.

I am perfectly fine with one episode of Mad Men like “The Summer Man.” Things have to change up every once in a while, and it’s a good thing. It’s certainly better to try new things and experiment a little than to fall into familiar, boring ruts. In many ways, I liked the tenor and direction of “The Summer Man” – it is a relief to see Don trying to move out of his downward spiral into alcoholism, it’s nice to return to telling stories about Joan, even if they’re stories about how rough her life is right now, and it’s useful to color Peggy’s upward trajectory into power and success with obstacles that come from her own misreading rather than perpetual unfairness from the outside. There’s no question that most of Peggy’s trouble at the office has to do with unstable bosses and idiot asshole co-workers, but Peggy isn’t a genius who sweeps through the hallway confronting injustice. Sometimes, she does things like fire Joey without seeing the bigger problem lurking underneath the outbursts, and while it’s great that Peggy clearly respects Joan, she’s never really understood her. Peggy fires Joey and flushes with her newly attained power, and then proudly presents her action as a gesture of friendship toward Joan. In the process, she completely ignores how hard it must be for Joan to watch Peggy “rescue” her and then expect thanks for doing it.

I appreciate “The Summer Man” for returning to this relationship between Peggy and Joan, because it’s always been a touchstone for Mad Men of how much things have changed. Their shifting positions relative to each other are more telling and markedly changed than Peggy’s relationship with Don or Joan’s position inside the company. The first season sets them out as blatant foils for one another, working inside a well-delineated hierarchy with Joan placed firmly ahead of Peggy on the ladder. Peggy and Don may have had the more personal and creatively challenging connection over the past several seasons, but Peggy and Joan are still poised in a culturally illuminating opposition to one another. Much though I might wish it could be otherwise, it seems that they’re meant to remain counterweights – one character rises, and the other one falls.

All that said, “The Summer Man” was really about Don, and it’s here that I worry a little about Mad Men straying a little too far from what works. Don’s trying to get sober – great. Don wants to get in shape, and have a relationship with his youngest son – good for him. Don manages to go out with Faye Miller, who would actually be an interesting match for him – all for the best. Don’s journaling becomes a theme-laden voiceover, a la Carrie on Sex in the City, Doogie Howser’s diary, recorded letters to unseen friend Sally on Felicity, the Captain’s Log on Star Trek, etc. etc. etc. – oh please, Mad Men. Let this be a one episode thing.

For my money, one of the most brilliant things about Mad Men is that it dramatizes the most frustrating aspect of any film-based fictional form. We see characters and we watch them interact with each other, but unlike a novel, we ultimately have no way to access to their thoughts. Film and television are perpetually fascinated by and grappling with this problem, which is why we have such a bounty of scenes with therapists, of heartfelt tell-all conversations, and of shows that reach for devices like voiceovers, journals, and other internal monologues to give us an inside view. Rather than fight with its medium, part of Mad Men’s genius has always been to capitalize on this absence of interiority. Instead of attempting to get us inside its characters’ heads, much of the surprise and pleasure of the show comes out of appreciating the gloriously manicured, gleaming surface appearances, and then delighting at how different everything is underneath. Mad Men works best as an anti-Facebook. The pilot episode illustrates this perfectly – first we get the silhouette of Don Draper in the opening credits, then we slowly meet a beautiful, struggling ad man with a bohemian girlfriend, then we realize he’s actually an insightful advertising genius, and finally, we discover he’s married. Mad Men does not begin with a close-up of Don Draper’s face and a voiceover that explains, “My name is Don Draper, but it wasn’t always that way. I have a girlfriend, but also a wife. I may have trouble at work, but sometimes I manage to see everything just a little different than everyone around me. My name is Don Draper, and my life is complicated.” *Cue wackadoo theme song*

Can't get no satisfaction, something you know all to clearly from his voiceover informing you he caught a whiff of perfume

And yet, this is sort of what happens in “The Summer Man,” complete with the hilariously over-sexified opening scene that features Don posing outside the New York Athletic Club like he’s a Brooks Brothers model. It’s sort of fascinating after all this time and his after oft-repeated distain for self-examination, Don Draper would become a guy with a journal. It makes sense that it would happen at a time in his life when his only remaining connection to Dick Whitman has been severed, his family dismantled, and his career disrupted. It makes sense, but after years of a fiction organized around the surprise of what’s inside, it feels too close and too revealing. My hope is that the episode’s title is a sort of excuse for the voiceover, and a suggestion of its impermanence. Right now, this summer, Don is a guy with a journal who can’t get no satisfaction. That’s fine, but I’d like it to be fall now, please.

Wow, it is a really good week for FX. First, the excellent season premiere of Sons of Anarchy, and last night, the pilot episode of their completely entertaining new buddy cop show, Terriers.

Terriers is a great example of why we have formulas. It’s easy and sort of satisfying to say, “Oh, come on! A buddy cop show? It’s a procedural with potential for long story arc development? Gee, where have I heard that one before?” When they’re at their worst, formulas are repetitive excuses for the absence of creativity, banking on the audience’s inertia. This point is going to be made quite clearly when the full crop of this fall’s new network programming premieres later this month, and you’ll find yourself staring down the barrel of Medical Examiner Solves Crimes (Body of Proof), U.S. Marshals Solve Crimes (Chase), Families Are Funny and Complicated These Days (Better With You), and Lawyers Who Act Like Cops (The Defenders). There’s something pretty sad about the desire to make and watch TV with the sole purpose of being exactly like five other things you’ve already watched. It’s like back when everyone was clamoring for what to read if you liked Harry Potter, and instead of suggesting other imaginative, detailed, epic, funny, young adult friendly fantasy books, you were given five other fantasy series of dubious quality where a special, talented protagonist goes off to a magical school and ends up fighting the super villain. The idea of a formula is that the most basic premise of a show (or novel or whatever) is that show’s most defining characteristic, and that it is also infinitely repeatable.

Donal Logue as Hank on FX's Terriers

The thing is, though, that sometimes the formula is good. Just because Harry Potter worked doesn’t mean another special protagonist attends a magical school series can’t work, and occasionally, they do work rather well. (See: the Percy Jackson series, which I have heard is…well, like Harry Potter). When formulas fail, they feel like tedious, unsurprising pabulum – like Twinkies, they are made to be consumed without much chewing. When formulas work, they feel like universally familiar stories that build on their well-established cultural foundations to remind us why we liked the formula to begin with. The first job of a buddy cop formula is to have two compelling protagonists who are interesting on their own and better when they’re together. On FX’s Terriers, Hank is a formerly drunk ex-cop who apologizes profusely for not paying his alimony on time and who refuses to drop a battle with the biggest real estate developer in town even after his lawyer warns him that he is too small time to take on the fight. “What if we’re big time, and just didn’t realize it?” he asks, half serious. Britt is the kind of guy who would steal a dog so that he could return it to its former owner, a woman who runs a dry cleaner’s. The woman then promises to do Britt’s laundry for a month, so Britt makes an arrangement with a fancy restaurant to clean their napkins and tablecloths in return for a nice dinner with his girlfriend. “Babe, we can’t afford this,” she says sadly. “Of course we can,” Britt answers, the best boyfriend/minor criminal around.

Michael Raymond-James as Britt (also, Winston)

Together, Hank and Britt form the partnership in an off-the-books private investigation team, and they are alternately charming, morose, childish, and thoughtful. They are also mercifully gimmick-free, a remarkable feat in a show that features two PI partners who drive around in a Gomez Brothers Pool Cleaning truck and spend much of the pilot episode with an adorable bulldog named Winston (the same dog, of course, Britt exchanges for laundry services). The presence of that dog in particular feels like Terriers thumbing its nose at the dominance of formulaic TV as well as the show’s slightly opaque title. How is it possible to have a buddy cop show also featuring a canine sidekick, and not have the whole thing come off as a cutesy retread? Terriers does it by refusing to be a slave to its formula. It can be a show about two private investigators who succeed in fighting the big bully, but don’t always have a heart of gold or a begrudging respect for honor. It can be a show with a dog in the pilot and Terriers for a title, and have little or nothing to do with cute dog humor. Terriers is funny and familiar, and still manages to have high stakes that come off as fresh rather than tired.

As I noted yesterday, Sons of Anarchy returned last night for its third season, and by the end of the episode, I was already desperate for next week’s installment. The first episode of season two ended with Gemma’s rape, an act which spurred much of the action in the rest of the season and immediately jolted the viewer into emotional investment. Kurt Sutter clearly has a taste for kicking things off with a bang, because the end of “So” performed a similarly impressive feat of emotional heightening. After the long, slow burn of Jax’s nearly affect-less despair throughout the episode, the sight of him turning berserk in front of the entire SoA and the Charming police force was enough to make you gasp. It would have been a sufficient gesture for the episode’s end, but then capping everything off with the image of Hale’s brains spattered across the road – and it’s obvious that the props and makeup people did everything in their power to telegraph that Hale is absolutely, thoroughly dead – felt like the final knife twist I didn’t realize I was anticipating.

It was a strong episode all around, but particular praise has to go to Charlie Hunnam and Maggie Siff, who both completely sold their grief and fury at Abel’s kidnapping. Jax makes the journey from comatose on his son’s nursery floor all the way to enraged Angel of Vengeance in just under an hour, and it was mesmerizing. The episode built several emotional marker points along the way – Jax gripping his son’s blue SoA hat, the moment when Jax’s grief actually diffuses a nascent gang war, his alienation from and then return to Tara – and they were all accompanied by some really lovely cinematography that movingly conveyed his increasing isolation from the club. There were so many great shots of Jax alone, but the classic for this episode has to be Jax slumped in front of his father’s tombstone, with the first of his “SO” “NS” pair of rings perched in focus behind him. It’s an elegant little bit of familial patterning. A dead father who fell apart when he lost his son, the remaining son now on the verge of collapse after his own son is kidnapped, all three of them damaged by their association with the Sons; a pair of rings that together spell SONS, but the first one by itself only spells the empty, rudderless word “So,” which is also, of course, the episode’s title.

My only complaint about the setup for season three is that much as I love Gemma and Hal Holbrook playing out Gemma’s own familial drama (and of course, it makes so much sense that Gemma’s father would be a minister), I worry that she’ll be absent from the club for too long. All of these sons and fathers are much better, more balanced, more interesting people in the presence of their mothers and daughters, and Gemma’s too crucial to the show’s balance to be missing the action. On the other hand, Gemma’s grandson has been kidnapped and no one told her? I am almost looking forward to the rage that will no doubt rain down from the heavens. Please let it be sooner rather than later.

Hooray, Fall TV is coming back! Other than the stellar Mad Men season currently underway and a few pleasant highlights (like Huge), I am more than ready to hand over a summer of kicky, fluffy, brightly lit USA procedurals and derivative reality shows for a solid TV schedule. Here are some of the releases circled on my September calendar:

Sons of Anarchy – I’ve been waiting to write this post for a while, and could conceivably have put it up several weeks ago as release dates became available, but I decided it would just be too painful to anticipate all of these shows and then have to wait forever. But I’ve waited long enough, because FX’s amazing Sons of Anarchy returns tonight! There’s an interesting NYTimes piece which suggests that Sons of Anarchy is the show that best tackles the current American tendency toward fringe politics, and while that isn’t the show’s primary source of interest for me, it is a prominent feature. Neo-nazis and anarchists aside, Sons of Anarchy is a fabulous Shakespearean drama disguised as a biker fantasy and peopled with murderers, gun runners, the ghost of King Hamlet in biker manifesto form, and some fantastically powerful women. Long live SAMCRO.

Boardwalk Empire – Easily the most anticipated release this fall, Boardwalk Empire is HBO’s next major must-watch production. The setting is Prohibition Era Atlantic City, and the show centers on the early gangsters and politicians who made the city into a capital of crime and hedonism. It features Steve Buscemi as the main character Nucky Thompson, it also stars Michael K. Williams of The Wire fame, and Martin Scorsese directed the pilot. It also premieres on September 19^th, which means Sunday nights are soon going to be very, very busy for me.

Chuck – Okay, we all know I have a strange and powerful weakness love for Chuck, and am thrilled it’s getting an early fall premiere date rather than being pushed to mid-season. As with any season of Chuck, this one may well be the show’s last, so treasure it for all it’s worth.

Undercovers – At the Visionaries panel at Comic-Con this year, JJ Abrams worked to characterize what he hopes will be a healthy balance between episodic and serialized plotlines for his new spy show, which premieres September 22^nd. I don’t know. On one side, I see a show like Fringe, which became quite interesting and worthwhile at the end of last season, and which has almost certainly managed to survive because of its commitment to episodic storytelling. On the other side, it’s clear to me that Fringe only became compelling once it managed to walk away from the straight up Monster of the Week format and throw itself full force into Crazy Doppelganger Land. I’m sympathetic to the desire for seriality and the need for something like an episodic show’s accessibility, but I almost always feel that shows trying to be both things end up doing neither of them well.

Law and Order: LA – Law and Order is dead, and yet, like a zombie apocalypse’s Patient Zero, its progeny live on, beginning September 29^th.

The Walking Dead – This one’s cheating, because it doesn’t come out until the end of October. For now, watch the trailer and marvel at how awesome it will be.

I am officially in love with this season of Mad Men. The flavor of it is distinctly different than the past three seasons – the switch to Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce has been accompanied by a new tone for the show, so that it feels a little looser, a little more comfortable being funny and brutal and strange. Last night’s episode was astoundingly good, so much so that I feel like instead of writing this blog post I just want to watch it again. Of course, episodes like these don’t roll around every day, and it’s because they can’t. You can’t have Don and Peggy holed up together in the office for every episode, ripping each other to shreds and then baring their innermost secrets, because if they did, Mad Men would quickly become a trashy, will-they-or-won’t-they soap opera with Don and Peggy in the starring roles. Instead, we get this one episode organized around a boxing match, and everyone gets beaten to a pulp so they can wake up the next morning with a belief that today will be different than yesterday.

Although the central idea works well – two competitors in a ring, working at each other until one of them prevails – none of the matches in the SCDP world end with nearly the speed or the definitive conclusion of the famous Muhammed Ali/Cassius Clay knockout. The battle between Don and Duck Phillips does at least have a victor, as Don says “Uncle” and Duck backs off, but the thing is so messy and ill-conceived that unlike Ali, Don’s big opening swing doesn’t even land, and their undignified thrashing hardly comes off as impressive. There are similarly chaotic fights all the way through, including everything from that goofy Samsonite commercial Peggy and Stan pitch in the episode’s opening to Peggy and Mark’s embarrassingly public break up, but of course, the title match-up is Don and Peggy.

The fight feels like something Mad Men has been building toward since its opening episode, and you can see all of their history being woven into the different sections of their showdown. Peggy is struggling with her need for equal treatment and fair recognition for her work, Don can’t cope with the meaning of Anna Draper’s death, and they both have huge, ever-looming backstories that they perpetually try to keep crammed inside of – well, inside of a suitcase, and the baggage follows them everywhere. At some point, the fight turns into something else, and as they sit chuckling over Sterling’s Gold and the idea that Bert Cooper has no testicles, those hidden histories begin to unfold. It’s remarkable to hear Don tell Peggy about his childhood, but I think it’s even more amazing to hear them both talking about Peggy’s pregnancy, something she has managed to keep almost completely separate from her working life. Her openness to the subject is no doubt triggered by Trudy’s visible pregnancy and her fantastically mean comment in the bathroom, and the acknowledged presence of Peggy’s storied past puts Don and Peggy on the same side rather than allowing them to remain adversaries. The fight that began as a breakdown between a boss and his protégé turns into a bigger battle about how much your past defines you, and Don and Peggy finish the showdown as allies against a world that doesn’t know them.

As anticipated, Anna Draper’s death kills Dick Whitman. Collapsed onto Peggy’s lap, Don sees her going, suitcase in hand, and Peggy’s suggestion about the most exciting thing about a suitcase takes on a more existential meaning. From the first person perspective, the most exciting thing about a suitcase is, as Peggy says, “going somewhere.” Of course, if you’re not the person carrying the suitcase, “going somewhere” becomes “watching someone leave.” With no one left here who remembers him, Dick vanishes inside of Don Draper’s past, and Don can no longer be that split personality, shifting back and forth between sophisticated ad man and country yokel. His task now is to be a single person containing both of those lives, and although it may seem impossible, Peggy Olsen pulls him out of the initial despair. When Don says that there’s no one left who knows him, and Peggy answers, “that’s not true,” she’s not saying she knows Dick Whitman. She knows the person he is now, Don Draper, who grew up on a farm and saw people die in Korea and became a successful ad man. She knows him better than Betty, or Pete, or Bert Cooper, all of whom know the story about Don’s stolen name, because she sees all of the aspects of him at once, as part of a single person.

There can only be episodes like this if they’ve been earned, and Mad Men has been setting up this moment of understanding between Don and Peggy for a long time. In keeping with that idea, I think Mad Men also earned the gesture they made at the show’s end, which I loved but which it can only do once in a while. One of the easiest ways to evoke a time period is through musical reference, but that’s a game Mad Men has often refused to play. Stephanie won’t dance to the Beach Boys, she’ll dance to now-forgotten Jan and Dean; Don will talk about Bob Dylan, but only two seasons after he gets used as the final music of season one; the only Beatles presence on Mad Men is a two second clip where Don tells his secretary to buy an album for a Christmas present. Still, every once in a while, you get to pull out something iconic, and it’s hard to get more sixties than Simon and Garfunkel. “Voices leaking from a sad café / smiling faces trying to understand” – Oh, Mad Men. You got me.

Happy September 2nd, 2010 everyone.