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During his photo session, Don asked the photographer, "What do you want?" "I want you to be yourself" was the reply Draper got -- a loaded request for a man who, years ago, took possession of a dead man's identity. Don's identity crisis has been at the heart of "Mad Men" since its start. The upscale-professional-suave persona he crafted for himself has served him well. But it's a product of the 1950s. Draper, while still charismatic and commanding, is increasingly old hat as he enters middle age in 1968. The advertising industry
-- and the culture, too -- continue to shift beneath his feet as he struggles to adapt, but his wingtips seem stuck in concrete. No wonder he remains tightly wound and detached. Or is he? The episode began with him and Megan on a business getaway to Hawaii, where Megan was thrilled to be in tropical paradise. Don mostly brooded, even after Megan scored a joint and got him stoned. Yet, when the couple returned to Manhattan, Don spoke dreamily of having "had an experience. It was nice." And when presenting a campaign for the Hawaiian resort where he and Megan vacationed, he described "a feeling that's stayed with me" since this holiday, and showed the clients an ad where an unseen tourist has shed his clothes on the beach and apparently splashed into the ocean. The clients noted that the scene looked less like a travel fantasy than a suicide. Did the man die? "Maybe he did," replied Don, slipping into a reverie, "and he went to heaven. Maybe that's what this feels like." If Don was so transformed by the trip, why no sign of his transcendence when he was there? Instead, when first seen, he was sunning himself in paradise while reading Dante's "Inferno": "Midway in our life's journey, I went astray from the straight road and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood." It was hardly the sign of a man having fun. Quite the opposite, it teed up Roger Sterling's later lamentation to his shrink. "Life is supposed to be a path," grumped Roger, but "you're just going in a straight line to you-know-where." To its credit, there are no straight lines in "Mad Men." But the premiere had warning signals that the show may be going astray. Challenging the viewer is what has made "Mad Men" great. But it shouldn't be a guessing game. It shouldn't put an onus on the viewer to make sense of behavior that doesn't add up. That's annoying.
[Associated
Press;
Frazier Moore is a national television columnist for The Associated Press. He can be reached at
fmoore@ap.org and at
http://twitter.com/tvfrazier.
Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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