I wasn’t implying Joan might get pregnant, I’m saying one of her first actions on the show was to set up the new girl to get nailed by her boss (or a salesman, Roger, etc) as a rote part of the job.
Remember Peggy’s awkward (and turned down) attempt to make herself available for Don? She expected (based on what Joan told her) that this would be part of the job.
Now if we only had an expert on Madison Avenue…
Isn’t that only true for really big, major plays? I thought that smaller plays would only be staged in NY city (or near New York city) without out of town tryouts. I’m surprised that that’s true for all plays. And wouldn’t someone who’s just breaking into the business be auditioning for both on-broadway, and off-broadway, and off-off-off broadway stuff?
That’s what I expected; it was odd that Megan didn’t say anything about having told Don before.
Eh, Joan either will find out as soon she goes to a jeweller to sell it.
I’m not sure I entirely agree; my first reaction was the same as yours, but I subsequently thought that with Joan knowing what a slimeball Pete is, she guessed he might perceive it as he did, and she could find just how high (or low) these boys were willing to go, always having the last word in the process.
If she was as insulted as your interpretation makes her out to be, I don’t think her response would have been as low-key as it was, even uttering the same words.
Little Murders, the play she auditioned for (and didn’t they leave it a little mysterious as to whether she got it or not?), was not a musical, FWIW. It certainly played longer in Boston that on its first B’way run.
I think he wants to, but there isn’t much she’s exposed him to that he actually likes. That play they went to in the previous episode he didn’t enjoy. Her friend insulted what he does (at a dinner they didn’t show). And it seems like everything that has to do with acting and Megan is talking her away from him. She’s not in the office with him. They no longer have a common work to talk about. To him she’s just away on auditions, away with her acting friends, and maybe away training for a play. He’s adjusting.
Seconded. But when Don chases her around the apartment like a sociopathic maniac, it’s Manly.
I see something a little different about the Peggy thing. Pure practicality.
A number of characters in this season have had bit roles in each episode, sometimes just kind of crammed in (Roger with Ski’s, Pete once or twice had one sentence), some not at all for a number of episodes (Cooper for instance, but thats been for a while, but Betty (good, no Betty) or Sally (quite good when she gets a spot)).
Peggy to me has had that position this season. She’s barely featured in a lot of episodes, and never really in anything major apart from this one. She’s gone because she’s written out for a while. She’s not had much of a storyline when within the company, and I’d be surprised if she gets one while outside… I’ll be sad to see her go, to me, its her, Don and Joan who have been the major players and we’ve just lost one…
Actually, Joan hasn’t had a big role in a lot of episodes either…
Little Murders was intended to be a major Broadway play. Nobody could know ahead of time that it would fail. It indeed was far more successful in 1969 off-Broadway and had numerous stock productions. I saw one staged in college. As Jules Feiffer’s first play, it was as big as could be. It was staged in a 1200-seat theater, which is on the large side by Broadway standards. The original cast included Elliott Gould, Richard Schaal, Heywood Hale Broun and David Steinberg. I can’t figure out what part they thought Megan could play. There are two female roles and both went to much older actresses and stage veterans, Ruth White and Barbara Cook.
The intention clearly was to show that Megan was contending in the major leagues, not for smaller off-Broadway parts. So she was a newcomer. It was the first play for both Steinberg and Schaal, BTW, both of whom went on to comic success but not in the theater. Schaal was married to Valerie Harper at the time and Gould of course to Barbra Streisand. That could make for some fun stories had Megan gotten the part.
If the pitch team had come back and said “I’m not sure about that dealership guy, he didn’t seem to be buying it” and Joan had thought, then said(in less blunt 1960s language of course), “When he was here, he only took his eyes off my tits to get a better look at my ass. I bet I could change his mind for 5% of the company,” I’d have a different answer to that question. It’s one thing to sell yourself, it’s another to be pimped out and passed around as a piece of SCDP property. That’s one of the things that was so awful about the whole thing, Joan didn’t have agency. Hopefully, as a partner, she’ll be able to get some back.
Link to the Mad Style post from the TLo blog
From that post: Joan wears the mink that Roger gave her that she said she’d always remember getting from him.
Again, I’d feel worse about this if Joan didn’t have the exact same attitude towards her secretarial pool in Season One.
I don’t think she thought the secretaries were “required” to sleep w/ the bosses, just that they often did and she’d rather they didn’t end up knocked up because of it.
Peggy’s “pass” at Don was very obviously rooted in her previous interaction with Joan. It wasn’t because Peggy thought Don was so dreamy, it was because she was led (by Joan) to believe this was required of her.
Peggy could be Don’s kid sister- she has sex (or sex like stuff) with who she wants and it doesn’t really matter if she’s in a relationship: Pete, Duck, movie theater guy [that one was like she was trying to think “who would most piss off my mother? Ooh, a stranger with a joint in a movie theater… too bad he’s white and American, but, there’s always the weekend matinee”), her boyfriend of course.
There were a couple of moments the other night when for the first time I realized just how much Elizabeth Moss looks like Bette Davis. No idea if this is something that’s been commented on 8 million times or if I’m the first person ever to think so, but if they ever do a movie in which a young Bette is a character she could totally kick it, and Peggy is also a character I could totally imagine Bette having played (if it was set in the 1930s/1940s instead of 1960s, obviously).
I was speaking of the very beginning of the series. After Joan talks to Peggy and sets her up with birth control, Peggy makes a mistake (I think it was letting Pete see some research) and Don tells her if it happens again, she’ll be fired. Peggy makes a very awkward pass at Don and Don tells her to drop it.
Peggy is obviously relieved, albeit embarrassed (and this sets up the relationship between her and Don for the series), because sleeping with Don was NOT something she actually wanted to do. She was led to believe it was expected of her which is evident both in her nervous attempt at it and in her relief when she’s shot down. The person who led her to believe it was Joan, both in her words and her actions. I very much doubt that Peggy was some unique snowflake in this and that Joan didn’t give every new girl the same treatment (lecture and pills). Joan was complicit in the whole “getting pimped out and passed around like a piece of SC property” thing years ago so I’m hardly going to clutch my pearls for her today.
I wanted to ask about Megan’s audition. We saw very little of it… just that the guys asked her to turn around.
When Don got home and she was already home after the audition, she was very mopey and morose. Then she said she was waiting to hear, so she was in the running.
Does anyone think that was a “casting couch” type of situation… that Megan was asked to do something-- I’m not sure what, but similar to what Joan faced, namely, “if you want to be considered for the job, certain things will be required”-- that she felt was demeaning and inappropriate, but that she did it or didn’t refuse to do it in the future, which is why she felt yukky afterwards, even though she was one of the finalists? That she figured out that this was “part of the game,” as Pete said; it was what she would have to get used to if she wanted a theater career.
I kind of assumed that she didn’t go through with it and that was why she was so mopey.
I didn’t think anything actually happened at that audition (there was three guys there and… well, just no) but rather Megan realized that this was how she’d be treated no matter how serious she was as an actress. And her ascension in the theater could directly depend on, not how hard she works, but how she responds some day when it’s just her and one dude in a room. It was a depressing awakening. And this was her “leave my advertising job for” dream job – how does she possibly explain failing at it to Don? It’s embarrassing and demeaning.
I don’t think that scene was meant to imply a casting couch, only that Megan was treated like a piece of meat just like Joan. The whole episode was about women reacting to the roles they’ve been put into (in Megan’s case, she is trying to secure a literal role in a play), Joan and Peggy are dealing with roles that are less defined.