You are making up and ignoring facts to fit your preferred internal narrative. Ted has been a rival “top young creative guy” to Don for entire seasons of this show. He’s won Clio awards. Don thought that the idea Ted came up with for GM was just as good as Don’s own idea.
He’s the kind of creative person who comes up with great ideas. Just like Don.
Not the point. The point was that Peggy and Ted had no idea what Don was going to tell the client – they both know he’s capable of anything, and they both knew they were at his mercy in that moment. Which was why he did it.
And the purpose for Don to spill the beans about the affair would have been to sabotage Ted’s reputation under cover of explaining why he was willing to go over budget on the ad. Ted and Don are competing to be the top creative guy at Sterling, Cooper, & Assoc. If Ted gets a reputation for affairs making him unreliable, Don wins, even if it costs them the client to do so. It was a plausible threat, although Don is too smooth to be so crude (that’s more Pete’s speed).
Afterthought: if Don is a narcissist, then he isn’t giving nearly as much thought to other people and their reactions as y’all (everyone who is throwing rocks at Don) are proposing. Narcissists go after their own goals without regard to other people for good or ill. They aren’t mean any more than a steamroller is mean.
Lots of posters are insistant that Don is a narcissist (and now, Bob too, it seems). That, too, is not supported by what we have seen on the show.
Don has been stricken by remorse for his actions many, many times on this show. Just this season we’ve seen him devastated by Sally seeing him + Sylvia, and we’ve seen him actually connect with Bobby #5 (at the movies, at camp). Heck, we’ve even seen him have a few genuine moments with Betty, of all people. None of those would have occurred to an actual narcissist.
He’s certainly a petty, selfish bastard with narcissistic tendencies. So is Pete, Roger, Ted, Harry, … heck, just about everyone on this show. ('cept maybe Burt and Ken). But they’re not clinical narcissists.
Also, I remember an earlier episode this season when Ted was sitting in the creative area with Peggy, Stan and the others discussing a campaign. I think Ted described it as a rap session. I think he is both more hip (less of an old fogey) and more collaborative than Don is. Perhaps that scares Don? He is starting to see that he is obsolete.
Conversely, when Peggy was at CGC she did essentially what we’ve seen Don do – call in her minions, have them report their ideas, give some feedback and send them back out to do better.
I think both SCDP and CGC were large enough to be past the point of Don or Ted doing the bulk of the creative work. Rather they proved their creative chops to the point where they have others do the bulk of it and they now pass judgement on what’s good and how to improve the fledgling ideas. And then act as the standard bearer in the pitch meetings with their sizable reputations providing the weight for why the client should listen.
Correct me if I am wrong, but when Don was home for the afternoon and channel surfing, he came across the soap opera and a scene with his wife - watched 2 seconds of it and then flipped the channel.
That kind of speaks volumes about what he thinks of her and her career.
I’m not sure why people are giving Don a pass in the meeting. He was a spiteful asshole. Sure he got a portion of the money but he did it ins such a way as to torture Ted and strip all of the credit away from Peggy and not because he cares about the company but because he was jealous.
He’s not interested romantically in Peggy but he has love for her and he hated how close she was getting with Ted.
Even for small firms, they are way too small. Mad Men is like the lawyer shows where the same person does a different murder trial every week, even though in real life they take full-time for years. Standard practice in the industry was to put a different creative team on each major account, although a creative director or copy chief might create the basic plan for the minions to work on. Ad campaigns require constant work. The idea has to be adapted and written for each medium - tv, radio, billboards, magazines, newspapers, subway and bus placards - and changes need to be made for regions, seasons, targeted audiences, new packaging. Lots of not very glamorous scut work in the trenches. Endless phone calls with the client, the photographers, the printers, and the accountants. The same couple of bodies literally can’t do it all.
He flipped over from Megan with her French accent playing her twin sister to The Patty Duke Show where Patty famously played “identical cousins”. (One had a cute English accent for the Beatle era.) Twinning was the episode’s theme. We were supposed to play “Spot the Correspondence” like a hour-long game of Concentration.
You are correct-a-mundo. I thought she looked like crap in that short platinum wig.
I think I’m the only one who is.
He is a spiteful asshole–no argument there. But a creative one. He shot from the hip, and I don’t think it was premeditated. Just how he operates. The two bodies were collateral damage.
I think this is true. Also because they are being so goo-goo eyed at each other. When you’re fucking someone at work who’s married, you shouldn’t be quite so obvious. But then the parties involved are usually the last to get that EVERYONE knows. (Yes, the voice of experience.)
Like Don told Ted, “We’ve all been there… well not there”, but Don wants Ted to do a better job of keeping things on the DL. Also, there’s obviously some jealousy (emotional, not physical) there as he has a strong attachment to Peggy and doesn’t like seeing someone else get her attention like that.
I’m not sure that he went into the meeting knowing that he was going to pull out the Frank Gleeson card, but he had to do something to keep the ad on the table and it ended up being something he could use make Ted and Peggy squirm a bit. Peggy losing out the chance at a Clio wasn’t and shouldn’t be a concern of his, you have to take care of the client first and worry about awards later. He knew that the ad was great, and that they had to get the client to buy into it in order for it to even get made - and unfortunately that led to Peggy losing the credit.
Don’t forget that Ted was trying to slip this ad under the radar so that they could make the client pay for it after the fact. He wasn’t showing the best judgement as far as client relations go.
Let’s start with the fact that Ted was trying to make an ad for $50,000 when the client had agreed to $15,000, without first telling the. That is ridiculous and Don knew it. However, instead of talking to Ted himself, he sent the budget to the client and let Ted twist there. That’s not great, but it isn’t horrible either. At the meeting, I think Don was playing out too much as a sort of revenge, but to be honest Ted kind of deserved. I do not think it is a very effective way to work together, it shows pettiness and arrogance, but Ted is far from innocent here.
The funny thing, of course, is Don frequently let’s his ego about what is a great idea that the client won’t get on board with mar his judgment. He took himself off Chevy because he they weren’t appreciative of the ideas. The truth is Don has not been very effective lately at doing much of anything. What was the last client he showed an idea to that said “Yes”?
Not only that but Ted is married. Peggy might not care in the context of non-stop flirting and all that but, from the outside perspective – what’s this going to be? Does Peggy think Ted will divorce his wife and leave his kids? Does Ted think this (almost certainly not)? Or the fallout when it’s discovered by his wife? Does Ted break it off with Peggy and keep working with her? This isn’t like one of the secretary dalliances of Don or Roger where you just put a new girl on the desk.
Regardless of where it came from, what Don said was correct – Ted & Peggy are being stupid and should nip this off right now.
Wasn’t Rosemary’s Baby highly controversial when it came out? I know it was in Alabama a decade later (it was on the list of movies denounced at the Christian school where I went), and even if it wasn’t controversial nationally it did include devil worship, nudity, rape, carnage, drugs, murder, a slam or two at the Pope/Catholicism, and other controversial stuff. I’m surprised the outcry from St. Joseph wasn’t over these things being associated with a children’s product named after a saint more than the money spent.
Sally’s look of control/joy/pride as Glenn fights Rolo was great acting and kind of scary.
