He’s there to work within the parameters the customer set.
Quite true. The clients’ strategy was foolish and self-defeating. There was no intelligent, artful way to execute it.
This was not like Don’s misstep with Connie Hilton. This was Don telling the prudes the bald truth.
Could Don possibly be interested in her, even for sex? She’s nothing like his other women. I kept waiting for him to get up and leave while she was blathering about “supers” and how “dark” the country has become, and her dating rules. If she’s supposed to be an example of a 60’s new independent woman, the writers missed the mark. Vapid and boring.
For sex? Yes. But ONLY for sex.
I didn’t find her vapid or boring, but I like opera; my response to her invitation to attend as her guest would have been, “When?” That said, I think we were meant to take it that she was not a good match for Don. Admittedly she’s a better match for Don than Betty. 
If the firm were on better financial standing, I’d say he did exactly the right thing. the clients’ strategy was inherently doomed, and associating SCDP with it was going to do their rep no good. It would be like running a chocolate ice cream campaign ignoring the fact that the product is delicious–in fact, pretending that people eat the ice cream for any reason other than taste–and basing the appeal on all the calcium, because the manufacturer feels guilty about contributing to childhood obesity.
New York City has always had notoriously bad tv reception, especially ghosts and double images, because the signals bounce off all the buildings.
I knew that too, but I couldn’t believe why. That was not a 1964 ad. Nobody in the world would have run an ad like that in 1964. I’m not even sure they were using photography rather than illustrations for bikini ads in 1964. Neither Roger nor Pete would have approved that ad before the meeting.
One thing ad men did do in 1964 was publicize themselves incessantly. David Ogilvy’s Confessions of an Advertising Man sold a million copies in 1963. He wasn’t a new wave youngster either, but a dignified Englishman with principles that make Don look like Aaron Burr.
Overall, the episode was an OK “reintroduce the characters and set them up for plotlines” time-filler. I just hated the way they created two entirely phony incidents designed to fail because neither was at all realistic.
In that case, he was wasting everyone’s time. If he couldn’t execute on what the customer wanted, then he should have told them so. Someone else would love the opportunity.
Well first of all, I thought the Jantzen ad was actually not very good. It doesn’t really make sense (and I do get that it was some sort of reference to the fact that they don’t have asecond floor at SCBD). Put the reason I think Don got so mad was because Jantzen is a lot like him, hypocritical and lying about who they really are.
I’m seriously confused by the point you’re trying to make. Again and again, Don has been faced with this dilemma. One the one side, there’s doing what he does best, making the decisions he knows will work, knows will move product. On the other side, there’s what the customer wants or think they want. Again and again, we see Don either convince the customer to his way of thinking or losing the account rather than kowtow to their demands. The difference is that before when he was with Sterling & Cooper, he had the support of an established firm, and if they lost one account because of this, it was bad but not devastating. Now he’s approaching his job with the exact same attitude, only the stakes are much, much higher. This is an essential part of his characterization. Has it only started bothering you in this episode or do you get highly annoyed every time this conflict comes up?
One thing that jumped out at me in several scenes was how amateurish the production values, including the acting and writing, were. No energy. No focus. Almost as if the objective was to bore the audience. All I can figure is that they were on a short schedule when it came to those scenes and they went in virtually cold and had almost the equivalent of a line reading. Very high school in how those scenes played.
Who said I was annoyed? It’s just part of his arrogance. He doesn’t know better than the customer, no matter how much he’d like to think he does. Does he know more about advertising & what it will take to get the customer’s attention? Sure. Does he know more about their products, who their existing customers are, and who they are targeting? No.
He is really, really good at what he does, but his arrogance takes him beyond that sometimes.
Not sure where Wiener is going with this. I’m not a big Betty fan, but Don was no prize as an SO either. She’s not that great a mother, but to make her an evil mom whose kids are “terrified” of her is going a bit far IMO, and to be fair her MIL is kind of a nasty bitch.
I didn’t see the interesting crispness to the writing I saw in earlier shows, too many scenes were absolutely predictable. The dressing down of Don by Cooper for blowing the Ad Age interview was great, but you’d have thought that Don would have “got” it by now about building business after being a partner in two ad firms for several years.
WRT the opera girl Don is in his late 30s at this point. For a 25 year old to think a divorced man pushing 40 is a good bet is a bit odd even for the mid 60’s.
The Janzen diva fit was kind of silly. If you don’t want to work for bumpkins move on. Don’t taunt them and terrorize them (they will, of course, be back next episode hat in hand for his magic services).
Mad Men is at it’s best when it works with, and illuminates the 60’s Zeitgeist. I didn’t see much of that in this show, it was mostly interior lives stuff.
I’m waiting for a MIL and Betty throw down later in the season, It should be epic.
So I guess we’re going with the ‘giant ongoing’ thread, eh?
Y’all are being pretty harsh on this episode. My biggest complaint was having to watch it stretched, because we don’t have AMC HD here. Don seemed very much the temperamental artist in his treatment of the client, and perhaps at several other points throughout–it was the impression that I came away with at the end of the show. His WSJ interview reminded me of another sort of artist–the self-promoting pop artist a la Warhol. Had he become important yet, in 1964?
There was a moment when Henry Francis realized just who he’d married, there in the kitchen after the spat over the house. It wasn’t quite as satisfying as seeing Betty Draper stumble drunk into rush hour traffic, but I couldn’t help feeling a delightfully vicious little thrill. Now somebody else gets to deal with the bitch, and Don is free, though he may not realize it–and he may not want to be, when you consider how much his date resembled Betty in personality and behavior. On the other hand, my heart breaks for poor Sally every time I see her, it seems like. She’s gonna be a troubled kid.
Is Peggy’s co-worker one of the young guys from Sterling Cooper? I don’t remember their names; one was gay and one wasn’t, and they were there because they were young. And was that him with her outside Don’s apartment? Surely Don knows everyone who works at SCDP, so if not him, who? Just a boyfriend?
All I can think of for now.
Maybe. But then, there’s an even greater age difference between Jane and Roger, and the opera girl did comment that she was breaking not just one, but several of her rules in going out with Don.
The opera girl reminded me a lot of Betty. Mannerisms, false modesty, looks, vacuousness.
I don’t think her co-worker was one of those two guys from Sterling Cooper. I think he’s supposed to be a new hire. (Also didn’t recognize the guy in the hallway. I think he was just a date. I think he was carrying a casserole dish, so perhaps they were on the way to a post-Thanksgiving party.)
You bring up a good point. was the young art guy in the hallway of Don’s apartment with Peggy the same guy as the hetero half of the young hetero/homo art duo from SC, and if he was shouldn’t Don have been well aware of who he was? I’ll look.
I don’t think he was one of the SC pair but he was obviously on the payroll and from his “Does this mean I’m down to two days a week?” comment I guess he’s only part time. Since we don’t know what’s happened in the past year we don’t know really where he came from but I’m guessing he’s an art assistant for Peggy. She tells him to have a drawing done up for her. If he’s new enough, part-time enough and irrelevant enough to the Big Picture, Don might in fact not really know who he is.
He was the guy with Peggy at Don’s apartment (I… think?). I’m guessing he got roped into the “human shield from Don’s wrath” job since it was him, Peggy and Pete who conspired with the canned ham throw-down.
Someone on Slate.com pointed out that the actor playing Cosgrove was listed in the credits, so I think that means we’ll see him again.
The hetero homo copywiter/artist pair frrom SC were Smitty and Kurt.
Smitty Smith - Patrick Cavanaugh Copywriter
Kurt Smith - Edin Gali -Graphic Artist
The hallway pseudo-fiance is apparently new.