“Frasier” and “Mad Men” aren’t often part of the same conversation. But when Betty returned to the screen on “Mad Men” on Sunday night, the show answered one of its biggest off-season questions — how it would handle the real-life pregnancy of January Jones, who plays her — in “Frasier” style. Betty got fat.
Of course, we didn’t get the overeating jokes that were thrown at the “Frasier” character Daphne Moon when the actress who played her, Jane Leeves, was pregnant in 2003. “Mad Men” played it seriously. The former Mrs. Draper — now ensconced in her new suburban manse in Rye, N.Y., a scary-looking Romanesque pile, with her new husband, Henry Francis, but the same disapproving children — was too embarrassed to go to a Junior League event, which drew a visit from her scary mother-in-law. At her mother-in-law’s suggestion, Betty tried to get a subscription for diet pills, but the doctor found a lump on her thyroid instead.
The lump turned out to be benign, but the cancer scare underscored the gloomy picture of Betty and the children’s post-Don Draper life. In striking visual contrast, we were shown the new, 26-year-old Mrs. Draper being zipped easily into a cute little frock, and later walking around the apartment sporting a floral bikini top.
Elsewhere, Roger Sterling was also depressed, as he came to realize just how marginalized he was in his own firm, despite having been primarily responsible for bringing in (or bringing back) the Mohawk Airlines account. A shot of Roger grimly, slowly clapping while Pete took the credit may portend a battle royal, though his depressive response when Don tried to cheer him up — “I’m tired of trying to prove I still have some value” — made me wonder whether we should be taking literally those controversial falling-man images in the Season 5 promotional campaign.
The firm’s accidental outreach to black job candidates last week resulted in a new secretary, named Donna, sitting outside Don’s office. The ever-awkward Harry Crane tried to make a joke about the similarity of their names — “It’s really hard to tell who’s who” — which she gracefully ignored.
The times just kept a-changin’ at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce when Peggy, empowered to hire a copywriter for the Mohawk campaign, brought in a Jewish candidate, Mike Ginsberg. To her surprise, Don liked him, so we’ll be seeing Ben Feldman (the guardian angel on “Drop Dead Diva”) again as the Duddy Kravitz-like Ginsberg again.
Harry’s utter cluelessness was demonstrated again when he and Don tried to ambush the Rolling Stones backstage to sell them on the idea of singing “Heinz, Heinz, Heinz is on my side” for a baked-beans commercial. Flirting with a pair of precocious teenage girls led Don to a sobering awareness of his advancing age and responsibilities but just led Harry to get stoned and mistakenly negotiate with a band called the Trade Winds. (Is this the American band that changed its name to the Innocence in 1966?)
The episode apparently took place on and around the Fourth of July; we saw the Draper-Francis children celebrating with sparklers on their lawn. The Rolling Stones played the tennis stadium in Forest Hills on July 2, 1966, when, we now know, two square advertising executives tried to meet them backstage. And in the closing moments, Mike Ginsberg’s father was upset by the fact that Pete Fox, a talented right fielder for the Detroit Tigers and Boston Red Sox, had died at 57 — establishing the date as July 5, 1966.
Before I sign off, a brief response to last week’s post on the City Room blog about how the opening scene of the “Mad Men” season premiere — in which bags of water were dropped from the Young & Rubicam offices on pickets in the street below — was closely based on a 1966 New York Times article, right down to the use of the line “They call us savages” by one of the demonstrators.
The post noted that I and a New York magazine critic, Matt Zoller Seitz, had criticized the scene — I called it “ham-handed,” he called the “savages” line “terrible” — and that we stood our ground (the post’s words, not mine) when informed of its historical basis. A solid majority of the 80 comments accused me and Mr. Zoller Seitz of arrogance, wrongheadedness, meanness or general idiocy for feeling that way. One commenter said it was pathetic that we had “doubled down” on our position.
Well, I’m going to double down again. (Or, from my point of view, split my aces.) Knowing that the scene was so closely based on a documentary account, and that the “savages” line was actually spoken, doesn’t make it better. Why would it? As I told the writer of the post, there is no necessary correlation between historical accuracy and dramatic quality.
In fact, the use of the Times article as a source could go a long way toward explaining why the scene felt so stiff and unnatural. That’s one thing that can happen when writers and directors are more concerned with recreating history than they are with creating plausible, effective drama. I suspect it’s what happened with that particular scene.
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