Last week, the news broke that Downton Abbey, the British drama about the titled residents of a major country estate and the people who work for them, will be adding its first black character: the London-born actor Gary Carr, who has a long British television resume, will play a jazz singer named Jack Ross. This is a notable development for Downton Abbey, which through three seasons has remained resolutely—if appropriate to its time period and setting—monochromatic. But the show’s decision is also part of a larger trend of overwhelmingly white shows that have made the decision to try to broaden their casting and their subject matter. And Downton Abbey can learn from Lena Dunham’s HBO comedy Girls, which responded to a firestorm of criticism over its whiteness by adding a character named Sandy (Donald Glover), a black Republican love interest for the main character, and AMC’s Mad Men, which in its sixth season has added two African-American characters and expanded its treatment of its characters reaction to the Civil Rights movement.

Downton Abbey, Girls, and Mad Men all differ in the extent to which their settings made the absence of black characters conspicuous or uncomfortable. A relatively secluded English country estate, close to a small town rather than London, would be less likely to have black British or immigrant residents than the capital itself, particularly in 1912. Mad Men has somewhat less excuse than Downton Abbey does, and a number of analysts have suggested that the version of Madison Avenue series creator Matthew Weiner and his collaborators have presented on the show actually suggests that women and African-Americans had made less progress in the advertising industry than they really had, particularly at the firm BBDO. And Girls, which was maligned as racist for having four white main characters, did better than its harshest critics suggested and worse than might have been realistic. The show, set in contemporary Brooklyn, did give its main character Hannah Horvath (Dunham) an Asian coworker at the publishing house where she was a long-time intern, but also relied on stereotyped portrayals of non-white secretaries and nannies, and gave its privileged characters a small, monochromatic social circle. Whether or not that was realistic, or whether or not that was a wise choice on Dunham’s part was a matter of how alienating an individual viewer found the decision, and how much one believed that relatively privileged Oberlin graduates might only have close friends of their same race.

Whether or not Weiner or Dunham felt obligated to have their shows respond to their critics on race, they both did so in ways that made black characters on-screen critics of the white main characters. Dawn (Teyonah Parris), Don Draper’s secretary, who became Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce’s first black employee in the first episode of the fifth season of Mad Men, told a friend she met for dinner this season of her white employers that “Everyone’s scared. Women crying in the ladies’ room. Men crying in the elevator. It’s like New Year’s Eve when they empty the garbage there. There’s so many bottles.” She spoke not just as an outsider to the office but for critics of Mad Men who have found the show alienating and offputting. And Sandy, after failing to finish one of Hannah’s essays on Girls, told her “It wasn’t for me.” When Hannah protested of the essay that “It’s for everyone,” the show was cleverly flipping the script. Sandy, the black character, was saying that a piece of art didn’t have to speak to everyone’s sensibilities, unlike critics of color of the show who were upset that it didn’t address their experiences, while it was Hannah, the white character, who was suggesting that Girls ought to be for everyone, contra many white critics’ defenses that the show’s strength lay in its particularity, and that it couldn’t possibly be reasonable to demand that it serve a universal function.
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Over at the Daily Beast yesterday, I wrote about a television phenomenon that officially became a trend over the weekend: the prestige television male virgin. I explained:

On last night’s Game of Thrones, after getting seduced by wildling warrior Ygritte (Rose Leslie), Jon Snow (Kit Harrington) confessed that “There’s been no one else.” Ygritte knew that as a man of the Night’s Watch, the celibate brotherhood who guards the Wall which marks the border of Westeros, Jon was forbidden from having sex after he swore the vows she asked him to break. But she assumed that he’d had sex before he joined up, and was surprised to learn she’d been mistaken. “A maid! You’re a maid,” she teased him.

An hour later on Sunday night’s television line-up, Mad Men copywriter Michael Ginsberg (Ben Feldman), whose father sprung a blind date with a pretty schoolteacher on him, confessed during a bout of logorrhea at the diner where he took her that “I’ve never had sex, not even once.” His confession was inexplicable, even to him. “What am I doing?” Ginsberg moaned. “I ordered soup. I just said that.” And Jon and Michael are in good company. Much of the third season of Downton Abbey, which aired on PBS earlier this season, concerned the sexual awakening of Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens) after he marries Lady Mary Crawley (Michelle Dockery), ending years of sexual yearning and passing into the realm where, in the words of his bride “all things are permitted.”

As I wrote earlier in our discussion of lies pop culture tells us, one of the biggest is that everyone’s having sex all of the time, and that everyone started having sex sometime late in high school or early in college. It’s worth noting that all three of these stories which have acknowledged that there isn’t a set age at which everyone is miraculously divested of their virginity are in some form or other period pieces. Game of Thrones is set in a world where youthful marriage means that a lot of people do have sex for the first time at a relatively early age, but often not in a truly consensual fashion. Downton Abbey is set in an environment where nice people of both sexes are expected to come to marriage inexperienced, and when the slow burn of sexual tension is a key source of cultural drama. And one of the things that Mad Men captures with great perceptiveness is the uneven arrival of the sexual revolution in different characters’ lives depending on their level of privilege and the conditions of their upbringing.

It would be nice to see some shows attempt to tell similar and similarly respectful stories about characters in contemporary settings, and about women as well as men. High school and college may be the point by which the majority of people have sex for the first time, but they aren’t the only times that people decide to—or get a chance to—have sex for the first time, and there are different concerns and different anxieties about it at different ages. I’m not saying that pop culture should abandon teen and young adult sex stories. But Mad Men, Game of Thrones, and Downton Abbey all serve as a reminder that there’s rich material in different kinds of first time stories, whether someone’s having sex for the first time at a different point in their life, or having sex for the first time with a new partner, which can be just as momentous as the first time period.

This post discusses plot points from the April 28 episode of Mad Men.

During last night’s episode of Mad Men, the most hotly-contested point between viewers I saw discussing the show on social media was whether the show’s white characters would have reacted to the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. the way they did, experiencing emotions from Peggy’s anxiety about how riots might affect the value of her first apartment to Pete’s outraged expression of grief. But what struck me about the episode was less the idea that it was an illustration of the relative goodness and racial progressivism of the characters we’ve come to know over the years, and more that it was about those characters adjusting to changing standards of whiteness. Rather than treating the civil rights movement as something rather distant, and perhaps something to get involved in only if you have personal reasons to do so, as was the case with Paul Kinsey’s Freedom Ride, Mad Men‘s core characters sensed that King’s death wasn’t an event confined to the black community, and not just because of the riots that it inspired. His murder was something they were supposed to have a reaction to if they were to be seen as compassionate people. But unaccustomed to honest discussions with black coworkers and wholly unfamiliar with the idea of genuine cross-racial solidarity, their reactions to King’s death ended up coming across as awkward and contrived, because, of course, they were. Opposition to racism, and genuine comfort with people who don’t share your race, it turns out, are things that take practice.

Many of the white characters on Mad Men treated King’s murder as if it were personal to their black coworkers, a death in the direct, rather than extended, family. “You should go home,” Peggy told her secretary Phyllis. “In fact, none of us should be working.” Don encouraged Dawn to go home, too, and only accepted that she would prefer to be at work, her persistence and dependability a deliberate counterexample to the rioters Phyllis called “these fools, running in the streets” whether Don recognizes it or not, when Dawn told him firmly “I’d really rather be here today.”

The decision that black employees should be allowed time to grieve, whether they wanted it or not, also inspired some of the first physical familiarity between Joan and Peggy and their African-American coworkers, though their hugs were markedly different affairs. Peggy and Phyllis, we know, have at least some sort of relationship other than a simple employer-employee one. Phyllis has told Peggy to be as encouraging to the men in the office as Peggy has been to her, though it’s not clear whether Peggy is encouraging Phyllis to try copywriting, or simply being a good boss. She feels comfortable enough with Peggy to watch the television in her office. They’re capable of talking about King’s death, at least a little bit, Peggy offering up Abe’s assessment that the riots “could have been a lot worse,” and Phyllis tearfully telling her boss, “I knew it was going to happen. He knew it was going to happen. But it’s not going to stop anything.” And when they hug, it’s a direct, if slightly brittle embrace. There is real feeling there, even if Peggy isn’t capable of being as open with Phyllis as Phyllis is being with her.
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Yesterday, my friend Matt Zeitlin tweeted: “The idea that characters are more realistic or human because they change substantially over time is, when you think about it, pretty LOL.” He was responding, I think, to Monday-morning quarterbacking of the last episode of Mad Men, a show which has given rise to an important and difficult discussion about two questions. First, what do the arcs of characters’ individual growth have to look like for us to invest in them? And second, what stories can we tell about characters who have significantly stagnated, as Don Draper seems to have at the beginning of the sixth season of the show substantially about him, which is scheduled to run for at least seven in total?

The television writer Ken Levine asked this question in a post exploring his reaction to Don Draper, in which he also touched on the way that Girls has doubled down on the unlikability of its characters in that sitcom’s second season. He wrote:

The hope was always that he’d figure it out, finally be comfortable in his own skin, and that all of his good qualities would rise to the surface and he’d become a better father, husband, employer, and stop wearing hats already in 1968. And if he slipped up a little, well – he’s only human and we’ve come to expect that. Betty is trying to throw Hansel & Gretel in an oven, she’s a lost cause. But there was still hope for Don.

Until this season. Now he has a loving wife, a wildly successful career, and he has become television’s biggest prick. It’s not enough he’s cheating on Megan, but he’s doing it with another woman in his building and he’s all buddy-buddy with her husband. They socialize together. He invites the guy to the office. What a fucking asshole! Meanwhile, he tries to destroy his wife’s dreams simply because they inconvenience him. He never talks to his children, even on Christmas. And he’s a cold distant boss to all his employees while still demanding total loyalty from them. Why should I care anymore about this miserable soul? Because he gets to his front door, slumps down to the ground, and feels sad?

And Ryan McGee, in a post about epochs of television that I don’t necessarily agree with otherwise, nailed this point:

That type of growth isn’t always linear, and it isn’t always pretty, and it quite often looks like defeat. Anyone rooting for Carrie and Brody to continue being the only sane thing in an insane world would have a hard time seeing the end of “Homeland”’s second two as progress. But it was still necessary for that to happen, not just for the storytelling of the show but also their growth as individuals. Hannah slipped something fierce after telling Joshua that she actually wanted to be happy, but that doesn’t mean her reunion with Adam at the end of the season was the end point to her ultimate journey. Boyd Crowder sees his dreams apparently squashed at the end of the fourth season of “Justified,” but neither he nor Raylan Givens traverse in pure misery. Both see a light at the end of the tunnel. They just are fantastically good at tripping themselves up on the way towards it.

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Race has always hovered around the edges of the storytelling in Mad Men, though the racial politics of the sixties have usually served to illustrate characters’ personalities, rather than driving the storytelling. When Pete Campbell notes the emergence of a distinct black market, it’s an illustration of his sharpness as an advertising executive, and his inability to push the insight forward through conversations with the office building’s elevator operator serves as a reminder of his social deficits. Paul Kinsey’s decision to go on a Civil Rights organizing trip with his girlfriend is more about demonstrating his desire to simultaneously ingratiate himself and prove he’s on the cutting edge than about him actually having particularly evolved racial attitudes. Lane Pryce’s dalliance with an African-American Playboy Bunny was an act of fairly childish rebellion against his father, as much as his wife. And Peggy’s willingness to take Dawn, her replacement as Don’s secretary, home for the night, only then to worry that the more junior woman might steal from her, is an illustration of the struggle between her desire to be kind and her self-interest.

Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner’s been actively resistant to the idea that he has to tell stories about the Civil Rights movement on the show in the past, even though he’s obviously made a choice to depict a segment of Madison Avenue that’s whiter and more male than the industry was overall. So Sunday’s episode of the show, in which we both learn more about Dawn Chambers (Teyonah Parris), Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce’s first African-American employee, and see racial and gender strife come to the firm not through a racial incident but through the kind of petty office politics that have driven so much of the show’s drama for the past five years, feels both like a response to long-running criticism of the show and a rebuke to the critics, Weiner showing us that his show would get to a key subject in what he determined to be good time, and in his own way.

What Weiner decided to do was make Dawn’s race a factor in a conflict that was simultaneously larger and smaller. While Dawn wasn’t willing to skip out on work to help Scarlett (who must be named for Miss O’Hara, in a great nod to pop culture’s influence even on these pop cultural characters), she did agree to punch her fellow secretary’s time card. When Joan found out, she fired Scarlett for effectively stealing wages from the company, setting up a confrontation between her and Harry, who resents that Joan is a partner, while Harry’s work on television hasn’t earned him the same thing—”It’s a shame my accomplishments happen in broad daylight,” he spits at her in public, ignoring that what earned the partners that title was sacrifice and investment, not personal accomplishment—and bringing up the question of Dawn’s race as one factor, along with her lower level of complicity in Scarlett’s offense, in the decision about whether to fire her.
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Starz seems to have settled on explicit sex and violence as the keys to its brand precisely at the moment when the flagrant use of both of those elements in television drama has ceased to be a novel advantage cable held over the networks and started getting embarrassing, and not a little dull. And even though Spartacus, the franchise that perhaps made the best use of those elements in service of genuine ideas, has just finished its run on Starz, the network appears to be doubling down with Black Sails, a pirate show that’s being advertised as an opportunity for Michael Bay to move on up from showing Megan Fox arching her back to depicting actual lesbian sex and for Toby Stephens to get another crack at the American market after playing Fergus Wolfe in Possession didn’t exactly set his career on fire:

There’s a good show to be done about piracy. But it’s one that requires the showrunners to know as much about Caribbean governance, and economics—some privateering contracts guaranteed fair, consistent monthly wages and advance pay—social dynamics that gave pirates a certain amount of social capital in polite society as well as in island enclaves, slavery, and cooperative organizing as about how to make a lady look fetching in a corset.

It’s notable that this season of Game of Thrones has—with the exception of this weekend’s scene in Littlefinger’s brothel—dramatically scaled down its use of nudity and scaled up its discussion of policy issues, from the ethics and efficacy of purchasing a slave army to the impact on Westeros of the particular people who have helped the country run up a sizable national debt. There was a sense in some of the commentary on the show last year that the prodigious use of nudity in both non-consensual scenes and situations involving prostitution was cheesy, a sop to less sophisticated viewers who might not otherwise be inclined to keep track of the show’s enormous roster of characters or engage with its big ideas about the morality of war. In other words, a clear distinction was emerging between adult drama and “adult” content. And in the show’s third season, characters have talked more about sexual assault and sexual experiences than we’ve actually seen on screen. How characters like Brienne of Tarth and Jaime Lannister respond to a threat of sexual assault, or how Tyrion Lannister interrogates Podrick Payne about his first sexual experience matters much more than watching their bodies in motion.
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Alan Sepinwall, following up on his post about the glut of strong television (about which I wrote here), notes that AMC, in an effort to jumpstart a new night of scheduled watching, has moved its Western drama Hell On Wheels to Saturday. Time slots and viewing days are something I’ve been thinking a great deal about recently. As one example FX, which has a string of great dramas, tends to air them during the week, often at 10 PM, and a (very) informal poll of my Twitter followers suggests that The Americans—the one of those dramas airing now and which has been making tremendous viewership gains once DVR usage is factored in— is something a lot of you are triaging to other nights, whether because it’s airing late on a work night, it competes with Nashville, or simply because week nights are full of other committments. And I’ve also been considering the fact that cable’s seemed much more capable than network of building a must-see night of television in recent years—but it’s only been able to do so on a single night, Sunday.

The problem with teaching viewers to make appointments to watch television on nights other than Sunday means that you have to have strong content to put there. Sunday night’s become crowded with good cable television precisely because it’s acquired the reputation as the prestige evening, and putting a show there is effectively entering it for consideration as serious and worthy programming. Seeding another night and expecting viewers to follow it would require one of two things. First, a single network could move an established must-see show out of its timeslot to a new time and using it to launch a new show. But that’s been difficult in the past in part because cable networks simply haven’t had enough original programming in development to build blocks out of it. For AMC to stack up, say, Breaking Bad and Mad Men in a single two-hour timeslot, would leave its schedule without a prestige player during much fo the rest of the year. That could change as cable networks go through a boom in ordering new programming, but it’s likely to take some time. And Sunday nights are an areas where the networks seem to follow cable rather than the other way around: scheduling The Good Wife on Sunday nights, for example, is an attempt to argue that the show is as good as a cable drama.

The other way to establish a night other than Sunday as an evening of must-see TV would be for a number of networks to separately arrive at the idea that it’s good to give another night a shot. For Hell On Wheels‘ move to work out—and Saturday nights aren’t an inherently terrible idea, if your goal is to get people to make an event out of watching TV that can be paired with dinner, wine, friends, etc.—another network will probably have to offer up some content such that it will be worth it to make an entire evening of sitting in front the television. The most coherent programming block on television at this particular moment is probably the team-up of Game of Thrones and Mad Men, both sophisticated ensemble dramas about grown-ups with real problems that air as an effective team-up because HBO and AMC don’t want to compete with each other. And based on simple thematic and narrative coherence, it works better than the block HBO tried to build last year with Game of Thrones, Veep, and Girls.

Maybe, as FX dramatically expands its programming orders as it splits its brand into FX and the comedy-centric FXX network, or if HBO gets some of the many, many projects it has in development into production, individual cable networks could start putting down beachheads on nights other than Sunday. But until they do, the next night of must-see programming is likely to be much more a matter of luck than of deliberate planning.

“You go to college. You meet a boy. You drop out. You get married. Struggle for a year in New York while he learns to tie a tie and then move to the country and just start the whole disaster over,” Sandy, the teenaged violinist who’s been living with Betty and Henry Francis, tells Betty over a midnight snack during the first episode of the sixth season. Betty’s reaction is telling—not anger, precisely, but frustration. “That’s an arrogant exaggeration,” she tells Sandy. But it’s also the first time someone has but the trajectory of Betty Hofstadt’s life, with all of its disappointments and wasted potential, in an actual context and acknowledged to her that her choices are shaped by larger expectations, rather than simply telling her that she’s a selfish, immature brat. Lots of fans dislike Betty, whether she’s been Draper or Francis. But Betty’s story in the season premiere left me hoping that Mad Men might finally be recognizing bigger plans for her, that just as Don’s found himself at sea and Peggy and Joan have, through very different means, found places for themselves in the changing world, the sixties might finally reach Betty Hofstadt deep inside her cellophane prison.

Through the show’s first five seasons, Betty’s often acted—or been treated—like a petulant little girl in ways that have made it easy for other characters to dismiss her, even when she’s been correct about things. Betty’s impulses are poorly directed, whether she’s confiding in Glenn Bishop, the neighbor boy who is closer to her daughter Sally’s age than her own, or shooting a neighbor’s birds in a fit of pique. She lives in a world of double standards, hoping to use Don’s adultery against him in the divorce proceedings and acting shocked when Henry’s lawyer assumes that she and Henry have also had sex outside of Betty’s marriage, even though she, too, had sex with an utter stranger in a bar. And she’s a terrible mother, chastising Sally for minor offenses and imposing a rigid discipline on her daughter even as she chafes against the expectations she’s internalized for herself.

But that doesn’t mean that Betty’s wrong all the time, particularly when it comes to Don. When she cooly told her first husband after he grabbed her “You want to bounce me off the walls? Would that make you feel better?” Don resorts to belittling her because she’s actually correct, telling her, “Sometimes I feel like I’m living with a little girl.” And when Betty uncovers Don’s original identity, she says two things that are particularly true, and that illustrate the idiocy of the strictures she lives with. “I’ve respected your privacy too long. Open it,” Betty commands Don after she discovers the contents of the drawer, a statement that piercingly illuminates the insanity of living with someone you barely know, a fate that’s true for many of the married characters on Mad Men. And after the truth’s been explained to her, Betty wants to know “Am I supposed to love you?” really asking if she’s supposed to accept Don’s elaborate fiction because he wants her to, and because it’s been a means by which she’s been well-provided for.
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Yesterday at The Daily Beast, I got to dig into an idea that’s been striking me for a while: that in the age of anti-hero dramas, teenage girl characters have become almost as prevalent as middle-aged men with dark secrets who we shouldn’t root for, but do. In a look at Game of Thrones, Homeland, Mad Men, and The Americans, I explained:

Like almost every major anti-hero drama on television today, Mad Men is also a story about what it’s like to be a young girl discovering the realities of the world she’s living in. The secret of today’s prestige television is that it can all be read as young adult fiction….

In Homeland, Sgt. Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), the prisoner of war who returns home after years of captivity by the terrorist Abu Nazir (Navid Negahban), reconnects most easily with his daughter Dana (Morgan Saylor). She’s pulled into her father’s plan to become a suicide bomber and the CIA efforts to stop him when agent Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes), deep in a bipolar episode, asks Dana, in desperation, to help stop him. Dana insists that she doesn’t believe he could possibly be a terrorist, but calls her father anyway. A year later, when Carrie is interrogating Brody, she tells him, “It was hearing Dana’s voice that changed your mind, wasn’t it?” Dana, whether she intended it or not, has become a full participant in the moral world of grown-ups, due to her father’s plot. And she finally reaches maturity in the second season, when she realizes that Carrie was right, though for the wrong reasons—she’s finally capable of seeing Brody independently, rather than through the haze of daughterly love…

Mad Men has always had Sally Draper (Kiernan Shipka), who was a little girl for much of the series, but one with secrets of her own, including her relationship with Glenn Bishop (Marten Holden Weiner). But this year, she is growing into maturity. After Betty’s cited for reckless driving, Sally tests her mother’s limits, announcing to Henry, “Isn’t somebody going to say something? Betty got a ticket.” She may have rushed home after getting her period last season, but now Sally’s shutting the door on Betty’s face to have some privacy on the phone and asking to go to New Year’s Eve parties.

The regular presence of teenaged girls, particularly teenaged girls in juxtaposition to anti-heroes, isn’t a new development, either. The Sopranos had Meadow Soprano, Tony’s daughter, The Wire had Felicia Pearson, 24 had Kim Bauer, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer let the teenaged girl herself be at the center of the frame—and even sometimes let her be a little bit anti-heroic herself. At this point, Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead are notable in part for having teenaged boys in relation to their main characters, and in giving them fewer opportunities to critically assess their parents than shows like Homeland, Mad Men, or The Americans do, and Justified and Sons of Anarchy are notable for not really featuring teenagers at all.

What’s interesting—and I think considerably unremarked on—about the rise of a teenaged girl as a staple of big, prestige, often anti-heroic dramas is that these characters function as built-in critics of the behavior of the adults who are at the ostensible centers of the shows they share. Sally Draper is one of the first people to really see the cracks in her family’s facade, whether her parents are late to pick her up from ballet practice, or failing to be on the same page as parents, with Betty shunted into the role of enforcer while Don gets to be Fun Dad. One of the things that’s made Morgan Saylor’s performance as Dana so impressive on Homeland is the way that Dana simultaneously loves her father deeply and comes to see his true flaws—not the conversion to Islam that upsets her mother so much—more quickly and clearly than anyone else in her family. On Game of Thrones, teenaged boys like Jon Snow, Robb Stark, and even to a certain extent Loras Tyrell, get sucked into pre-packaged narratives of chivalry and bravery, while it’s teenaged girls like Sansa and Arya Stark, Margaery Tyrell, and Daenerys Targaryen who see the real truth of the system in which they’re forced to live their lives, and find ways to circumvent or expand the boundaries placed upon their lives. And while in The Americans, it’s probably too early for Paige and Henry to figure out the real nature of their parents’ work and marital arrangements, their experiences with American consumerism, latchkey kid culture, and emergent sexuality are as important expressions of the show’s themes as Elizabeth and Phillip’s dalliances with sources and conversations with Claudia, their handler.

This isn’t to say that Don Draper, Tyrion Lannister, Nicholas Brody, or Elizabeth and Phillip Jennings don’t matter. But if you want to know how to judge the dark princes and princesses of prestige television drama, you might be better off keeping your eyes on the girls standing off to the side, rather than watching the throne.

This post discusses minor plot points from Mad Men‘s sixth season, though none that Matthew Weiner has requested that critics refrain from talking about.

The sixth season of Mad Men kicks with an image that’s an equivalent of a John Deere lawnmower to the foot: Don Draper reading Dante’s Inferno to himself, murmuring “Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray from the stright road, and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood.” Don’s been in the midst of a midlife, or perhaps life-long, crisis since Mad Men‘s earliest days, so it’s not as if he’s suddenly wandered off the right road. But when season five ended with the clear implication that Don would always stray from his intended route, no matter the woman along for the ride with him, it left Mad Men with a problem. If the show’s argument that Don can’t really change, what does it have left to say over the two more seasons creator Matthew Weiner has budgeted for it?

The premiere of season six offers a number of options. One potential new theme is mistaken identity. Don’s spent years concealing his birth as Dick Whitman, but he seems disconcerted by the extent to which people buy his polished image. “You some kind of astronaut?” a veteran asks him in a hotel bar. “I’m in advertising,” Don tells him, a bit rattled by the extent to which his pitch has obscured even the fake identity he’s built for himself over the years. Megan, who continues to find success as an actress, finds herself mistaken for one of her characters. “Excuse me, Corrine, I hate to bother you. I know your name isn’t really Corrine,” a woman from Minnesota approaches her. “You’re so much trimmer than you are on television…You just have a way.” Betty, who’s given much more to do this season, to the improvement of the show, even finds herself rattled by the assumption that she’s nothing but a judgmental suburban housewife.

Then, there’s the idea of flawed men reconciling themselves to their inability to transcend themselves. “They all open the same way. And they all close behind you,” Roger Sterling complains, using a metaphor that new life experiences are supposed to function like doors. “Look, life is supposed to be a path. You go along, and these things happen to you, and they’re supposed to change you. Change your direction. But it turns out that’s not true. It turns out the experiences are nothing.” Later, Mona Sterling, meeting up again with Roger, remarks “That man never tires of embarrassing himself.” When Roger assumes she means her new boyfriend, Mona corrects him, saying “I’m talking about Don.” Playing more aggressively with how Don would like to be seen, and how others see him, could broaden the emotional scope of the show in effective ways beyond the question of whether it’s possible for Don to transcend his instincts for deception. If he’s settled that question with a no, then there’s still plenty to be interested in as other people discover the extent to which he’s flawed, a dynamic that marked the end of his marriage to Betty and Peggy’s departure for his competitors.
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