MAD about the ‘MEN’
DON Draperis married again. Joan Harris had the baby. And the upstart ad agency Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce is still in business, though Lane Pryce admitted to Joan, when he wasn’t doing a really creepy thing with a strange woman’s picture, that cash flow remains a problem.
Welcome to Memorial Day weekend 1966, the landing point and launching pad for season five of AMC’S critically adored drama “Mad Men,” which returned Sunday after a 17-month hiatus.
Besides marrying his secretary Megan (Jessica Pare), Don (Jon Hamm) is turning 40. Like most personal things, he says little about it.
At the end of Sunday’s wonderful opening scene, he asks his 10-year-old son Bobby how old Daddy will be when Bobby is 40. “You’ll be dead,” Bobby says.
So Don would be happy to let 40 coast right by, except Megan throws him a surprise party.
Don wants a surprise party about as much as he wants to be neutered, and it doesn’t help when Megan sings him a sultry French love song that ends with a discreet version of a lap dance.
Later, Megan asks Don to admit he loved the party. He indicates he didn’t, in a voice cold enough to shatter the TV screen.
The next day they’re at work, and the crushed Megan leaves early to clean up party debris. Don follows her. They argue. She strips down to her black underwear and orders him not to even look at her.
As if. Moral: 40 is not too old for makeup sex.
Meanwhile, tired new Mom Joan (Christina Hendricks) feels like she’s on a hamster wheel. She also fears SCDP may forget her, so she pays a visit, during which Lane (Jared Harris) says her overworking and underpaying job is still waiting for her. In contrast, her fellow new parent Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser) has no baby issues at all. He stays late enough at work that he barely even has to listen to his wife Trudy talk about them.
At the office, Pete asks for Roger’s larger office, reasoning that he has actual clients to impress, while Roger (John Slattery) just smokes and drinks. Pete is right. Roger doesn’t care.
Elsewhere, Peggy (Elisabeth Moss) creates a campaign based on ballet-dancing beans.
When the client doesn’t get it, Don seems to side with the client. Peggy says Don is “going soft.”
Clearly it’s not just the arrival of 1966 that has the ground shifting under Don Draper’s feet.
Fans of the show celebrated its return to TV at “Mad Men”-themed parties around city, including one at The Roosevelt Hotel on E. 46th St. and Madison Ave.
“I like ‘Mad Men’ because of the strong women and the fashion,” said Joan Harris lookalike Lindsay Goranson of Manhattan. “If you’re a girl with red hair and boobs like me, you’ll appreciate the time period.”
Brooklyn dancer Dani Harris, 26, said the show hasn’t lost its step.
“It was perfect,” Harris said. “It just draws you in — the writing, the character development, the fashion. It’s the perfect package,” said Harris as friends drank $14 cocktails dubbed “Mad Manhattan” and the “Sterling Cooper Cosmopolitan.”