'Mad Men' Review: 'Time and Life'
It is no coincidence that this week’s Mad Men was both the best of its final half-season and an episode that did not pivot around Droopy Don Draper’s Existential Traveling Show. Titled “Time and Life,” the hour contained a lot of workplace energy and the return of the divine Trudy, making her entrance in a magisterially frumpy housecoat.
“Time and Life” had a lot of drama but was constructed around a principle of comedy: the misunderstanding that builds and builds. Thinking someone at the ad agency had forgotten to pay the rent on the joint, Roger was initially grumpy but soon enough, he and Don, and Joan, Pete were confronted with the bigger reality. “We’re being swallowed up”: that is, the whale that is McCann-Erickson was absorbing our heroes’ smaller agency.
For once, there was a palpable danger to the main characters — a loss of independence and status — rather than Mad Men’s usual notion of drama, i.e., whether or not there’s enough Scotch for Don to mop his soul up with. There was erupting anger, stunned shock, and frustrated teariness. There were times when the main players looked like grown-up versions of the kids Peggy and Stan were auditioning — awkward children told to play with new toys they had little interest in.
Related: Read the Best (Fake) ‘Mad Men’ Oral History Ever
“Time and Life” — a play on the Time-Life Building, the legendary midtown Manhattan edifice out of which SC&P will now have to move — contained hot pockets of subplot. I’m always happy when loud-mouth Lou Avery puts in an appearance, and here he was on Sunday night, bellowing from Los Angeles that he’d sold his cartoon character to the same Japanese animation company that makes Speed Racer. Lou was about to become what so many Mad Men characters want to be but never become: an independent artist.
Then, too, there was Alison Brie’s Trudy, calling ex-husband Pete from Connecticut to complain that their child hadn’t been accepted to Greenwich Country Day School. Miffed at this status-symbol insult, Pete took his furrowed brow back to his former home and confronted a school official. The mess got messier when the tiff turned on an ancient family feud between the clans of the Campbells and this sniff-necked fellow’s long-gone Daddy-o. Culminating in one of Pete’s patented bops to the beak of the Greenwich Country Day dude, it left the wonderful Trudy sighing with ill-disguised pleasure, “Peter, you can’t punch everyone!” and Pete telling Trudy, “You’re ageless!” (S’true, forsooth!)
More crucial moments: The discussions Peggy and Stan had in the wake of their clumsy auditions for children in a new ad campaign. Stan, who’s become positively Huggy-Bear-ish, ended up commiserating with Peggy over her position in life, with allusions to her abandoned child. These scenes would have been even warmer than they were had they not contained the irritating Mad Men edge of signaling wildly to the audience that These People Are Saying Something Deep Just Below the Surface of Their Chatter.
Related: The 24 Best ‘Mad Men’ Scenes, Ranked
The best aspect of the episode, co-written by Erin Levy and Matthew Weiner, was its instances in which Don lost his motivator-mojo: At least twice, he revved up to give people a double dose of the old Draper Super-Salesmanship, but unlike his early triumphs in this arena, he failed to seize the day.
Tasked with convincing the McCann-Erickson smuggies that it would be a peachy idea to let the core players continue to operate independently from the now-Lou-less L.A. office, Don started to work one of his magical word-spells we’ve come to know as Draper’s only remaining grasp on full-functioning power in the changing world around him. But he was abruptly cut off — too late; it was a done deal. “You went down swinging,” Joan told Don, but she no longer possesses the ability to comfort him. And besides, the episode set up a new workplace dynamic that may not have a place for Joan at all.
The final scene was equally, finely humiliating: Told by the usually mousy Meredith that he had to address the troops because “there are rumors flying like bats around here!,” Don started to make a grand bullcrap corporate-speak announcement only to have the underlings ignore him.
It’s a new era, Don: The workers no longer have blind faith in their masters, and Don, Roger, Joan, Pete, and the rest were left to contemplate their new future. Oh, to be sure, it’s one in which there’ll still be plenty of booze and dough to salve their wounds, but it won’t soothe their punctured souls.
Their misery was our pleasure.
Mad Men airs Sundays at 10 p.m. on AMC.
