

1. The sinking feeling that Mad Men has nowhere else to go. It’s becoming clearer to me that Mad Men probably should have ended with the final episode of last season, with Don Draper fired and, at long last, willing to live permanently with the truth. At the end of that episode, Draper was ready to stop living as an image of a man, and to begin living as Dick Whitman, an actual human being.

But instead, the show threw away that endgame and, at least for the first three hours of this season, we’ve seen Don Draper do the shit Don Draper always does. I spent an hour last week watching him argue with Megan and wondering to myself, “Wait, didn’t they already have this fight? Wasn’t this marriage over already? Why am I watching this shit again?” There’s been a whole lot of again this season. Peggy feeling underappreciated, again. Don smoothly pulling off a shrewd boardroom maneuver, again. Pete being a cock, again. Betty being a shitty mom and feeling kinda bad about it, again. Megan crying, again.

I can only watch Jon Hamm looking tired and alone so much before the drama is sucked away completely and I feel like I’m watching an endless loop. Maybe that’s the point creator Matthew Weiner is trying to make, but that doesn’t make it entertaining to behold. The only new element this season has been the addition of Lou Avery, a cheap, shitty villain who exists mostly so Don has someone new to overthrow.

Now that Draper is back at SCP (and let’s face it, it’s only a matter of time before he ousts Evil Mr. Rogers Sweater Guy), the show’s narrative hasn’t advanced at all, and it’s hard to see where it CAN advance. Since its inception this has been a remarkably entertaining show (especially for a show that doesn’t showcase people who work in a violent profession), and Lord knows few people have the ability to craft a TV series as well as Matthew Weiner. You, as the viewer, are not entitled to a flawless TV series. Still, the reason you watch Mad Men is because you’re looking for a turn in the Don Draper saga, a change in his character, be it for better or worse. Maybe he redeems himself. Maybe he damns himself. But right now, all he’s doing is sitting there being a miserable wretch. It doesn’t exactly make for scintillating television.


2. The death penalty. It took the state of Oklahoma 43 minutes to ecute a man this week because they lacked the proper drug cocktail for lethal injections. And I can’t imagine anyone in that death chamber—be it a witness or an administrator—walked out there overjoyed, like, “Well, it took an hour of writhing and screaming, but by golly it was worth it!” I know that there are some truly evil men out there, but I don’t trust our judiciary system to sort out who among us must be ecuted and who should be allowed to remain alive. If you’ve read David Grann’s story about Cameron Todd Willingham, or Gilbert King’s “Devil in the Grove,” you know that this country has a ugly track record of ecuting potentially innocent people. In the early 1900s, the death penalty was a convenient way for Southern prosecutors to legally murder any black person who had offended a local. Accuse any black man of raping a white girl, and you could wipe him off the face of the earth in relatively short order.

There’s no relief or closure to the death penalty. It’s just death piled on top of more death, the final ugly act of a tragedy that begins with the original crime. It’s not cheaper. It’s not exactly a deterrent to murder (violent crime rates don’t appear to coincide with the number of people we put to death). And the idea that it could be used clumsily means that it should probably never be used at all. It’s a political tool used to make people feel safer, but there’s gotta be a better way of offering the public the illusion of security. Hire more cops. It’s cheaper that insourcing arsenic from Canada.

3. Rob Ford. And don’t make it a Draper-style leave of absence.