You can take Don Draper out of the ad agency, but you can’t take the ad man out of Don.
So while he’s been on a forced leave of absence for two months, he’s been coming up with ideas that he’s had Freddy Rumsen submit for him. That’s how the seventh season of “Mad Men” began Sunday: with Freddy reciting a bold campaign for Accutron.
“It’s a home run,” says Peggy. “Not what I expected.”
But she never suspects it’s her old mentor, either.
Draper might have kept busy in his time off, but by the time we see him, 10 minutes into the episode, he’s just landed at LAX to visit his wife Megan who moved out there for acting jobs. They reunite in slow motion, as Traffic plays “I’m a Man,” the first of two effective late 60s cover songs in the episode.
Off to dinner with her agent — one of several new faces on the show — she learns she got the part for an NBC show called “Bracken’s World,” an actual show on the 1969 schedule that in fact took the Friday night slot of the original “Star Trek.” A soapy look behind the scenes of Hollywood starring Eleanor Parker, old clips of it indicate a fashion approach that might have given “Mad Men” designers some ideas.
Megan has a place in the Hollywood Hills, whose coyote howls suggest to him Dracula’s castle. She likes the view and the Bohemian lifestyle. She’s a little angry when he brings a big TV console into the place.
The West Coast seems to have changed Pete Campbell the most, with a tan now to match the sideburns, shades atop his head and a sweater tied around his shoulders. He introduces a pert real estate agent to Don, played by Jessy Schram of “Veronica Mars.”
There are even better guest stars. Youthful Dan Byrd, the kid on “Cougar Town” is a marketing exec for a shoe company that Joan uses her business smarts to retain. Ken Cosgrove, still wearing an eyepatch from the time a Chevy exec shot him in the face, wouldn’t lower himself to go to the meeting, so she takes the initiative.
Matthew Weiner apparently loves to troll old late 90s youth shows for casting purposes, so after last season’s Linda Cardellini (of “Freaks and Geeks”), here was Neve Campbell (of “Party of Five”) seated next to Don on the red eye back to New York.
She was returning after scattering her husband’s ashes; there is some consideration of Don getting his ashes hauled as well, so to speak. But he says he has to get to work.
She sleeps on his shoulder but says, “If I were your wife I wouldn’t like this.”
“She knows I’m a terrible husband,” he says, though it’s true she more senses it than has actual evidence.
He bemoans his matrimonial skill and becomes uncharacteristically frank when he says, “I keep wondering if I’m a broken vessel.”
Maybe so.
Later that same morning, he listens intently to Nixon’s near-forgotten 1969 inaugural speech which brings up the same kind of national ennui: “We find ourselves rich in goods, but ragged in spirit; reaching with magnificent precision for the moon, but failing into raucous discord on earth. We are caught in war, wanting peace. We are torn by division, wanting unity. We see around us empty lives, wanting fulfillment.”
Such is Don Draper’s life on this date — Jan. 20, 1969.
And so it is with Roger Sterling, who is awoken, disturbingly naked, in a seeming post-orgy scene by a call from his daughter. She wants to meet with him for bruch and he agrees but keeps thinking he’ll be ambushed. All she says is that she forgives him his many transgressions and it kind of ticks him off.
But he thinks about it later, when he has to move a couple of the free lovers in his bed over so he can get some sleep.
Peggy’s feeling pretty empty, too. While pushing Freddy’s idea (that she doesn’t know is Don’s), she feels that she alone strives for quality in the agency. Everybody else are hacks, she declares at one point.
The new New York boss, Lou Avery, played by Allan Havey (once a consideration for Letterman’s late night job) is kind of a drip. She sees Ted, back visiting from L.A., and it rattles her. And she’s not a very good landlady.
She may feel like she’s out in the cold, but Don ends the episode literally so: Sitting out on his balcony in the January cold after he finds that his sliding door won’t shut anyway as Vanilla Fudge’s thudding cover of “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” plays.
Does this all portend to an eventual 1969 rebirth? Well, it’s impossible to say from the coming next week preview. It’s as inscrutable as ever, proving some things on Mad Men never change.