What did we learn from Mad Men this year? For one, never party with businessmen from Chevy, unless you’ve got a spare eye patch and cane handy. Also, if a strange doctor is offering you a shot of “energy serum,” it’s probably straight speed. Oh, and maybe don’t forget you have roommates when creeping around your apartment wielding a homemade bayonet. The show could have ignored the Tet offensive and Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, and 1968 still would have been the bloodiest, craziest, and most violent year of Mad Men yet.
But what did we actually learn about the employees of Sterling Cooper and Partners that we’ve grown to love, and love-hate over the last six years? Don was a miserable, selfish, cheating mess. Peggy’s career skyrocketed off the explosive fuselage of her disastrous personal life. Pete was, well, Pete. Season six was sparing with the earthshattering developments, so it’s understandable that some viewers grew frustrated at times with the characters refusing to change, and just move on already.
But in its perhaps noble, definitely risky commitment to showing change not as a linear path, but instead a series of ups, downs, gains and setbacks, Mad Men still managed to deliver a fantastic batch of episodes this year, leaving it on sure-footing going into its last season. While in many ways a transitionary arc meant to set the table for the series’ endgame, the merger of SCDP and CGC provided some Mad Men moments that won’t be forgotten anytime soon, ranging from the bittersweet, like a one night reunion between Don and the original Mrs. Draper, to the outright surreal, like Ken tap-dancing up a storm in the season’s (series?) most divisive episode, “The Crash.”
Nary a week went by without at least one heartrending or infuriating scene out of Jon Hamm, though if we go down the rabbit hole of praising the cast, we’ll be writing this well into 2014. Ted Chaough and Jim Cutler proved to be great foils for Don and Roger respectively, and mysterious new hire Bob Benson had fans spinning more theories than a conspiracy nut on a carousel. Handsomely acted, gorgeously shot, surgically specific but intriguingly opaque, Mad Men was the whole package this season.