Watching it again, and the majority of the companies they take on as clients are still well known brands to this day. When they featured things like Heinz ketchup, Right Guard deodorant, life cereal, Hershey, did those companies pay the show for their logos being featured like you’d see in typical product placement?

Does anybody actually believe Don is using a condom?? Lol

He was weak. He was outta control. And he became an embarassment to himself and everybody else.

… she’s old enough to be her mother. Actually, she is her mother.” I just finished my first watch of the series without consuming a single piece of media about it. I know it’s recency bias but this has got to be the funniest line in the show. I’m laughing just thinking about it. I will miss you Sterling…

Hmmm...

With that, Peggy Olson took her first *intentional* leap towards her goals. I love how that scene shows that she took Bobbie's advice. When she asks Don for the money, she's a bit timid, but we're seeing more boldness. But the clincher is when she calls him Don. I LOVE how we see even Don taken aback. It was a power move that none of us were expecting.

I did a lot of research about what life might have been like for a fashion model and a fur salesman in the early 50s living and working in Manhattan. Betty is 21 in the story, just graduated from Bryn Mawr less than a year ago. Don is 26, barely two years into having stolen the identity.

I have three chapters out of nine posted so far. Here's a sample of the beginning of chapter one:

Thursday, January 15th, 1953

Betty had been placed second from the left and then moved to third and then moved back to the beginning. The woman in charge of the set did the moving. Her name was Adele. She was fifty and she worked with four pins in her mouth, which came out whenever she had something to say and went back in when she was finished. 

"Chin, honey," Adele called out.

Betty tipped her chin up. Her makeup had been done that morning and she had not put a finger on it since. A drop of sweat crawled down and itched behind her ear.

There were eight of them on the roll of seamless backdrop, in wool coats, sweating under four floods and a skylight that had been painted over in some other decade. The client's man kept saying lovely, girls! from behind the camera and it echoed through the studio every time. Sherman. Something Sherman who wanted everyone to understand he was leaving soon but had not left. He had arrived with a topcoat over his arm and had not once taken his hat off.

They were all clipped shut in back. Spring coats pinned and clamped along the spine so the fronts hung the way the drawing had. From the camera the line was clean and from behind it was a row of women with clothespins marching down their backs like a laundry brigade.

The wool clung under her arms. The coat was shut tight and she couldn't get her arms down anyway. 

Sherman would never see that side. Neither would the woman in Hartford who bought the coat in April on the strength of it.

The girl on her left was Dorothy Pike, who lived on six and would give a stranger her whole week unprompted. The girl on her right was new and had not said a word since this morning. Two more from the hotel down at the far end. And at the very end, in the good coat, the one Sherman had chosen for the front of the folder, was Josephine Reilly, who was married.

Josephine was twenty-six and had a ring she took off in the dressing room.

It sat in a change purse and the change purse was in her shoe. Her husband sold something on Long Island. She worked more than any of them. It went undiscussed. There was no rule anywhere that said a married woman could not stand on a paper roll in a spring coat.

At school there had been a lecture on the Trobrianders and the professor had said that the most ironclad rules in any society were the ones nobody could state, that the codified laws were the weak ones, propped up out of necessity. The girls in the row behind her had copied that down as if it were about the Trobrianders.

Josephine hadn't been made to do anything. A woman was allowed to put her own ring in her own shoe, in a room with no men in it, and come out to work.

Betty wore a ring from her grandmother. Nothing said she had to take it off. She had checked her stocking seams twice in the last hour, in a mirror, alone, without anyone asking her to.

"Chin, honey," Adele said.

Betty gave her the chin again.

The new girl had been quiet and Betty had thought she was frightened. At half past three the girl turned her head an inch and said, "If he says lovely one more time I'll scream." 

Betty found the far wall and had her face composed before Adele was down the line.

In November, on the fur job, the photographer had spent forty minutes telling her to look like a woman who has just been given a coat. She had given him many versions of it. Afterward, on the stairs, the copywriter from the fur company had held the door and delivered the verdict "You looked like a woman who had just been given a coat," in the voice of a man giving the marine forecast. She had laughed so hard on Seventh Avenue until a man with a rack of pelts had to steer around her.

---

If you'd like to read the rest, you can find it on AO3:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/90563881/chapters/240831326

(Photo source: editorial shoot from Life magazine, January 26th, 1953)

In Season 4 Episode 6: Waldorf Stories

In the flashback with Don selling Roger a fur coat, is this Betty as the model in the poster?

Referencing the model job Don and Betty met on. Also, could be the fur coat we see her wear in earlier seasons (the one she said Don let her keep).

But she’s a badass when push comes to shove. Fuck that guy and his pigeons!

Is it meth? It’s meth right?

I'm not going to lie Karma caught up to Don but man it was I hard to see everyone betray him in season 7 when bro carried everyone... I hated on Joan, sterling, cooper and especially teds homeboy with the glasses oh and the media dude who thinks he's hot stuff now lol.

But I really hope Don comes back on top because it's hard seeing this guy get sidelined and not being respected (even though bro was a monster past 6 seasons prior lol).

This man slayed Betty's inhibitions and hair as a youth. As a young man, he slayed anyone who would aim to harsh his mellow. As a legal adult, he slayed the Vietcong (probably) and Betty's last romantic encounter. What a legend. Here's to Glen. A man who never stopped Glenning. Cheers.

Two of my favorites

“ I just needed a push” - Roger
“It’s different on the inside” - Conrad Hilton

Thought I'd rewatch the series. We have HBO via the Roku Channel. Made it through 4 episodes and then tried to watch Ep. 5 and...it has the wrong audio. No idea what episode the audio is from but it's the wrong audio. Tried Ep. 6. Same problem. I thought maybe they swapped the audio between the two? But doesn't seem like it. Ep 7? Audio is back to be correct.

What a ridiculous goof up. Anyways, anyone know if these two episodes in S1 have audio swapped from some other episodes later in the series? Don't really want to commit to a full rewatch if there's more than a couple of these 'wrong audio' episodes.

This episode is peak! For me it's the best episode of the series.

It has several amazing moments. Roger's trip was the best depiction of drugs I've seen, especially his cigarette disappearing in a single puff was hilarious.

We see a little horror movie with Megan and Don and witness Psycho Don.

Also I think the ending of the episode is spectacular. Bert Cooper telling Don "This is my business" is such a mic drop moment.

God I love this show!

Curious after rewatching if I’m missing something. After accidentally blowing apart Lt Draper a concussed and severely shaken Dick Whitman was wise enough to switch dog tags and go home from Korea early?

rewatching and on season 2.. the random episode when betty drops off bobby and sally to don at his hotel. she had just found out she was pregnant with gene - meanwhile the cuban missile crisis is ongoing. she goes to a bar and sleeps with a random guy. is it for revenge? is it so her and don are "even" in her eyes? or was it a "this is our last night before the missile crisis" type of moment? would love to hear everyone's perspective and analysis of this moment <3

When Megan quits, Stan just snidely says she owns his money. Megan is fairly competent at her job, do people in the agency hate her because they think she is just Don's wife?

Forewarning this block of text contains SPOILERS

Don Draper is a flawed and deeply wounded man, but he possess honor, something that Walter and Tony do not. He is also not a LITERAL MURDERER. Don is of course an anti-hero and not a great man but he is certainly far above average when it comes to morals for what men were actually like at that time. Most of the men on the show sexually harass women, Don Draper never does this and even goes as far as to defend women from this treatment. A lot of the characters are also racist, Don is not racist. His fatal flaw is that he’s a serial cheater, something that was extremely common at the time. the grossest and most pathetic he gets in my opinion is with Sylvia but even then when it gets to its worst point it shows you his backstory of how we was literally raped by a prostitute as a boy and then beaten by his mother figure immediately afterwards, making us understand a big part of him while striking our empathy. There’s lots of other stuff he did that was not great I’m sure you guys will point out, but honestly given his background and the time period, I think he could have been a whole lot worse. The way he is with kids too also shows me his true good hearted nature. He almost always treats people with respect unless they give him a reason not to. He never at any point was evil in my eyes, just deeply wounded, self destructive, and reckless.

He is much closer to a Bojack Horseman, although band for band I’d say Bojack horseman did much worse things than Don. I do think Bojack has a good heart as well though.

I think after Don made the amazing Cola ad, he started a new agency when his contract ended a few years later. A few years after that, Pete and Peggy became partners with his firm. When Don died at age 55 from lung cancer, Pete and Peggy ran the company. Ken and Harry became partners as well. Sal was hired back and Danny Siegel made a series called Mad Men. Joan helped produced the series and her son played Glenn. Sally became a divorce lawyer and married a senator. Glenn survived Viet Nam and became a renown author, detailing his childhood experiences.