By the time Mad Men, Matthew Weiner’s seminal dissertation on the quiet desperation of the 1960s-era White American Male, has its Season Five premiere on Sunday night, Don Draper and his discontents will have been absent from our screens so long—not to mention those tense few weeks last year when it seemed like they might not return at all, giving those of us born after 1962 a taste of what the Cuban Missile Crisis must have felt like—that their impending return has a hint of the anti-climax about it; like when you finally open up the box with your wedding gown in it and think: “Oh, there’s that dress I ordered 11 months ago. I don’t remember the skirt being quite that poufy.”
Perhaps in an effort to convert any lingering wait-induced apathy into breathless anticipation, AMC has placed the strictest of embargoes on the advance screeners usually distributed to critics, journalists, and other interested parties, with the end result being that nobody in the Mad Men punditocracy—a group whose intellectual rigor and meticulous attention to detail the political commentariat would do well to emulate—has the slightest clue about what is going to happen this season, or even what year of the 20th century’s eventful seventh decade it will take place in, leaving us no choice but to dedicate our inaugural pieces (oh yes, there will be several) to more existential questions about the show’s appeal as a whole.
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