In a 4.1 Hitfix interview with Mad Men‘s Jon Hamm, Alan Sepinwall asks Hamm to explain why Don Draper has refused to grow even modest-length sideburns despite the fact that by 1969 each and every creative person on the planet earth had begun to let their hair and sideburns grow at least a little bit. … Read more
I’m attending this evening’s black-tie premiere of the second half of the final Mad Men season, which will debut on Sunday, April 5th. The first-anywhere showing of “Severance,” the first of the last seven episodes, will screen at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion with an outdoor “Black and Red Ball” to follow. The invitation says that … Read more
The finale of Madmen will be upon us before you know it, and once again Don Draper‘s refusal to grow even modestly-proportioned sideburns is driving me up the wall. I said this last year and I’m saying it again — nobody who worked in any kind of creative circle in the late ’60s wore their … Read more
So you’ve got yesterday’s Don Draper, faded and opaque in a light summer suit, about to cross Madison Avenue while the new 1968 version of Don (as last season ended in the summer of ’67 with Nancy Sinatra singing “You Only Live Twice“), more sharply defined and perhaps a bit more aggressive, stepping up to … Read more
“Severance,” the first episode of the final Mad Men season, feels like a return to square one — business as usual at Sterling Cooper & Partners, sex, a death from cancer, sexism, finessing clients, Don Draper drinking and catting around, a firing, office disputes, back to the darkness and so on. Mad Men has been … Read more
On top of his adamant, afore-mentioned refusal to grow sideburns in the late ’60s, Don Draper also has the temerity to wear, in this teaser, a blue sport jacket with mustard-brown pants — an atrocious color combination — with his pant cuffs at least a half-inch if not an inch too high. There’s something so … Read more
Mad Men‘s season #7 is occuring in 1969, and once again Don Draper‘s hair style hasn’t changed a bit since the very beginning (i.e., 1961 or thereabouts). Let me make something clear: every single American male who had any give-and-take dealings with the upheavals of the ’60s grew his hair out to some degree between … Read more
In a 3.12 riff about the poster for Mad Men‘s upcoming sixth season, I wrote that “sooner or later Don Draper is going to have to start growing his hair a little longer, or at least the beginnings of modest sideburns. By ’68 even straight-laced ad execs had started to loosen up and unbutton from … Read more
In this morning’s Mad Men vs. Woodstock piece, N.Y. Times columnist Frank Rich quotes Vanity Fair‘s Bruce Handy: “As in Hitchcock, the Mad Men characters are unaware of shocks that the audience knows all too well lie ahead, whether they be the Kennedy assassination and women’s lib or long sideburns and the lasting influence of … Read more