The Honest People: The Semblance of Control on Mad Men

The universe has a nasty way of reminding us that we're not in control of our lives. Though we might scheme and lie and grab onto some semblance of control in an effort to quell that inner truth, it's a bitter pill to be reminded of just how little authority we have over our own destinies.

When Lee Garner Jr. tells Roger, "There's no reason. Nothing you can do," he might as well be speaking for that unseen horseman in whose hands all of our reins sit. Like Lucky Strike's Lee, Life is a capricious and unforgiving mistress.

In this week's glorious episode of Mad Men ("Hands and Knees"), written by Jonathan Abrahams and Matthew Weiner and directed by Lynn Shelton, the truth spilled out uncomfortably for several characters, who were forced to reckon with the lack of control they have in their individual lives. When faced with making life-altering choices, each of them--whether that be Don Draper, Joan Harris, Lane Pryce, or Roger Sterling--were forced to contend with the fact that the choice was already made for them by someone else.

Secrets have a way of coming out, even if you bury them deep inside and for each of these characters (and even Pete Campbell, despite his speech about being one of "the honest people"), there's a ticking clock element to the concealment of their innermost truths. One doesn't need G-men stalking your ex-wives to feel the pressure, after all, and the hard truth can often hurt as much as a blow from a cane to the back of the head.

The fictional construct of Don Draper has been built on layers of control, of refinement, and of stolen opportunity. While the mix-up in Korea wasn't Dick's fault per se, he made a concerted effort to steal the identity of Don Draper, to make the government--and for a while himself as well--believe that he really was this other man. Because by being Don Draper, he wasn't an uneducated farmer's son, he wasn't a military deserter. His life was a blank slate and he could recreate it in any way he saw fit.

But one can't run forever. The panic attack that Don suffers at his apartment, Faye Miller by his side, is the result of keeping the truth bottled up, of running from his true responsibilities for so long. The life he created for himself--gorgeous Manhattan offices, Beatles tickets for his daughter, that Brylcreamed profile--is built on quicksand and it's only a matter of time before the bottom drops out completely. That the government agents, conducting a routine background check on Don as part of his request for security clearance, question Betty is the moment that Don has feared more than anything.

After all, Don managed to finesse Pete Campbell into keeping his dark secret. He formed a bond with the late Anna Draper. He came clean to his wife, even though it ultimately destroyed the final vestiges of their marriage. But a governmental probe into his personal life, into the fiction that he's constructed around himself? It's too dangerous. There are elements that don't match up: his age, for one. And while an everyday citizen might be able to be bribed, coerced, or placated into going along with his identity theft scheme, there's no way that he'll be able to convince a government official of any innocence. There is no going back.

It's interesting that Don opened up to Faye Miller in this episode, telling her about his past, despite the fact that they haven't been together very long. It's a reversal of fortune for Don. After concealing the truth from Betty for so long (and getting burned when he did tell her) and having the lie discovered by Pete, Don chooses to unburden himself to Faye in an effort to regain control over this all-encompassing truth about himself. He chooses to tell her, openly and honestly, though it's also worth noting that his defenses are down. He's "tired of running," and is so exhausted he can barely keep his eyes open.

But in telling Faye, Don doesn't regain control. Not really. In fact, by telling Faye, it seems as though their relationship is over before it's even really begun. Despite the fact that Faye accepts Don and is happy that he told her the truth, she has already begun to make plans and arrangements. This situation isn't something that can be left alone. She alludes to solving the problem, that Dick was just a kid when it happened, that they can figure it out together.

Which is the problem.

Don doesn't want to go back to being Dick. Faye may have surprised him by being so understanding and sympathetic towards his situation but he's been running since he was 18 years old. He's not going back to being Dick Whitman. He doesn't want to fix anything. In that moment, his casual relationship with Faye became something fraught with far too much complication.

Hence, perhaps, Don's sudden admiration of new assistant Megan outside his office. As she reapplies her lipstick at her desk, unaware of Don's gaze, something stirs within him. Is he aware of that he's lost control over his relationship with Faye already? Is he perhaps attracted once again, not to the strong and impassioned woman that Faye represents, but something far easier?

We're reminded, after all, of the fact that even something as simple as Sally's happiness is outside his level of control. Despite the fact that he has promised her to take her to see the Beatles, the tickets aren't in hand and Don spends the episode attempting to track down those concert tickets, lest he disappoint Sally even further after the events of last week.

Pete does keep Don's secret and the company drops NAA as a client as Pete falls on his sword for Don. The Beatles tickets do arrive, however. It's Megan who manages to get them and who hands them to Don after he's reassured Faye that everything is fine between them. "Everything worked out," Megan coos, handing him the tickets. It did, but only this time.

Elsewhere, Joan--not unsurprisingly--told Roger that she was pregnant and that the baby was his and not Greg's, as he was deployed seven weeks earlier. While they consider their options, it's clear that the fate of Joan's pregnancy has already been decided: she'll once again abort, the third time that she's done so. It's not an easy decision, given the fact that Joan has been trying to get pregnant for some time now. She freely entered into this extramarital arrangement, yes, but her yearning for a child doesn't come into the equation. She has as little control over her life--or that of her offspring--as much as the 17-year-old girl she encounters at the clinic.

Our sad Madonna, dressed in blue, can't even be honest with the woman about what she's doing there, pretending that she's supporting her 15-year-old daughter as she gets an abortion. The lonely bus ride home, the loss that she's suffered, only serve to further remind us of how little power Joan has over her own life.

Separate from the sexual and bodily issues of control plaguing Joan, Roger himself suffers a moment of clarity when Lee Garner Jr. tells him that they are taking their business from Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce to BBDO. It's a shock to Roger, the end of nearly thirty years of business together but Garner says that the decision--like everyone's this episode--was out of his hands. The board decided they wanted to consolidate their brands and this is just a business decision.

Roger attempts to buy time, pleading with Lee to reconsider, to at least give him thirty days to get their affairs in order and keep things secret until then, the literal "hands and knees" begging of the episode's title. While Lee agrees to give Roger thirty days, he still attempts to keep the news under his hat, refusing to even tell the other partners of the loss of their largest client.

Which is why he lashes out at Pete over the loss of the $4 million NAA account. Given the financial jeopardy they're now in thanks to the end of the billable hours from Lucky Strike, they are in dire circumstances. His anger at Pete is displaced rage towards himself, a cosmic frustration with how things have--or haven't--worked out for him, for Joan, for his life. (It hasn't for others either, as Roger discovers most of his business leads are literally dead.)

Circumstances are conspiring around them. Don may have convinced Pete to dump NAA but he wasn't aware of the Lucky Strike situation. Roger might have to apologize to Pete for jumping down his throat, but he hasn't told anyone about Lee's announcement. And Lane leaves for England, believing the company to be fiscally solvent. The lies being told at the conference table bind all of them together, even if they can't see at that very moment that the walls are crumbling down around them.

Lane, for his part, believes himself to be his own man, to be independent of the abuse and tyranny of his Victorian era-born father Robert (W. Morgan Sheppard). He believes that he's made a new life for himself in New York, one that's separate from his estranged wife Rebecca. He is a man in love, having fallen for Playboy Club waitress/bunny Toni Charles (Naturi Naughton).

His relationship with Toni reveals just how far out of his father's orbit Lane has traveled, refuting the Victorian ideals of his father's generation and planting himself in a modern America. Robert immediately takes umbrage to Lane's choice of lover: Toni is both black and a Playboy bunny; she represents the sexual revolution underway. She's a cocktail waitress who basically wears a swimsuit and a bunny tail to work each night. In other words, she's an affront to everything that Robert believes in, his carefully ordered view of the universe.

Still, Lane attempts to wrest control of his life from his domineering father, believing that he can stand up to the old man and forge his own path in life, even if Robert and Rebecca are conspiring to keep his son from him. Despite the fact that Robert makes the situation with Toni all the more uncomfortable, Lane tries to salvage the evening.

But it gets worse. His efforts to enforce his own rule backfire completely as Robert shockingly smacks him over the head with the crook of his cane and then stands on the prone Lane's hand until he agrees to return to England to sort out his family. It's a portrait of a beaten man, one whose plight echoes the likely frequent abuse meted out by this tyrannical man. This new man is infantilized by the exchange, reduced once again to a child at the whims of his enraged father. The blood on his hand, the result of that blow to his head, don't come as so much of a shock but rather an awful reminder once more of the fragility of his self-control.

It's no surprise that Lane takes a leave of absence, intending to sort things out in the United Kingdom. He might be in love with Toni, but their relationship is shattered as soon as that cane connects with his skull, a brutal wake-up call at the end of a dream.

It's just one of many dreams that, rather sadly, none of these characters can toil under any longer.

Next week on Mad Men ("Chinese Wall"), Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce employees resort to scuttlebutt after an agency-wide meeting is called.

Chinese Wall: Truth and Consequences on Mad Men

I'd like to think that we all fall sometimes.

This week's sensational episode of Mad Men ("The Beautiful Girls"), written by Dahvi Waller and Matthew Weiner and directed by Michael Uppendahl, focused on the women in Don Draper's personal and professional life, crafting provocative storylines for Joan Harris, Peggy Olsen, Faye Miller, and little Sally Draper. While it's the latter who physically hits the floor at the end of the episode, there's the definite sense that each of these women not only picks themselves up but keeps moving ahead, their eyes on the future.

For the three adults, the feminist spirit of the 1960s has awakened something in each of them and this forward-facing approach is best summed up when Peggy, Joan, and Faye board the elevator together at the end of the day. All three women have made a specific decision in her own life, one with dramatic consequences for each of them. Entering the confines of the elevator, they face ahead rather than at each other, their eyes staring towards the camera, towards audience, towards the future. Did they fail the tests that they were given? Or did they choose to instead to follow their own rules?

While it's Faye who earlier brings up the concept of the Chinese wall, that information screen that safeguards the flow of intelligence, it's clear that there are a number of walls either toppling down or being built up in this episode. The final confrontation between Don and Sally--the supremely gifted Kiernan Shipka--points to something as insurmountable as the Great Wall itself springing up between father and daughter.

It was only a matter of time before Sally would choose to run away, choosing Don's life in Manhattan over her rigid and icy existence in Ossining. Here, she boards a train in a display of rebellious independence, a chance to surprise Don and force his hand before she pleads her case: she wants to live with him rather than Betty and Henry. Don represents an unrealized ideal rather than the honest reality of what such an existence would mean. He can't care for her, not in any meaningful, real way--he dumps the responsibility of watching her for an afternoon on Faye simply because she's there and a woman--but Sally doesn't see it that way. She sees a life of pouring rum on French toast, wearing his t-shirts to bed, and stopping by his slick office on the way to the zoo.

Sally's attempt to manipulate Don point to just how much she learned from watching her own mother. Her petulance and mischievous smile (such as when Don agrees to order pizza) match up perfectly to the same way that Betty interacted with Don. With her new haircut and more mature looks, Sally is nearly a mirror image for the Betty we saw in the earlier seasons of Mad Men. The gap between their ages has been bridged by a haircut and an atmosphere of lost innocence.

In her childish way, Sally yearns for change. When she can't coax, cajole, or charm her way into Don's new life, she attempts reverting to an emotional response: screaming, kicking, and running. But her fall after screeching through the halls of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce isn't her own. As the women of the office look on, it's not Faye or Peggy who comes to her rescue, but innocent receptionist Megan, whom Sally throws her arms around. Sally isn't just looking for her father but that sense of protection, warmth, and comfort that she so desperately craves.

It's interesting that it's Megan who comforts Sally rather than, say, Faye, whom Sally knows is Don's girlfriend, whether or not he denies it. (She, like Sally, knows where the plates are, as well as that Don has peanut butter in his apartment.) It's clear that Faye is uncomfortable around Sally and around children as well. She might like kids but she doesn't have any of her own, she lacks "child psychology," and she speaks to Sally as though she's four or five years old.

Rather than see that Don selected her because she was there and because he trusts her in his apartment, Faye sees her care of Sally as a crucible by which her relationship with Don will be judged. Is she worthy of becoming Sally's replacement mother? Of segueing into the role of Don Draper's new wife? Don certainly doesn't see it that way; the situation wasn't an audition for the role because he hasn't even considered it. He's not looking to fill that role emptied by his divorce and doesn't see his very new relationship with Faye in that manner. When she fails to calm Sally down, it's not a test to be passed or failed, but rather a last-ditch effort to quiet his troubled daughter, to pacify her in a way that he doesn't know how to or won't do.

But that's not inherently contained within the DNA of this woman, nor perhaps in the two others who gather in that elevator at the end of the day. Each of them has a complicated relationship to motherhood that's only fitting given their professional status within the pre-women's liberation years of the 1960s. Faye has chosen to focus on her career and not on her uterus; Peggy gave up her child to forward her professional stake; Joan was desperate to get pregnant before Greg left for Vietnam.

In their own way, each is not equipped to handle the reality of Sally Draper's tantrum, of the psychic damage inflicted by Don and Betty's divorce. Instead, they huddle around the doorway, watching as Don returns Sally to Betty, a casualty of the war waged between her bitter parents. She's the little girl lost, a bruised young woman, who might have the future ahead of her but is determined to change her life right now, even if she lacks the maturity to see what that life truly is.

In that future for Sally, the possibilities are limitless. While she doesn't know it yet, the women who don't know how to calm her down are the trailblazers who make her future chance at happiness (whether personal or professional) possible. While Cooper regards the late Ida Blankenship as "an astronaut," a woman who was born in a barn and died in a skyscraper, it's Sally who could be an actual astronaut. She can be anything she wants to be in a way that has been denied Joan, Peggy, and Faye. They've fought and clawed their way into the precious power that they've gathered for themselves but it's been a battle, particularly when men like Abe Drexler don't see that they're still being subjugated.

In an episode rife with so much emotional complexity, this week's installment also contained some deliciously hilarious moments as well. If comedy is tragedy plus time, the death of Ida Blankenship was played for its tragic-comedy qualities straightaway. The shock of Peggy discovering Blankenship's demise journeyed into a hysterical sequence in which Joan and Pete concealed her body and moved Ida before the clients saw her corpse.

It's Joan who begins Blankenship's obituary but it's Cooper who finishes it and manages to celebrate Ida's life, as well as the transition from an agricultural America to a thoroughly modern one, barns segueing into skyscrapers, a farm girl dying surrounded by the people she answered phones for.

It may have been a life lived but it was once hampered by what paths Ida Blankenship could have taken, and the vast in-roads that the three elevator-traveling women have made in the time since her youth all the more apparent.

Peggy's decision to protect herself and her career, to chose her pocketbook over her heart with regard to Abe Drexler point to her own priorities. She might be political in her own way (she did attempt to bring up the discrimination issue to Don in the meeting), but Peggy Olsen is not stupid. Abe is just some guy with a manifesto. He might be "interesting soup," but she's looking for a full meal. She doesn't need to be the pot but can be something entirely different. After all, she's already sacrificed so much in the name of advancing her career. Why wouldn't she want to hold onto that?

And then there was poor Joan. I loved that Roger sent over the masseuses to make up for rubbing her the wrong way, but I also knew that these two--with the unfinished business between them--would transition back into something more than work colleagues and old friends. For Roger, Joan was the one who got away and writing his memoirs has reminded him of this in no uncertain terms. There might not be a chapter in his book about his lost love but he can't help but pine for this sad Madonna even as he made his choice to leave Mona not for her, but for Jane.

Joan manages to deflect Roger's advances throughout the episode until they're robbed at gunpoint and Joan literally loses that constant reminder of her marriage: her wedding band. Faced with a brush with a gun, Joan passionately kisses Roger and they make love in that seedy neighborhood. But, later, it's Joan who signals that that's as far as things can go. She's not sorry it happened but she's married and so is Roger. While Joan's husband faces an uncertain future in Vietnam, she's going to do her best to remain faithful to him. While she displayed a moment of weakness, it was also a clarion call to her that it can't happen again.

Which makes me wonder if Joan will finally get the baby she's been so desperate to have, even while she runs the risk of losing her husband in the war.

Ultimately, "The Beautiful Girls" was a lush, lyrical, and emotionally bracing episode that examined the past, present, and future of women in this particular time period. While they might each work in that glittering skyscraper, it's not their names on the wall. Not yet, anyway.

Next week on Mad Men ("Hands and Knees"), an unannounced visitor at the Francis home rattles Betty.

The Sun and the Wind: Introspection and Clarity on Mad Men

It's fitting that when Don Draper attempts to organize his thoughts, he does so with a pad and pen rather than Roger's confessional cassettes.

Don's writing--reminding him of those 250-word essays he wrote before dropping out of high school-- is part of a concerted effort to gain some clarity in his life, to unburden his mind even as the last vestiges of his true self slip away in the wake of Anna's death. While Don might look the part of the carefree summer man, the internal struggle raging within him is anything but placid.

Throughout this week's episode of Mad Men ("The Summer Man"), written by Lisa Albert, Janet Leahy, and Matthew Weiner and directed by Phil Abraham, we see glimpses of a very different Don Draper, one painfully aware of his own mortality--hence the look of horror at his actual physical condition while swimming--and of the coping mechanisms in his life. He sees for the first time perhaps the way that alcohol affects him, the way that it swimmingly fills his brain, pushing his fears and concerns to the back of his brain. He's traded clarity for false comfort.

It's interesting then that Don would choose this time to back away from the booze, to attempt to find himself on the page, to unjumble his thoughts into something lucid and cogent, and to attempt to change, something he's able to do at the end of the episode: to choose to delay gratification in a way that the old Don Draper never would have.

After all, as we learned in this week's episode with a hat tip to Aesop, the sun's approach is always preferable to that of the wind.

It's interesting that Aesop's fable should loom so large over this installment, which juxtaposed Don's voice-over narrative as he wrote down the facts of his current situation against two other storylines: one involving Joan and Peggy at the office, each enmeshed in a power struggle, and that of Betty and Henry in Don's old house. In all three circumstances, the choice between brute force and gentle supplication--between the wind and the sun's differing methods of achieving the same ends--are utilized to great effect.

In the fable, the sun and the wind enter a competition to see who can make a man remove his coat first. While the wind attempts a direct assault on him, the man simply draws his coat tighter, whereas the sun simply slowly warms him and the man easily removes his jacket. According to Faye, "kindness, gentleness, and persuasion win where force fails."

It's a method that Don seemingly embraces in his apparent conquest of Faye Miller, in fact. Despite the fact that she has turned down Don's advances in the past, his knowledge that she has broken up with her boyfriend result in a different tack, as she agrees to an actual date rather than the after-work dinner that Don proposes. After that dinner, she's keen to go back to his place but Don chooses to simply drop her off at her place instead. He's not only happy sleeping alone, his whole body filling the bed like a "skydiver," but he's also grown up a bit since his fallout with Betty. His dalliances might have been suitable for a twenty-something but Don isn't as young as he used to be, the generation gap between him and Bethany Van Nuys a vast chasm that's growing by the day. By gently rejecting Faye, he embraces the gentleness of the sun, whereas the old Don would have kicked up a fierce gust. (It takes Faye by surprise, in fact. She didn't expect him to be quite so gentlemanly in that moment.)

Don's efforts--to pull back on his work-hours drinking, to take things slow with Faye (even as he receives some, er, pleasuring from Bethany in a different cab ride)--point towards a path of redemption for this reluctant bachelor. He's discovering his own simple pleasures--the cool spots of the bed he can hold onto when he's sleeping alone--as well as the transformative powers of altered thinking. By attempting to find clarity, he's finding his new self. His act of writing, of self-discovery, are paving stones on this new path. He can make due with what he has, rather than mourning what he's lost. He can choose not to follow in the footsteps of Roger Sterling but forge his own journey, reclaim his wounded pride, and put the past behind him.

He does just what when he travels to Ossining to pick up the last of his things from the house he once shared with his family. When he arrives, he finds the cardboard boxes--labelled simply "Draper"--dented on the sidewalk, placed there as one might refuse on garbage day. As he pulls up, he sees Henry mowing the lawn of his old home, his place usurped by another man, his castle now no longer his. The old Don may have drowned his sorrows in a deep glass. Instead, Don packs up the boxes in the trunk of the car and then puts them into a dumpster. He doesn't tear up over the crated-up possessions, the symbols of his old life. Rather, he accepts them and then puts them behind him, consigning them to the rubbish bin of yesterday. They don't define him. Not anymore.

But it's Betty who finds that it's more difficult to let go than she imagined. Henry maintains that he has a cordial--if strained--relationship with his ex-wife but insists that he doesn't hate her, whereas Betty's vociferous hatred of Don reveals that not only is he still taking up room in their house but in her heart as well. She can't move on and a chance encounter at a Manhattan restaurant (where Don is on a date with Bethany) stirs up a host of unresolved feelings and animosities towards her ex-husband.

It's interesting that Betty's looks would be so perfectly captured within Anna Camp's Bethany: the scene plays up the similarities in their looks, their hair, their blue dresses, and earrings. What Betty sees reflected back at her is a looking-glass into yesterday, a painful reminder of what was and what will never again be. She sees Don's happiness and it stabs her precisely because she herself will never be happy. She traded one marriage for another, one domineering husband for a different one, one unhappy situation for yet another. She and Henry might have "everything"--the house, the kids, the marriage, but Don has something that she will never achieve: freedom.

Betty downs a drink and then another, she runs off to the ladies' room, but she can't escape what she feels. Her scene--and the subsequent pouting in the car--demonstrate her own tempestuous nature, the wind in her very veins. But she changes her tune later, thanks to an offhand comment made by Francine (the always welcome Anne Dudek, here in her first Season Four appearance), who says that Don has nothing to lose and she has everything.

If she causes a scene at Gene's birthday party, she risks looking foolish in front of her friends and further upsetting Henry after she "misbehaved" at that dinner. She can choose to be the wind or take the path of the sun: choose to be welcoming, kind, and persuasive. Choose sunniness over brusqueness. Which she does spectacularly, welcoming Don and finally allowing him time with Gene. Even as Henry visibly prickles, Betty tells him that it's alright. "We have everything," she whispers. Even as she says it, she looks at Don and sees just what has been lost.

While it's perhaps a thawing of the iciness between Don and Betty, it doesn't mean that things will be coming up roses between them. However, it does point to each of them taking a different approach with the other and perhaps finally coming to terms with the new circumstances they're in right now. Perhaps by being gentle with each other, they can turn that gentleness on themselves...

Back at the office, Joan discovered unpleasantly just how little power she truly has at Sterling Draper Cooper Pryce, as she saw herself for the first time as a relic from another time, yet another symbol of that gap between Roger's generation and those of the immature, over-confident young men of Joey's.

Spinning out of last week's confrontation between Joan and the creative team over the messiness of their office, Joan was not only the butt of several jokes this week but of a pornographic drawing of her and Lane, one that capitalized on her seductive nature and her (perceived) menial job. Whereas she ran Sterling Cooper with an iron fist, she doesn't have the respect here that she once did. Hell, her office is used as a thoroughfare between two points, rather than as a place of sanctuary. Her kingdom is so small that the two doors of her office are less defendable battlements than they are a symbolic revolving door.

And it's true that Joan's loss of power isn't limited to her career. Her marriage is hanging on by a thread as Greg prepares to leave for basic training, after which he'll be shipped out to Vietnam... and, as Joan knows in her heart of hearts, likely won't return to her. Her remarks to the boys of creative that they too will likely be sent over there and die in the jungles is scathing but only too true. It cuts to her heart of her own fears that Greg is being sent to die.

Even as she tearfully prepares to send him to his fate, she discovers just how truly alone she really is. She has no one to talk to, no one to confide in, and certainly no one who understands her. Certainly not Peggy Olsen, who wrongly believes that she can ingratiate herself to Joan by firing Joey.

Don empowers Peggy to fire Joey and Peggy offers Joey a lifeline: he can apologize to Joan but he refuses. He rails against her because he sees in Joan a mirror image of his own power, the pen around her neck, flaunting her sexuality to get her way, a joke of an office peon who believes she has power because she makes men stare. (He even goes so far as to piercingly call her "mom," a reflection of last week's episode where Joan said to the boys that she wasn't their mother.)

Peggy's firing of Joey reinforces her role of authority within the agency, even as she witheringly tells Joey that Don doesn't even know who he is, putting him down even as she raises herself up. But in doing so, she chose to make herself the "cold bitch" in the equation, the wet blanket who ruined the boys' fun and lacked a sense of humor about the "joke" at hand. Furthermore, in doing so, she carved out a role of power at the expense of Joan herself. While unintentional, Peggy wresting control of the Joey situation revealed Joan to even less capable of defending herself. She was reduced to little more than a secretary, wounded at the hands of the cruel boys who had to have someone else bail her out and save her.

Joan wanted to be less outwardly brutal. She would have preferred to handle it her own way, to apply persuasion (the sun, again) and get Joey kicked off the Sugarberry account rather than blow in, guns blazing. It's the choice between Aesop's feuding natures, but it's also a sign of the times. Joan isn't as young as she used to be; could it be that Joey saw her usefulness in the same way that Don sees Miss Blankenship's? That both have outlived their day in the sun?

As the elevator opens and Peggy is left agape, the sad truth about the two roles that women in 1960s workplaces could take is made all the more apparent. Peggy might have willingly taken on the role of "humorless bitch," but she ripped Joan down from whatever level of power she had made for herself, reducing her to the role of "meaningless secretary," a woman unable to fight her own fights. Someone in need of rescuing.

In the end, perhaps progress is about what's gained as much as what's lost. While Don may have set foot on the road to redemption, the times are being less kind to Joan Harris, for whom I imagine heartbreak is only just beginning. The summer might have arrived for Don Draper, the scent of chlorine on his skin, but one can only hope that, even in the cold months to come, he can hold onto his invincible summer.

Next week on Mad Men ("The Beautiful Girls"), Peggy receives a romantic gift that could compromise her career.

Unwanted Guests: Emotional Baggage on This Week's Incredible Mad Men

Though Don might have once told Peggy Olsen always to look forward and never look back, it's an impossible credo to embrace completely. Regardless of how much we might attempt to escape the trappings of our past, they have a nasty way of staring us right in the face, whether that's an inevitable phone call, a playground, or a pregnant rival.

It's the past that we always carry around with us, dragging our failure and shortcomings at our heels, shoving them into whatever baggage we might grab at the moment, whether it's an army duffel bag or a stylish Samsonite suitcase.

This week's beautiful and intense episode of Mad Men ("The Suitcase"), written by Matthew Weiner and directed by Jennifer Getzinger, swung the focus back around to the central relationship between Don Draper and Peggy Olsen, two sides of the same coin, each grappling with the intrusion of an unwanted guest into their structured and compartmentalized lives.

Threaded around the Cassius Clay/Sonny Liston boxing match, the episode shines a spotlight on the often contentious relationship between Don and Peggy, each of whom proves in this week's installment that, no matter how many times they get knocked down, each of them manages to get back on their feet again. Like a piece of Samsonite luggage, they can take a hit and keep on swinging. This season has been noticeably scant on Don and Peggy intimacy as their relationship seemed to take a bit of a hit when they moved to the new agency... and Don's Clio Award cemented a frustration on Peggy's part, as did his constant needling of her ideas.

Of course, Don is hard on Peggy because he's hard on himself, more so than anyone else. Like he does with himself, he holds Peggy to an unrealistic expectation of perfection, one than no mortal can meet. If Don had to be the best in order to overcome his upbringing, his lack of education, and his lack of experience, so too has Peggy. They have to be the best at everything because Don has seen that it can all so easily be ripped away from them.

"I know what I'm supposed to want," says Peggy, sadly, "but it just never feels right, or as important as anything in that office."

While the major theme this week seemed to be unwanted guests--from the unwelcome appearance of Peggy's family at Mark's surprise birthday dinner, Duck's near-defactory cameo at the office, the mouse in the office, the roach in the Parthenon--it also delved into notions of identity and perception. If the people who know us in the truest, deepest sense of the word are no longer alive, no longer remembering, are we still intrinsically us? If our pasts are scrubbed from memory, can we escape who we were? Who we are?

Despite the fact that Don has long known that Anna Draper was going to die, Stephanie's call from California still comes as a shock and he does everything in his power to delay making the call, the call that will forever alter his life as he is forced to contend with Anna's death and its inescapable implications. He goes so far as to keep Peggy at the office lest he have to deal with picking up the telephone, throwing himself into work, shielding his heart behind the office walls. His intransigence towards Peggy, towards the Samsonite campaign--not due for two more weeks--is an effort to delay the inevitable.

But he can't forget. The phone remains omnipresent throughout the episode, each time it rings it becomes the clarion symbol of some painfulness he's hoping to avoid. But each time, it's Peggy's boyfriend Mark, increasingly fed up with the fact that she is making excuses and keeping all of them waiting for her. While Peggy's frustration with Don mounts, it's really Mark who she's the most upset with, once she learns that he brought her entire family to dinner, her overbearing and clucking mother who disapproves of her lifestyle. It's as if, Peggy tells Don, he doesn't know her at all.

So who does know us in the end then? It's those who see us at our best and at our worst. For Peggy, that's Don Draper, the only one who visited her in the hospital, who nurtured her talents and promoted her, who gave her the life that she was so desperate to live, a life that she chose over her own baby, given away for adoption. He has seen Peggy at either end of the spectrum, just as she has done with him. They both still have their secrets; while both have revealed truths about themselves, each has chosen to conceal something powerful about their pasts--Peggy that Pete is the father of her child, Don that he stole another man's identity--but that doesn't diminish the bond between them, one forged in the fires of honesty, the late nights at the office, the frantic calls, and the sometimes horrific consequences of their mistakes.

It's fitting that Don attempts to bring Peggy back around by sharing with her his own discovery, the tapes that Roger has been making for his autobiography, entitled--of all things--"Sterling's Gold." Among the juicy tidbits we learn: that Don's secretary Ida Blankenship was once the "queen of perversions" and that Bert Cooper had his testicles removed... for no good reason.

It sets up what ends up being a night of truths, not just ones coerced from illicit tapes but ones shared openly between Don and Peggy, their fractured relationship breaking down once she erupts at him... and then finally being knitted back together over coffee at a Greek diner, drinks at a bar, and a trip to the men's room. (I loved Peggy's reaction upon seeing the urinals therein.) All before Don attempts to protect Peggy's honor when a drunk Duck calls her a "whore." (If Duck was hoping to woo Peggy into his bed or his office, he failed miserably on both accounts, particularly after he nearly defecated in Roger's office.)

Throughout it all, both Don and Peggy drag their own emotional Samsonites across town, circling back into the office. (Don cracks his open to tell Peggy that he grew up on a farm and his father was killed by a kick from a horse.) But each is a heavyweight in their own right, their inner selves unable to broken by just anybody, even when it's being hefted from the height of the Eiffel Tower. Rather, each is able to open up those suitcases for one another.

Don's breakdown in the office removed any semblance and artifice from his relationship with Peggy, a moment of such agony and pain--upon hearing confirmation that Anna had died--that he is not embarrassed by his grief, nor by expressing it in front of Peggy. In fact, there are similarities between the way that Peggy is painted in this episode and the way that we've seen Don's relationship with Anna, one that's not encumbered by a sexual dimension but rather by a familiar rapport that marks them more as siblings rather than would-be lovers. Don falling asleep on Peggy's lap on the couch marks their relationship as strictly platonic, a mirror image of Don and Anna.

It's fitting that Anna's ghost, appearing to Don in the wee hours of the morning, carries with her a Samsonite suitcase, a receptacle for everything they shared, the knowledge of Don's true self. After all, Don sees her passing as the death of not just his best friend in the world but also, in a way, of the last connection to Dick Whitman in his life. It's not just Anna who dies, in that sense, but also Dick as well. She was "the only person in the world who really knew me," says Don. But that's not true, not really. While she doesn't know the full story, Peggy does know him. She knows the man he is today, his flaws, his courage, and his charm. She's seen behind the facade and lived to tell the tale. When she says that it's not true, we feel that she's telling the truth inasmuch as anyone can know anyone else.

There might be another way out of the office, one the mouse is capable of navigating, but Don and Peggy don't find it that night, each of them grabbing some kip on the couch in their respective offices before starting a new day tackling the Samsonite campaign once more.

The question before the final scene, unspoken but hanging in the air like smoke, is whether Don would acknowledge the very real moment that passed between them the night before. Would he look forward as always, or would he admit that what had happened between them--the supreme moments of connection over a shared evening and open truths--had actually happened?

After all, that's all that Allison had wanted: Don to admit that they had slept together, that it wasn't all in her head, that he hadn't somehow drunkenly forgotten, that he wouldn't pretend that nothing had occurred. Don wasn't able to do that with Allison. He switched into his standard operating mode, one of no regrets, no looking back, sweeping the unpleasant and the awkward under the thick rug.

Not so with Peggy. While it might be all business--another take on the Samsonite pitch, this time using Clay's victory as a basis--Don breaks the spell, taking Peggy's hand in his and holding on. It's an acknowledgment of what passed between them, of the depth of their relationship, and of the unbreakable bond that they share.

I'll admit that I freely started crying at that part, not by what's been lost but by what's been found for each of them. We might not be able to ditch our emotional baggage but we can sometimes in life find those willing to help us carry it.

Next week on Mad Men ("The Summer Man"), Joan and Peggy deal with high-jinx in the office.

The Daily Beast: "The Summer's Best (and Worst) TV"

Over at The Daily Beast, you can check out my latest feature as I offer a report card for the Summer TV Season: picking the winners, losers, and draws across broadcast and cable.

Be sure to check out the gallery at "The Summer's Best (and Worst) TV," where I break down the successes and failures of the past season show by show. Where did White Collar, Pretty Little Liars, and Covert Affairs end up? And which shows ended up at the bottom of the barrel?

Head over to The Daily Beast to find out and head to the comments section to discuss your favorite and least favorite shows of the past summer season and why you felt certain programs succeeded or failed.

The Daily Beast: Fire and Ice: Mad Men's Christina Hendricks and January Jones

As promised, the last Emmy-related piece of this year.

While I've already discussed Modern Family and Glee, Friday Night Lights, and to a certain extent Lost, as well as rounded up my picks for who will win a gold statuette and who should have won, I can't imagine not discussing AMC's luminous period drama Mad Men.

Over at The Daily Beast, my latest feature--which is curiously entitled "Mad Men's Ice Queen"--takes a look at Mad Men's Emmy nominated actresses January Jones and Christina Hendricks and explores how they fit into certain female iconic traditions and why our perceptions of their characters seem to spill over into their real lives.

Just why is Betty Draper so misunderstood and disliked? Why does Jones seem so icy whereas Hendricks--a somewhat reluctant sex symbol--seems so vibrant and full of life? Can they escape our own perceptions of them? Head to the comments section to discuss.

Season Four of Mad Men airs Sunday evenings at 10 pm ET/PT on AMC.

The Dead Walk: AMC Announces Halloween Launch Date for The Walking Dead

Be prepared to be scared.

AMC has announced an official launch date for its upcoming zombie series The Walking Dead, which is based on Robert Kirkman's comic book series.

The Walking Dead, which stars Andrew Lincoln, Jon Bernthal, Sarah Wayne Callies, Laurie Holden, and Jeffrey DeMunn, will launch with a 90-minute series premiere on Sunday, October 31st at 10 pm ET/PT.

The official trailer for The Walking Dead can be viewed below. "Stay focused."



The full press release from AMC can be found below.

AMC LAUNCHES NEWEST ORIGINAL DRAMA “THE WALKING DEAD”
WITH A 90-MINUTE PREMIERE EPISODE ON HALLOWEEN NIGHT: SUNDAY, OCTOBER 31, 10PM

Series Stars Andrew Lincoln, Jon Bernthal, Sarah Wayne Callies,
Laurie Holden, Jeffrey DeMunn and others

Written, Directed and Executive-Produced by
Frank Darabont, Executive Produced by Gale Anne Hurd
New York, NY – August 2010 – AMC's newest original series, “The Walking Dead,” will premiere on Halloween night, Sunday, October 31 at 10 PM ET. The Sunday night series will debut with a 90-minute premiere episode, airing at 10 PM, October 31st. Subsequent episodes will be one-hour long presentations.

In conjunction with the announcement, today AMC released a four and a half-minute trailer, previewing the series, as was seen at this year’s Comicon. The trailer can be viewed on www.amctv.com.

The series will premiere during AMC's Fearfest, the network's annual blockbuster marathon of thriller and horror films. Fearfest is celebrating its 14th year by airing 14 consecutive days of themed programming with more than 50 films.

“The Walking Dead” is AMC's first wholly-owned original series.

“The Walking Dead” is based on the comic book written by Robert Kirkman and published by Image Comics. The six-episode series tells the story of life following a zombie apocalypse. It follows a group of survivors, led by police officer Rick Grimes, played by Andrew Lincoln (“Love Actually,” “Teachers,” “Strike Back”), traveling in search of a safe and secure home. Jon Bernthal (“The Pacific,” “The Ghost Writer”) plays Rick’s sheriff’s department partner before the apocalypse, Shane Walsh, and Sarah Wayne Callies (“Prison Break”), is Rick's wife, Lori. Supporting cast include Laurie Holden (“The Shield”), Jeffrey DeMunn, Chandler Riggs and Steven Yeun.

Three-time Academy Award-nominee Frank Darabont (“The Shawshank Redemption,” “The Green Mile”) serves as writer, director and executive producer. Chairwoman of Valhalla Motion Pictures, Gale Anne Hurd (“The Terminator,” “Aliens,” “Armageddon,” “The Incredible Hulk”), creator of the original comic series, Robert Kirkman, and David Alpert from Circle of Confusion serve as Executive Producer. Charles “Chic” Eglee (“Dexter,” “The Shield,” “Dark Angel”) and Jack LoGiudice (“Sons of Anarchy,” “Resurrection Blvd”) are Co-Executive Producer.

For more information, visit AMC’s press website, http://press.amctv.com .

About AMC
AMC reigns as the only network to ever win the Golden Globe® Award for Best Television Series - Drama three years in a row and the only basic cable network to win back-to-back Primetime Emmy® Awards for Outstanding Drama Series. Whether commemorating favorite films from every genre and decade from the most comprehensive library or creating acclaimed original productions, the AMC experience is an uncompromising celebration of great stories. AMC's original stories include the Emmy® Award-winning dramas “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad,” and insightful non-scripted programming such as “AMC News.” AMC further demonstrates its commitment to the art of storytelling with curated movie franchises like AMC Hollywood Icon and AMC Complete Collection. Available in more than 95 million homes (Source: Nielsen Media Research), AMC is a subsidiary of Rainbow Media Holdings LLC, which includes sister networks IFC, Sundance Channel, WE tv and Wedding Central. AMC is available across all platforms, including on-air, online, on demand and mobile.

A Doll's House: The Chrysanthemum and the Sword on Mad Men

"A man is shamed by being openly ridiculed and rejected."

On this week's fantastic episode of Mad Men ("The Chrysanthemum and the Sword"), written by Erin Levy and directed by Lesli Linka Glatter, we see how symbolism is in the eye of the beholder: what one man sees as a vase of chrysanthemums is another man's symbol for death. What a mother sees as her daughter attempting to punish her is a cry for help. Or it's none of those things at all, but a burgeoning sexuality or effort to explore and to understand.

Or it's just an attraction to The Man From U.N.C.L.E..

We can parse the meanings from others' behaviors but we always apply our own patina of understanding to the symbols we take in. Sally's behavior isn't of a wanton nature; she's not on a path of destruction, despite Betty's claims that her daughter is "fast" or is picking up things from Don's "whores." She's a normal girl dealing with normal things, particularly after her world came crashing down around her following her parents' divorce.

That dollhouse that Betty so admires in Dr. Edna's office is an illusion. It's a house without a wall on the outside, letting us peer into another world. Betty sees a perfect family living inside, everything in its proper, ascribed place. But what we might see are lifeless dolls, unable to think for themselves, unable to express their rage, frustration, lust, until someone else comes along to give them meaning.

In other words, we see what we want to see. Just as Don's competitor Ted Chaough believes that he sees Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce breaking the rules and shooting a commercial in order to land the lucrative Honda account, Roger sees not dollar signs but dead army buddies, not businessmen but ruthless Japanese villains, and Betty sees not her own childhood reflected back at her but evidence of her own imperfections.

In an interesting twist, it's Henry who seems to be the sole carrier of parental knowledge here, able to see much of Sally's behavior as not abnormal but completely normal. "Little girls do this," he says to Betty after Sally chops off her hair, "even those not from broken homes." Henry, as the parent of a now-grown daughter, has seen all this and more. Despite their physical similarities, Sally is not Betty, though the latter seems to want to place her on a similar path, lying to her about her own girlhood tendencies and threatening to cut off her fingers, just as her mother did to her.

The lines have been drawn in the former Draper household: while Bobby runs to his mother and throws her arms around her, Sally is withdrawn, aloof. There has always been a simpatico spirit between Don and Sally and Betty goes so far as to push the two of them into the same category, into being recipients of her somewhat sublimated rage. Rather than console and confront her daughter rationally, Betty acts out irrationally, slapping Sally in the hallway simply because she cannot slap Don. While it's supposedly Sally she's furious with, Betty moans, "I want him dead" as soon as Don leaves. The mark she leaves on Sally's cheek is meant to ricochet to the girl's father, really.

For her part, Sally Draper is attempting to find her own way in the world. The doll's house she once lived in has been knocked on its side. In attempting to make herself over, she's attempting to thwart her mother's expectations for her and to attract her father's attention. Sally first expresses disapproval that Don is going to meet Bethany for dinner at Benihana and leave her with neighbor Phoebe. Later, she hacks off her hair in an effort to transform herself, to feel "pretty." She assumes--incorrectly--that something is going on between Don and Phoebe and then attempts to remake herself in the nurse's image, scissoring off her locks to give herself short hair. ("You have short hair and Daddy likes it," she says.)

Betty's response is to punish Sally, even as Henry advises rewarding her. In other words: paying attention to her and giving her encouragement, transforming the situation into something positive (a trip together to the hair salon) rather than something negative. But Betty, for all of the change in her life, can't transform her rage and frustration into something pleasant; it's been so deeply sublimated her entire life that it erupts into inappropriate behavior. (Like mother, like daughter.)

Sally is curious about sex and sexuality. We see this both from her questioning of Phoebe and to her response to watching The Man From U.N.C.L.E. but no one is guiding her or talking to her. And she can't talk to Betty about it because Betty won't confront these touchy subjects, even though she herself went through just what Sally is going through. ("You don't do those things," Betty screams. "You especially don't do them in public.") Don's question to Betty--"boy or girl?"--is a valid one but Betty fails to see the distinction. Sally's curiosity was inward rather than external; Betty sees only whores and fast girls.

But Betty also can't see herself. It's fitting in a way that it's a child's psychiatrist who finally gets Betty to open up, not only about Sally, but about the pain and loss in her life, about the breakdown of her marriage and the death of her father. Both Sally and Betty were deeply affected by Gene's death, though it takes the gentle coaxing of Dr. Edna to allow Betty to admit it openly.

In going to consult Dr. Edna, Betty sees the woman as a possible cure for Sally's abnormal conditions, rather than as a sounding board for herself as well. Witness how easily Edna is able to get Betty commit to coming to see her--in the guise about talking about Sally--whereas she fails in getting her to see a psychiatrist of her own. (Betty is, however, put at ease knowing that Edna will keep both sides of the ongoing conversation private from the other party.)

"I feel like Sally did this to punish me," she tells Dr. Edna. But that in itself is a symbol of misplaced anger too; Betty's reading of Sally's behavior fails to take into account her own punishment of Sally to get at Don. A misplaced slap, a cool attitude. Their every interaction is a bitter reminder to one another of what they've lost.

In a room full of toys, it's the first time Betty can be honest and it's the first time we see the ice thaw in a long while. She admits to masturbating as a girl, she admits to feeling the agony of her father's death, and--though she doesn't say it out loud--she admits that her life hasn't turned out how she imagined it. It was never as easily as moving those dolls around that open house, after all.

Roger, for his part, can't let go of his own past. His anger at the partners for even considering doing business with the Japanese speaks volumes about his anger at his World War II adversaries and in himself. While his rage is directed at the Honda executives, it takes Pete to see what's really going on here: the negotiations are symbolic of a larger issue at play. Should Pete have successfully brought in this account, the agency is less dependent on Lucky Strike... and therefore less dependent on Roger himself.

While Roger lunges at Pete for having the temerity to suggest such a thing, Don intervenes... and agrees with Pete. His efforts to wrap himself in the American flag was a smokescreen to divert from the true issue. Just as later his story to Joan about his dead war buddies is an effort to make Joan feel sorry for him, despite the fact that her husband is about to ship out to Vietnam. She urges him to let go, reminding him that he made the world a better and safer place through the sacrifices he and his friends made twenty years earlier.

She has to believe that, after all, because her husband is standing on the same precipice that Roger had all of those years before. While he attempts to engage her sympathies, Joan urges him to stop feeling sorry for himself. The scene in beautifully shot by Glatter, as Joan and Roger are positioned in front of the window, two vertical lines dissecting their tableau, depicting the separation between them, a chasm that widens even more as Joan steps out of the scene.

Don, meanwhile, fails to see that Lane has given his little "stunt" his blessing, preferring to see that they acted without the partners' knowledge, though Lane makes it clear that he had to have allowed Joan to book studio time (at which Peggy drove around an empty set in circles). But Don's stunt does work: not only is CGC put out of the running but SCDP lands the Honda account (or at least the future Honda automobile account) because Don played up the sense of honor that the Japanese hold so dearly. By failing to hold up their own rules, they invited dishonor. Don's understanding of the symbolism land them the account. It's a matter of deciphering the meaning behind the shifting symbols.

Likewise, Faye admits to Don that she uses a fake wedding band in order to discourage "distracting conversations" from men at work. The ring is a symbol of attachment; by using it she wards off prospective admirers without uttering a word. But while Faye comes clean to Don, he too opens up to her. Her psychiatrist's couch is the narrow break room at SCDP; her notepad a bottle of sake left as a joke. But Don unveils a harrowing truth about his relationship with his children: that they are intense when he watches them, that he is relieved when he drops them off, and that he then misses them. The cycle repeats itself over and over. He does love his children but can't express it; what Betty sees as disinterest and irresponsibility is a host of conflicting emotions.

Emotions that all of them either bottle up or turn to the bottle to avoid facing. It's the chrysanthemum in the room, the specter of death, the symbology that they can't quite face up to. The call to California goes unanswered, hair once shorn can't be immediately repaired, and the hard truths of life can't always be confronted. One can only hope that Sally Draper finds solace in talk therapy and that she, as the symbol of a new generation, finds herself able to discuss the things that her parents are unable--or unwilling--to say aloud.

Next week on Mad Men ("Waldorf Stories"), Peggy clashes with her new creative partner; Don pitches under unusual circumstances.

The Daily Beast: "2010 Emmys: Who Will Win This Year?"

With the 2010 Emmy Awards less than a week away, it's time to take a look at this year's front-runners and weigh the major races that are already underway.

Over at The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, "2010 Emmys: Who Will Win This Year?" in which I take a look (via a visual gallery) at who will win the top spots this year and who should be taking home those statuettes come August 29th.

Do you agree with my assessments? Think Julianna Margulies is a lock? Or do you think that I'm wrong and Aaron Paul won't get overlooked for a Best Supporting Actor award? Head to the comments section to discuss and debate and post your take on the major categories.

The 62nd Primetime Emmy Awards will air live coast to coast on Sunday, August 29th on NBC.

Counter-Culture Blues: The Rejected on Mad Men

It was only a matter of time before Peggy Olson found the counter-culture. Or, one supposes, the counter-culture of the mid-1960s found Peggy Olson.

Rejection seemed to be on the minds of everyone in this week's "swell-egant" episode of Mad Men ("The Rejected"), written by Keith Huff and Matthew Weiner and directed by John Slattery, which revolved around the generational gap and in the transition of old ideas to new ones. Is it that young women want to find themselves beautiful, to partake in rituals of feminine beauty, or is that they're only looking to snag a husband? Is matrimony the expected outcome of any encounter?

The rejections experienced weren't just romantic ones--though they threaded through this week's installment--but also intellectual ones, that Peggy could chose to align herself not with the aged men in the lobby of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce but with the vibrancy of youth, with a generation of forward-thinking individuals--artists, rebels, drug-users--who were defying their parents' ideals, rejecting the notions that womanhood meant subservience, that marriage was the ultimate destination, that everything comes down to commerce in one form or another.

In Joyce, Peggy encounters someone rather like her: an ambitious woman who wields more power than most women at the office but without turning on the charm like Joan Harris. No, Joyce is a pretentious intellectual, which makes Peggy smile all the more, a free-thinker who is shocked to discover that a copywriter like Peggy would admire the nudes that have been rejected by Life magazine. In a way, they're kindred spirits, though not quite in the way that Joyce would hope, given the way that she is herself rejected by Peggy after attempting to kiss her at the downtown party she invites Peggy to.

While I was surprised that Peggy would be so down to earth about advances from a woman, I was glad to see that that wasn't the end of this storyline, which was more about Joyce giving Peggy access to a world she knew nothing about--a world filled with arrogant artists, police-raided parties, and possibilities (notice that Peggy didn't hesitate when Abe kissed her)--than in a sexual encounter between the two. Joyce's knowledge of this world and her handing Peggy and entry card to this demi-monde pull Peggy off of the path she's been on. It's an eye-opening experience that separates Peggy all the more from the world she's been inhabiting, an ad agency filled with men who have chosen their parents' values rather than their own.

That Peggy and Joyce's group should walk by a collection of old men and ad executives in the lobby of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce is an intentional juxtaposition, a visual reminder of the generation gap that existed at the time. The look that passes between Pete and Peggy as she waits for the elevator expresses the wide chasm between them, between their choices, their past indiscretion, and in the rejection that Peggy faced at his hands and in her own rejection of his belief structure. (The distance between the generations is made all the more apparent this week in the hiring of the elderly Miss Blankenship as Alison's replacement.)

For all of his pluck, Pete Campbell has made his alliance with the establishment. Pete has been promoted; he's a partner and a father-to-be now. His efforts to seize control of his destiny lead him to wrest control of his father-in-law's company and bring the entire Vicks Chemical line to the agency. He's playing an old game and his company here, the old men, the boys' club, signals an era that's soon to be ending. He might be building his dynasty, but Pete is missing out on the true revolution happening on the other side of those glass doors. (It's interesting too that much of what Pete allegedly accused Kenny of is true of him as well. He's leveraging his wife's family for financial gain.)

It's interesting too that Alison, Don's jilted secretary, attempts to form a rapport with Peggy after she tearfully flees the Pond's focus group. Alison sees her and Peggy as one in the same, both rejected women who have been forced to deal with Don's grabby hands and mercurial nature. But that's not the case, Peggy angrily insists; Alison's problems are not hers. It's a reminder that just about everyone still believes that Peggy's position of power at the agency is due to her sleeping with Don. It's a slap in the face to Peggy, an assumption of the highest order.

Yet Peggy too makes that assumption of Joyce in the elevator, seeing her as a pink-slipped secretary rather than the one doing the firing, a photo editor for a national magazine. And, though there wasn't anything sexual between Don and Peggy, she too made a bad decision and had an indiscretion with someone she shouldn't. While she bore Pete's child and gave it up for adoption, the parallels between Alison's plight and her own can't be avoided.

Though she angrily tells Alison to grow up and deal with the consequences, it's clear that Peggy can't truly let go either. Her bonk against the desk with her head recalls Pete's own head-banging earlier in the episode. They're joined in ways that can't be overlooked but Pete, like Don with Alison, has made his decision and it didn't include Peggy. He may have seen her but that made it all the worse. As Dottie said in the focus group, "I gave him everything and I got nothing."

Still, I admire Peggy for going to see Pete and for congratulating him on Trudy's pregnancy; it's a big step for her to make, particularly after last season's admission that she had had his child and gave it away. Peggy's decision not to sign the card but to see Pete in person express her own conflicted feelings. It would have been disingenuous to sign the card but it's harder still to dredge up the past between them, the child they had together, and the fact that Pete will now be a father in more ways than just one.

By saying things aloud (or even writing them), we give them power. It takes courage to admit the truth, which is something that Don can't do. Hell, he can't even take the time to write Alison an actual letter of reference when she decides to leave (likely for that job at Life that became available), leading her to throw a paperweight at Don. (Ouch.)

But it's even harder for him to admit the truth of his situation: that he's in a dark place right now, a time where his life and his expectations of how it would turn out have been brutally thwarted. He's a lone man, sitting in the dark at the typewriter (his hat still on his head, a symbol of enforced formality), but he can't bring himself to even write the truth in a letter to Alison he'll never send.

Don might have chided Faye for using outmoded ideas when she suggests that they reject Peggy's hypothesis and stick with the link between using Pond's cold cream and matrimony, to which Don replies, "Hell, 1925." While he admonishes her for attempting to bury a new way of thinking, it's clear that Don too has already committed to those old ways in his own life.

That elderly couple in his apartment building hallway represents that outmoded way of thinking too, in a way. His life has gone a different direction; he and Betty will never be that couple discussing groceries in a too-loud voice in front of a stranger. ("We'll discuss it inside," the woman says.) He's entering his own home alone, sitting in the dark with the truth. They might be arguing about pears but they might as well be arguing about "pairs" really.

Next week on Mad Men ("The Chrysanthemum and the Sword"), Don and Pete go against Roger in efforts to win a new account.

Channel Surfing: Masi Oka to Hawaii, Bones Won't Go for The Situation, Vincent Kartheiser Talks Mad Men, MI-5 Heads to ABC, and More

Welcome to your Friday morning television briefing.

TV Guide Magazine's Will Keck is reporting that former Heroes star Masi Oka will guest star on CBS' upcoming reboot of crime drama Hawaii Five-0, where he will play a local coroner who assists Steve McGarrett and his team solve some murders. "He'll debut in the fourth episode as the coroner and be billed as a guest star," writes Keck. "But with the body count expected to spike considerably in Oahu, this coroner could potentially be busy for several seasons." Keck also reports that D.L. Hughley will guest star in the third episode. (TV Guide Magazine)

You can breath a sigh of relief: it looks like The Situation won't be turning up on Bones this season after all, according to Entertainment Weekly's Michael Ausiello, who says that plans to have the Jersey Shore star turn up as a murder victim this season on Bones haven't come to fruition. “The Situation is not going to work out,” executive producer Stephen Nathan told Ausiello. “There were so many contractual difficulties with MTV that it just became an impossibility... But the episode will still be our little tribute to Jersey Shore, and it will do what many people in America would like to see themselves--which is one of those people dead." (Entertainment Weekly's Ausiello Files)

TVGuide.com's David Hochman has a brief interview with Mad Men's Vincent Kartheiser, in which they discuss just where Pete is heading this season, the series' fourth. "There's only one Don Draper, and when you work alongside somebody like that, you make your peace with being a beta male," said Kartheiser. "Pete got a promotion, he's feeling more comfortable with his status, and he knows more about who he is. His angst is down and his confidence is up." (TVGuide.com)

Deadline's Nellie Andreeva is reporting that ABC is developing a US version of hit British crime drama Spooks, which has aired Stateside (on A&E, PBS, and BBC America at various times) under the title MI-5, following a deal between Kudos Rights Ltd and ABC Studios. Michael Seitzman will write/executive produce the reversioning, which has received a script order at the network, however it's still unclear whether the series' spies will be British or American. [Editor: As a huge fan of the original, I'm firmly against this as I don't think that a US version would keep the stakes and tension of the original, where any of the characters could be killed off at any time. Instead, I feel like ABC is attempting to launch their own version of 24.] (Deadline)

Entertainment Weekly's Michael Ausiello has a first look photo of Brian Austin Green on ABC's Desperate Housewives, where he will play a handyman hired by Marcia Cross' Bree. “Bree has an instant physical attraction to him,” executive producer Bob Daly told Ausiello. “But then over time it turns into something more.” Green will make his first appearance in the seventh season opener, airing September 26th. (Entertainment Weekly's Ausiello Files)

Deadline's Nellie Andreeva is reporting that Neal McDonough--whom she says was allegedly let go from ABC's Scoundrels after refusing to go against his religious beliefs and film a sex scene--has landed at Starz, where he will executive produce and star in drama pilot Vigilante Priest, which he co-created by Walon Green (Law & Order). McDonough (Desperate Housewives) will play "an ex-cop turned priest who is cleaning up the streets of Los Angeles 'one sinner at a time.'" Andreeva reports that the pay cabler is fast-tracking the development on the project. (Deadline)

Nerd Gets the Girl? Recycled Crap? Exploitative Crime Documentary #57? The latest faux NBC fall schedule making the rounds in Hollywood yesterday was this little gem, which contains all of the above, along with Jerry Seinfeld's Paycheck and Decreasingly Wet Paint. Ahem. (Hollywood Reporter's The Live Feed)

Yay, Mahershalalhashbaz! [Editor: what can I say? I was a huge 4400 fan.] Ron Yuan, Jeremy Ray Valdez, Mahershalalhashbaz Ali, and Kelsey Ford will star opposite Ben Whishaw and Clayne Crawford in HBO drama pilot All Signs of Death, based on Charlie Huston's crime novel "The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death" that will be directed by True Blood's Alan Ball. Project, writes Deadline's Nellie Andreeva, "centers on Webster Filmore Goodhue (Whishaw) an inveterate twenty-something slacker who stumbles into a career as a crime scene cleaner, only to find himself entangled with a murder mystery, a femme fatale and the loose ends of his own past." (Deadline)

Elsewhere, Ben Esler (The Pacific) has been cast as a series regular role in AMC's Western drama pilot Hell on Wheels, where he will play Sean, described as "an Irish immigrant who opens a show for railroad workers." (Hollywood Reporter's The Live Feed)

BBC America will debut the six-episode psychological crime drama Luther--starring Idris Elba, Ruth Wilson, Steven Mackintosh, Indira Varma, Paul McGann, Saskia Reeves, and Warren Brown--on Sunday, October 17th at 10 pm ET/PT. Here's how the network, which co-produced the series, is positioning it: "A brilliant detective tormented by the darker side of humanity, Luther shines a light into the hearts and minds of psychopaths and killers, and the shadowy spaces of his own soul. A BBC AMERICA co-production starring The Wire's Idris Elba (Russell 'Stringer' Bell), Luther is a gripping, psychological thriller driven by a brilliant and emotionally impulsive detective. A self-destructive near-genius, Luther might just be as dangerous as the depraved criminals he hunts. In each episode, the murderer's identity is known from the start, focusing the drama on the psychological duel between predator and prey." [Editor: having seen Luther, I seriously recommend you to check out this gripping and provocative series.] (via press release)

Entertainment Weekly's Michael Ausiello is reporting that Jeremy Davidson (Army Wives) has signed on to ABC's Brothers & Sisters for a multiple-episode story arc, where he will play a new love interest for Calista Flockhart's Kitty--after the death of her husband Robert (Rob Lowe) at the end of last season--whom she meets in Ojai. “He’s very different than Robert,” executive producer David Marshall Grant told Ausiello, “and a very different guy than the kind of men Kitty’s been with her whole life." (Entertainment Weekly's Ausiello Files)

Jennifer Love Hewitt and Betty White will star in Hallmark Hall of Fame telepic The Lost Valentine, which will air on CBS in early 2011. Project, based on the novel of the same name by James Michael Pratt, will revolve around a "journalist working on a profile of a woman (White) whose husband was declared MIA during WWII." Script was written by Ernest Thompson and Jenny Wingfield; pic will be directed by Darnell Martin. (Variety)

Sobini Films has launched a television division that will be headed up by former Battlestar Galactica associate producer James Halpern, who served as director of development at David Eick Prods. (Variety)

Stay tuned.

Channel Surfing: AMC Finds The Killing, Lotus Caves for Syfy and Bryan Fuller, More Office Rumors, FNL Launch Date, and More

Welcome to your Thursday morning television briefing.

AMC has given a series order to pilot The Killing, which hails from writer/executive producer Veena Sud and Fox Television Studios and is based on Danish television series Forbrydelsen, ordering thirteen episodes which will air sometime in 2011. Series, which will star Big Love's Mireille Enos, revolves around the murder of a young girl and a police investigation that connects several seemingly separate story threads. "We are thrilled to be moving forward with this stunning piece of television," said Joel Stillerman, AMC's senior vp of original programming, production and digital content, in a statement. "It is a crime drama, but it is also a gripping character based story that pulls you in and doesn't let go. The storytelling is completely compelling, and the show is visually breathtaking." In addition to Enos, the project--which will be renamed, sadly--also stars Billy Campbell, Michelle Forbes, Joel Kinnaman, and Brent Sexton, among others. (Hollywood Reporter)

Entertainment Weekly's Michael Ausiello is reporting that Syfy is teaming up with Pushing Daisies creator Bryan Fuller to develop a drama series based on John Christopher's novel, "The Lotus Caves." Fuller and Jim Grey will write the pilot script for The Lotus Caves, which--like the novel before it--will revolve around a group of "rebellious lunar colonists [who] dare to take a peek beyond their borders and discover a bunch of brainiac aliens living in the caves of the title." (Entertainment Weekly's Ausiello Files)

Could Portia de Rossi or Tony Hale be headed to The Office? New York Post's Jarett Wieselman looks at an unconfirmed report that says that Danny McBride will be dropping by Scranton this season but not as the replacement for Steve Carell's Michael Scott, who will instead be replaced by someone who once starred on Arrested Development. Wieselman then goes on to say that the most obvious suspects, should we believe the report, are Tony Hale, Jeffrey Tambor, and Portia de Rossi. (New York Post's PopWrap)

The date you're waiting for: the fifth and final season of Friday Night Lights will kick off on DirecTV on October 27th, according to Entertainment Weekly's Michael Ausiello. No word on when Season Five will turn up on NBC, though it's likely to air next summer on the Peacock. (Entertainment Weekly's Ausiello Files)

The Chicago Tribune's Maureen Ryan has an interview with Sons of Anarchy's Ron Perlman, who plays Clay Morrow on the gritty FX biker drama. "None of us really know where we go from week to week," Perlman told Ryan. "And there's something really exciting about that. I feel if Kurt needed for us to know where we needed to go from week to week, he would tell us if it was going to affect something in our playing of it. The hallmark of his writing is -- he writes in a way that's very vivid and the only thing you ever need to worry about is the moment that you're in. The kidnapping of the child is the event that drives at least the first few episodes. Of course, it's all hands on deck. Whatever is going on in [the characters'] personal relationships is shelved for the moment while we address ourselves to the matter at hand. But beyond that I really can't say. But my guess is -- and I'm like an audience member, in terms of [not knowing] where the show is going to be later in the season -- Kurt is too smart to introduce something without it, at some point, resolving itself. He doesn't feel like he's in any hurry to put all the cards out. That's my guess." (Chicago Tribune's The Watcher)

Vulture has an interview with former Lost star Michael Emerson about the release of the DVD and the twelve-minute epilogue entitled, "The New Man in Charge." "I was so pleased with it," said Emerson of Lost's finale. "Instead of employing some narrative device or science-fiction device or time-travel device, [the writers] humanized the whole affair and brought it back to characters and souls, and so I thought it was really a fine solution and one that I’m onboard with. And I’m especially delighted with the way they wrapped up the Benjamin Linus [story]." Asked about some of the negative reactions to the series finale, Emerson said, "It surprised me a bit because a lot of people who were unhappy had been misunderstanding the show for a long time, so why were they still watching it if they’d mixed up what they were seeing? But I guess that’s the deal: It works magically for all sorts of people at all different levels of understanding." As for the epilogue, he described it as a sort of "dessert" to be enjoyed after the main course. (Vulture)

USA Today's Whitney Matheson also has an interview with Emerson about the finale and the epilogue. Asked whether the epilogue was truly the end, Emerson said, "Yeah, they've always made that clear. I think we can take them at their word. These writers will never revisit the material, or at least not soon. And you'll never get the cast together in one place again. But as some people have noted, you might get a couple of cast members together to do something that takes off on a tangent." (USA Today's Pop Candy)

It looks like Jennifer Lopez won't be taking a spot at the judges table on American Idol after all. Citing a report by People, The Hollywood Reporter has a look at why talks with Lopez fell through: "Her demands got out of hand," an unnamed source told People. "Fox had just had enough." (The Hollywood Reporter)

Which brings us to this gem: Hollywood Reporter's James Hibberd offers seven reasons why there has been such a delay in FOX announcing replacements for the outbound American Idol judges. (Hollywood Reporter's The Live Feed)

20th Century Fox Television has signed a three-year overall deal with Family Guy writers Alec Sulkin and Wellesley Wild, under which they will remain aboard the FOX animated comedy while also developing new projects for the studio. (Variety)

Entertainment Weekly's Lynette Rice reports that CBS will debut its new daytime talk show The Talk, developed by Sara Gilbert, on Monday, October 18th. Series features six female hosts with kids, including Julie Chen, Sara Gilbert, Sharon Osbourne, Holly Robinson Peete, Leah Remini, and Marissa Jaret Winokur. (Entertainment Weekly's Hollywood Insider)

E4 has released the first photo of the cast of Season Five of Skins, featuring an entirely new cast of characters. (E4)

Syfy is planning holiday-themed episodes of its series Warehouse 13 and Eureka and has tapped Judd Hirsch and Paul Blackthorne to drop by Warehouse 13, while Chris Parnell and Matt Frewer will be stopping by Eureka this winter. (via press release)

Jay Mohr is set to guest star in the fourth episode of NBC's new legal drama Outlaw, where he will play Henry Ashford, whom Jimmy Smits' Cyrus Garza will face off with in court in a case involving a mother who accidentally kills her baby after locking it in a car, according to TV Guide Magazine's Will Keck. "NBC is keeping mum as to whether Cyrus or Jay's character, Henry Ashford, will be representing the bad mother," writes Keck. "The network says it will be a weekly guessing game as to which side of the law Outlaw Smits attaches himself." (TV Guide Magazine)

Nick Cannon will remain the chairman of TeenNick through January 2012 under an extension of the deal Cannon has with the Nickelodeon cable network. (Variety)

Stay tuned.

We'll Take a Cup of Kindness Yet: Welcome Distractions on Mad Men

At the end of it all, sometimes all we leave behind is a mark on the wall.

That seemed to be the message behind this week's beautiful and lyrical episode of Mad Men ("The Good News"), written by Jonathan Abrahams and Matthew Weiner and directed by Jennifer Getzinger, which seemed to offer the suggestion that just about everything in life--whether that be beer and abalone at the beach, an afternoon movie, or a rendezvous with a call girl--are in themselves welcome distractions from the true issues at hand, from the omnipresent threat of death and loss.

It's only fitting then that the distractions faced by Don Draper, Lane Pryce, and Joan Harris, are offered up as the calendar pages flit from one year to the next. New Year's Eve and New Year's Day represent the alpha and omega of the neverending cycle of life, the passage of time. It's only fitting that January should be named for the Roman god Janus, whose two heads looked in either direction and so too that "The Good News" should itself be set in the liminal period between 1964 and 1965.

It's also, for Don, mostly set in the space between destinations, between the workplace intrigue of Manhattan and the promise of relaxation in Acapulco, in California, where Don can truly be himself. Not the Don Draper of Wall Street Journal profiles or the recent divorcee, but his true self, Dick Whitman.

Throughout the series, the presence of Anna Draper has been keenly felt, both in terms of Dick's own usurping of her husband's identity but also for the relationship Dick forged with the real Don Draper's widow, a relationship with a woman that wasn't based on sex or marriage, that was void of power games or artifice. It was, really, the one true relationship in his life that was built upon honesty, even as it was borne from the biggest lie Dick/Don had ever told.

It's only fitting then that Don would go to see Anna now, his life in tatters after the destruction of his marriage, that he would seek to reconnect with one of the few positive influences on his life. When Anna tells Don that she's sorry that Betty broke his heart, the depth of that sympathy is palpable. "I know everything about you," Anna tells him later. "And I still love you."

The same can't be said about Betty, who left Don shortly after he came clean to her about his past and his real identity. The foundation of their marriage was built on quicksand, whereas he's been open and honest to Anna about who he really is, about his dreams, his fears, his failures, and his successes. More than his wife or children, Anna Draper knows Don more than any person ever has. Really, Anna is the only one qualified to answer the question raised in the season opener: "Who is Don Draper?"

It's said that we're alive so long as those who knew us carry us in their memories. The impending death of Anna Draper--to a cancer that she doesn't even know she carries in her bones--isn't just the passing of a confidante and friend. It's the passing of Dick Whitman, of the one person who knew just who Don Draper was and who loved him all the more for it. When she tells him that she's proud of him, it's more than just hollow words or an empty sentiment. Anna's love is a validation of the man Don can--and could--be, of his full potential and promise.

But nothing lasts forever, sadly. Anna's already polio-ravaged body is further invaded, the cancer eating away at her from the inside, just as her picture-perfect home is stained by water damage, a reminder of an invader that can't be kept out. Don's efforts to distract Anna, to conceal the truth from her about her condition are in keeping with his handling of the water stain: he applies a fresh coat of paint to make things appear to be fine. But underneath it all, the stain is still there. It might be hidden for now, but Don knows it's there, just beneath the surface.

Likewise, Don discovers that he can't stay in California; he can't keep applying coats of paint to something that he cherishes more than anything. If he stays, he'd have to tell her the truth and he leaves, promising to bring Sally and Bobby at Easter time, but not knowing truly if he'll ever see Anna again. Their goodbye, as Don chokes back tears, is likely the final one they'll share.

It's all the more gutting then just what Don chooses to leave on the wall. As Anna paints a flower--a symbol of a too-short life--Don inscribes something at the bottom of the wall ("Dick and Anna, '64"). It's a reminder that they were there, they shared a part of their lives, however brief, together and that they existed. It's more than many of us get and it's all the more heartbreaking to realize that soon, that too, will be painted over.

(It's also fitting that Don should learn of Anna's death after making a move on her niece Stephanie--who is "young and beautiful"--but not only are his advances rebuffed but he learns from Stephanie that Anna has terminal cancer and that the last few months of her life this is to be kept from her. Personally, I'm glad that Stephanie and Don didn't end up in bed together and that Stephanie didn't want to keep Anna's condition from him. However, Stephanie's mom, Patty, sees things different. Don is just "a man in a room with a checkbook." He has no say over Anna's life or her death.)

Rather than vacation in Acapulco, Don returns to New York, where he encounters Lane Pryce, himself attempting to find a welcome distraction from his own marital problems. A clerical error--an almost comical exchange of a bouquet of flowers meant for Joan--compounds the already perilous condition of his marriage and Lane is told not to fly to London and that his family won't be returning to the U.S.

The two men--both divorcees now--end up spending the day and the evening together, taking in a Godzilla movie, a steak dinner, a raunchy stand-up show, and two call girls. It's meant to be a welcome distraction for them both but the alcohol-fueled excursion and debauchery--from monster movies and masturbation jokes to oversized steaks and call girls Candace and Janine--turns into a morning of sobering recriminations. Their boys' night out now seems tawdry and sad the following day, as Lane settles up with Don over a glass of water, handing him $30 to take care of Janine, the hooker whose company he enjoyed.

It may have been a "magnificent year," but things are still precarious. The good news may never come for either of the men. Don's vacation turned into something heartbreaking. Lane's night of excess was a reminder of what he's lost. No matter how hard you try, some things can't be retrieved. And some things once lost, are gone forever.

For Joan, it's that fear that's almost paralyzing. The Joan we see on New Year's Eve, flower lei around her neck is vastly different than the headstrong and powerful woman who throws Lane's flowers at him and fires his incompetent secretary after she fails to admit responsibility for the "egregious" screw-up. Her attempts to salvage the holiday, to celebrate the turning over of the year as it happens in Hawaii, is an effort to hold onto Greg and to push the uncertainty that 1965 brings to the back of her mind. But, unfortunately, it's just a coat of paint.

As Joan cuts her finger attempting to make Greg freshly squeezed orange juice, he takes the opportunity to stitch her up. But in order to do so, he attempts to distract her as well, pretending there is a bird's nest on the ceiling, as one would a child. But rather than feel that he is patronizing her (as Joan assumed Lane was from his card and admonishment not to go cry), there's a tenderness here that's at odds with Greg's treatment of Joan last season and his rape of his wife. "I can't fix anything else," he tells her, "but I can fix this." Despite what has passed between them, I do believe he loves her.

It's a small moment of domesticity that conceals the true terror that Joan feels: that her husband will go off to war and will die in Vietnam. Even as she hopes to plan for the birth of a child (plans for which, fortunately, an illicit abortion from a "midwife," did not derail), the presence of death sits uncomfortably between them. Greg might be able to fix her cut but it's a painful reminder of just how little time they have been them as well as how unknown the coming year will be. Will he be gone in three months' time? Or six? Will he come back to her?

Ultimately, distractions are just that: distractions. In the cold light of morning, Don is still alone, Lane is still estranged from his wife, Greg will still go off to war and Joan may wind up a widow. All three attempt to take their minds off their troubles by escaping reality but life has a way of catching up with you. At the office, the conference table has finally arrived as the staffers of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce gather around to begin to plan the coming year.

It's a scene that's full of possibility for them all. Just what 1965 will bring none of them know but it's an effort to face the future head-on. Distractions past, they can get down to the business at hand. It may not be easy, it may be filled with loss, but they've turned over that calendar page and, like any of us, are taking it one day at a time.

Next week on Mad Men ("The Rejected"), an edict from Roger and Lane puts Pete in a personal dilemma.

Channel Surfing: Breaking Bad Won't Return Until July 2011, Nigel Lythgoe Closes Idol Deal, Zombies Vs. Vampires at NBC, and More

Welcome to your Thursday morning television briefing.

Could it be almost a year before Breaking Bad heads back to AMC? According to a Deadline interview with series lead Bryan Cranston, Season Four of Breaking Bad may not launch until July 2011, over a year after the end of last season. "I think what AMC is thinking here is there will be less competition for us -- particularly from the broadcast networks -- if we launch our season during the summer than if we come back again like we did this time in March," said Cranston. However, AMC and Sony Pictures Television will produce 3-4 minute mini-episodes of Breaking Bad that will run on AMC's website during the break. "The idea is to keep people aware and interested in the show during the long time away,” Cranston told Deadline. “But I, for one, am eager to make these little interstitials important. I don’t want them to be simply filler or recap, but something that actually moves the storyline forward. If we’re going to do it, it ought to be a real part of the larger show." (Deadline)

Well, at least FOX confirmed something: former American Idol executive producer Nigel Lythgoe will return to the musical competition series, where he will serve alongside Simon Fuller Cecile Frot-Coutaz, and Ken Warwick for Season Ten of Idol, which launches in January. "Since we launched the original Pop Idol in England, I’ve remained close with Simon Fuller," said Lythgoe in a statement. "Working as executive producer on American Idol for its first seven years not only was an inspirational journey into the heart of American pop culture, it opened my eyes to the untapped potential of the incredibly dynamic young people in this world. I have been able to continue discovering raw talent on So You Think You Can Dance, which I co-created with Simon. American Idol became a juggernaut of epic proportions, but to me it was always like home. I am elated and honored to be rejoining childhood friend and fellow executive producer Ken Warwick, and look forward to creating more magic." (Entertainment Weekly's Hollywood Insider)

Variety's Michael Schneider has a Q&A with Lythgoe about his return to American Idol in which they discuss his return to the series and his criticisms of the musical competition series. "I think some of my concerns were that over the last couple of years we've lost sight of the fact that the most important people in the production are the young artists," Lythgoe told Schneider. "And it's revolved around the judges, it's revolved around Kara coming in to make four judges, which often left them no time for them to talk at any great length. Certainly there are times I watched the show where Simon didn't even get a chance to say anything. Then it was about Paula leaving. Then it was all about Ellen joining. And somewhere in all of that muddle of judges the show was losing sight of the actual contestants. And I think we were also losing chemistry between the judges. And I will go back now and hopefully point out now that it isn't about stars, or what people did in the past of might do in the future that makes a good judge. It's about chemistry and it's about a team." (Variety's On the Air)

Could NBC be taking a page from AMC's playbook and going after the zombie-loving crowd? Deadline's Nellie Andreeva is reporting that NBC has signed a script deal for Austin Winsberg's spec script Zombies Vs. Vampires, described as a "fun buddy cop procedural" with supernatural overtones. Project, produced by Warner Bros. Television and Wonderland, is executive produced by McG, Peter Johnson, and Winsberg. "It is set in a world where zombies are a part of society, controllable with medication," writes Andreeva. "The show's two leads (one secretly a vampire) are cops assigned to a squad specifically formed to deal with 'zombie crime.'" (Deadline)

E! Online's Kristin Dos Santos has a series of video interviews with Chuck's Zachary Levi and the rest of the cast in which they tease details about Season Four, including the return of Nicole Ritchie, the casting of Linda Hamilton, Chuck and Sarah's relationship, and much more. (E! Online's Watch with Kristin)

AMC is said to be thisclose to handing out a series order to crime drama The Killing, based on the Danish series Forbrydelsen. (The US version is written by Veena Sud and directed by Patty Jenkins.) Project, from Fox Television Studios, stars Mireille Enos, Billy Campbell, Michelle Forbes, Brent Sexton, Kristin Lehman, Eric Ladin, Jamie Anne Allman, and Joel Kinnaman. [Editor: I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this pans out as I loved the pilot script and would watch Enos in anything.] (Deadline)

MAJOR SPOILER! Entertainment Weekly's Michael Ausiello has details on just who Timothy Olyphant (FX's Justified) will be playing on NBC's The Office when he drops by Scranton next year. Ausiello reports that Olyphant will be playing "a rival paper salesman with a deep, dark secret: He used to date Pam!" Watch out, Jim... (Entertainment Weekly's Ausiello Files)

Variety's Michael Schneider is reporting that former United States of Tara showrunner Jill Soloway has signed on to executive produce Zooey Deschanel's HBO comedy I'm With the Band, as well as Season Two of How to Make It in America. (Variety)

Russell Brand will play himself on the upcoming season of The Simpsons, reports TV Guide Magazine's Will Keck. Brand's episode, entitled "Angry Dad -- The Movie," is slated to air in early 2011 and will see him join Halle Berry and Ricky Gervais in the installment, which will feature "Bart and Homer [heading] to Los Angeles after they're nominated for an Academy Award for their animated short based on Bart's cartoon webseries, Angry Dad." (TV Guide Magazine)

NBC has pulled its self-help reality series Breakthrough with Tony Robbins from the schedule, effective immediately. The network will slate repeats of Minute to Win It in the timeslot. (Hollywood Reporter's The Live Feed)

Warner Bros. Television International has signed a package deal with UK's Five, under which the channel will receive exclusive terrestrial and digital right to Season Three of The Mentalist, while Five USA gets rights to Dark Blue and Blade, and Fiver gets Human Target. (Variety)

In other news, the studio is also set to acquire indie production company Shed Media (the makers of Supernanny and The Choir), in a deal said to be worth nearly £100 million. (Broadcast)

Stay tuned.

Channel Surfing: Fringe Fest, Diablo Cody Targets FOX, Carol Burnett to Be Sue's Mom on Glee, Ferrigno to Torment Chuck, and More

Welcome to your Wednesday morning television briefing.

Entertainment Weekly's Michael Ausiello caught up with Fringe star Jasika Nicole to get some information about Season Three of Fringe, kicking off this fall, and a "groundbreaking and mind-blowing" twist. "She is indeed," said Nicole when asked if Astrid would get more to do in Season Three. "And that's due to the fact that there are now two of her that I get to play, which is awesome. [For the first half] of the season, we're alternating episodes, so we've got one in the alternate universe and one in the present universe, so if you were to only [watch] every other episode, you would only see the story happening in one universe." Nicole told Ausiello that the two storylines will converge into a single stream where "everyone's world will be turned upside down." Wowsers. (Entertainment Weekly's Ausiello Files)

Diablo Cody is heading to FOX. The network signed a put-pilot deal with the Juno creator--who is the executive producer of Showtime's multiple-personality comedy United States of Tara--for comedy The Breadwinner, which will be produced by Warner Bros. Television, should FOX opt to order a pilot. Details on the plot of the project, which Cody will executive produce with Mason Novick, are being kept tightly under wraps. It's not the first time that Cody has sought to work with the network; she previously developed comedy Sydney Dare at FOX back in 2009. (Hollywood Reporter)

Stop the presses: Entertainment Weekly's Michael Ausiello is reporting that legendary comedienne Carol Burnett has been cast as the Nazi-hunting mother of Jane Lynch's Sue Sylvester on Glee. While details of her arrival at William McKinley High are being kept secret (for now, anyway), it's expected that Burnett will make her appearance in an October or November episode of Glee's second season and Ausiello also indicates that she will be turning up without Sue's father. (Entertainment Weekly's Ausiello Files)

In other casting news, Entertainment Weekly's Michael Ausiello is reporting that former Incredible Hulk star (and motivated home seller in I Love You, Man) Lou Ferrigno will guest star on Chuck this fall. Ferrigno, who is set to appear in the second episode of Season Four, will play "the bodyguard of an evil spy model (ex-Victoria's Secret Angel Karolina Kurkova." (Entertainment Weekly's Ausiello Files)

E! Online's Kristin Dos Santos has two video interviews with the stars of FOX's Bones, Emily Deschanel and David Boreanaz, in which the two talk about the power shift when Deschanel directs an episode of Bones this season and jokingly vows to make Boreanaz "pay." Plus, the duo tease details of the next season of Bones, including--SPOILER ALERT!--a potential death, a new love interest for Booth named Hannah, and much more. (E! Online's Watch with Kristin)

Sorry sci-fi fans: it turns out that Sky1 has dropped its plan to resurrect classic sci-fi series Blake's 7, created by Terry Nation, after announcing its plans to develop an update back in 2008. "Following the development process we have decided not to produce Blake's 7," said a Sky1 spokesperson. "However, Sky continues to invest heavily in original drama and it remains at the heart of our plans. We have just announced an extended run for the second series of Chris Ryan's Strike Back and we'll soon be unveiling a new long-running series for prime time." The satcaster will also not proceed with a spy drama that was to star Gillian Anderson (The X-Files). But the production company behind the resurrected Blake's 7 plans to shop the series elsewhere. "Sky's deciding to not proceed with the planned TV revival of Blake's 7 is obviously disappointing, but the development process has resulted in the dynamic reinvention of this 'branded' series ... There is a huge opportunity for investment in a TV series that is fully developed, has genuine global appeal and has exciting 360-degree exploitation opportunities," said a B7 Productions spokesperson. "With much praised scripts from lead writers Richard Kurti and Bev Doyle (Going Postal) and 60% of the finance already in place, by anyone's standard we have pulled together a compelling package. We are confident that this reboot of Blake's 7 has the creative and commercial credentials that will enable us to find a partner with the vision to recognise the strength and enduring appeal of the show and the opportunity it represents to produce a bold new drama series with significant international appeal." (Guardian)

Dallas Roberts (Rubicon) has been cast in a potentially recurring role on CBS' The Good Wife, where he will play Owen, Alicia's gay brother, according to Entertainment Weekly's Michael Ausiello. But don't look for the series to make a big deal out of the University of Oregon professor's sexual orientation. "“We just thought [it would be interesting] if it didn’t matter. Everybody around them thinks it’s an issue between them, but there’s no issue,” said executive producer Robert King. “We kind of like that it voids expectations of what will happen between them." (Entertainment Weekly's Ausiello Files)

TVGuide.com's Gina DiNunno has some further details about Roberts' Good Wife character and talks to executive producer David W. Zucker about Owen. "I think [creators and executive producers] Robert and Michelle [King] came up with a very sort of compelling and surprising way to introduce her brother into the world that immediately impacts [her] and Peter, and then gets us to explore a little bit of what their history was and how it pertains to their future," said Zucker. "What about Alicia's own familial experience informed the way she handled [the] with situation with Peter, and her vigilance about protecting the children and the family first and foremost? We were really interested in trying to start exploring, for Peter and Alicia, what that greater world is, especially as Peter is coming to the public eye in a different way now." (TVGuide.com)

So it turns out that Lost's enigmatic Man in Black does have a name. Sort of. TVOvermind has confirmed that Titus Welliver's character was named Samuel. Or, was on the back of his director's chair, anyway. The news doesn't exactly send ripples through the Lost community, but it does lay to rest one dangling plot thread. (via Blastr)

Jeff Goldblum will be departing Law & Order: Criminal Intent after only two seasons, citing uncertainty "surrounding the show's future." (Ahem.) News comes on the heels of the order for Law & Order: Los Angeles and the cancellation of the flagship Law & Order. (E! Online's Watch with Kristin)

Courtney Ford (Dexter) is heading to the CW's Vampire Diaries, according to Entertainment Weekly's Michael Ausiello, who reports that Ford will potentially recur as Vanessa, described as "a grad student at Duke who helps Damon, Alaric, and Elena go through Isobel’s old research." But Vanessa might be more than she seems as she's concealing a secret or two... (Entertainment Weekly's Ausiello Files)

Deadline's Nellie Andreeva is reporting that Colm Meaney (Get Him to the Greek) will star opposite Anson Mount, Dominique McElligott, and Common in AMC period drama pilot Hell of Wheels, about the building of the Transcontinental Railroad. Meaney will play Thomas "Doc" Durant, described as "a businessman determined to make his fortune building the transcontinental railroad, a man of vision and a self-serving opportunist who is capable of 'creative financing.'" (Deadline)

Sherry Stringfield has landed the lead in Josh Berman's new untitled Lifetime drama pilot, where she will play San Diego police detective Molly Collins, described as a "married mother of two on the verge of divorce, who, along with her partner Brooke Kross, investigate the city’s most high-profile crimes while navigating their divergent personal lives." (Deadline)

Disney Channel has assembled the cast for its upcoming original musical movie franchise, Lemonade Mouth, which follows a group of high school students who meet in detention and start a band. (Deadline)

Stay tuned.

Glad Tidings of Great Joy: Christmas Comes But Once a Year on Mad Men

If this is Christmas, we should be glad that it only comes once a year.

On this week's episode of Mad Men ("Christmas Comes But Once a Year"), written by Tracy McMillan and Matthew Weiner and directed by Michael Uppendahl, the holiday season is in full swing at the offices of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. Or at least as much as they can be when Lane is clutching the purse strings and the company is teetering on the edge of fiscal disaster.

Yet, the entire company is forced to put on a brave face--as do many of the series' individual characters this week--when Lucky Strike's Lee Garner Jr. demands an invitation for the company Christmas party and throws everything--from the festivities to the company's future--into chaos.

Meanwhile, Don attempts to come to terms with the fact that he'll be spending Christmas away from his children, Sally makes friends with a sociopath, Peggy contemplates giving herself to boyfriend Mark (Lost's Blake Bashoff), a familiar face returns bearing gifts, and things get even more awkward around the office.

So what did I think of this week's sensational episode? Pick out a Christmas tree, dump some eggs in Bobby's bed, pour yourself a stiff drink, and let's discuss "Christmas Comes But Once a Year."

Don Draper is unraveling before our eyes, really. The once stoic ad man has become, post-divorce, a shadow of his former self, a man heading towards becoming a drunk who can barely unlock the door to his sad bachelor pad and who beds his secretary simply because she's there with two aspirin and a sympathetic expression. That this depiction of Don is so at odds with the variations we've seen in the past--the grimly resolute Don who stole another man's identity, the doggedly optimistic Don who proposes to Betty, the vengeful man who drinks and screws his way around town--is the point. This is a new Don, one whose life has split open at the seams and who is so decidedly lonely, so terrifically isolated that he can't bear to discuss his life on a questionnaire or spend the evening alone.

That he tries and fails to bed his neighbor Phoebe (Nora Zehetner) should be an indication of where things are heading for Don, even as she informs him that she has experience taking men's shoes off because her father was a drunk. But as awkward as it would have been running into Phoebe on the building's landing, it's far worse that Don drunkenly takes advantage of the good nature of his secretary. Having struck out with Faye Miller (Cara Buono), who comes into his office not to flirt but to fight, Don's efforts to have some sort of companionship lead him to make an advance at Allison, a woman who is so enamored of her boss that she anticipates his every move and buys his children Christmas presents without asking any questions.

It's a mistake from the start. Despite his dalliances with Bobbi Barrett and Rachel Katz, Don has managed to largely keep his romantic life separate from his professional one. In pulling Allison down onto the couch, Don not only threads together those two distinct arenas of his life but makes a shockingly powerful call for help. Their act of coitus isn't just sex but an appeal for companionship that connects sharply with last week's slap across the face. Don is desperate to feel something, anything, to experience emotion or pleasure of some kind. That he asks Allison to stay afterwards (something the old Don would never have done) underlines this further. The empty apartment, the half-empty bed, the shoe polishing kit on the floor, they're all a reminder of just how desolate and vacant his life has become.

When Faye tells him that he'll be married again in a year, it's yet another slap. While Don might be furious with Betty, it seems that he too believes that this is just temporary. He's not ready to move on to a new relationship (hence, he doesn't call Bethany) nor is he ready to contemplate another marriage. (His third, if you count the sham marriage to Anna.)

But Don makes the situation between him and Allison even more painful by not directly addressing what had happened the night before and instead being all business... and then, after noticing the gift-wrapped presents she procured for his children, gives her a present of his own: two fifty dollar bills inside a card, her bonus. For all his charm and poise, Don can be monumentally blind when it comes to women. "I just wanted to say thank you for bringing my keys," he says without any real emotion.

Allison's smiles and warm manner indicate that she did think that this would turn into something more than just a professional relationship between boss and secretary, and yet Don seems to push her into the role of prostitute, acknowledging that he took advantage of her kindness yet paying her for her "services." The look of shame and horror as she returns to her desk and reads the card ("Thanks for all your hard work"), before she begins typing a letter (her resignation?), are more cutting than any dialogue.

Freddy Rumsen's return kicks up feelings that have lain dormant within Peggy Olsen as well. Bringing a $2 million Ponds account with him, Freddy rejoins the firm but finds himself enmeshed in conflict with Peggy from the start as he pushes her back into the role of the "office girl" and she accuses him of being "old fashioned." But their arguments--and the subsequent reconciliation--do kick up some issues for Peggy, who is attempting to wait to have sex with her boyfriend Mark.

While Mark reads her hesitation as Peggy being, yes, "old fashioned," the truth couldn't be further from that fact. Mark wants to be Peggy's first, unaware that she has not only slept with Pete and Duck but bore Pete's child. Peggy wants to be taken seriously, both as a prospective mate and as a career woman. If she gives herself to him, will he lose interest? Or, conversely, can she take control of her own destiny by having sex with him on her own terms?

In the end, Peggy realizes that she can have it all in a way that women of Freddy's generation couldn't; he sees young women as "angry" and that their sole desire is to get married. Peggy finally admits to him that she does want to be married some day. Her move to take her relationship with Mark to the next level underscores her own internal debate about value. As he asks her whether she feels different, the answer is clear: she does but not for the reasons he believes.

Elsewhere, Roger was forced--possibly for the first time in his life--into playing the part of the sycophant, into bending over backwards to please the client because without Lee's continued support of the agency, they'll have to close their doors. This means being forced into donning a Santa suit, handing out presents, and smiling glibly when Lee cracks jokes about Roger's history of heart attacks and gets a little too close to Jane. His reaction is at odds with Joan's, as the office manager dons a costume of her own--that red dress with the bow on the back that Roger loved so much--and plays hostess (or Mrs. Claus, one imagines) for Lee, organizing a game of pass the orange and upping the party quotient by about a hundred in order to keep up appearances.

The scene with the Polaroid camera, as Lee snaps picture after picture of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce staffers sitting on Roger's knee, underscores just how much he's toying with them and putting them in their place. I half-wondered if whether Lee would can the agency at the end of the night but he wanders off, a placated and spoiled child who received everything they wanted at Christmas.

But Lee's mind games are child's play compared to the complex plots unleashed by the mentally unstable Glen Bishop, whom Sally runs into at the Christmas tree lot. Joined by their shared experiences of divorce, Sally and Glen form a tentative friendship that is based on lies and half-truths. But it's Glen's Christmas present to Sally--the destruction of the home she so bitterly hates (a place where she believes she can turn the corner and see Don) and the piece of twine he leaves for her--that really shows off his skills as a future sociopath. Breaking into the family's Ossining home, Glen and a friend trash the entire house, dumping eggs into Bobby's bed, emptying the fridge, and generally making a mess everywhere, except for Sally's bedroom, which remains untouched.

The entire affair--and the twine left for her atop her pillow--remind me of a dead bird or mouse that a cat might bring its owner. It's a present of sorts, borne of out of an innate need to destroy, but it's horrific rather than pleasurable. Still, it's a reminder to Sally that there is someone who understands what she's going through, someone who would do something spectacular in order to shake up her new reality. I just worry just what plans Glen might have for young Sally, who, after all, is the spitting image of Betty Draper herself. Might this develop into a friendship or something more worrisome? Hmmm...

But while Sally might not feel quite so alone, that's not true for her father. The final scene of the episode depicts Don leaving the now-empty office alone, his briefcase and those Christmas presents clutched tightly to him. For all the glitter and shine of the wrapping, they might as well be a life preserver that he holds to his chest. I just hope that Don, alone once again, chooses to swim rather than sink.

Next week on Mad Men ("The Good News"), Don heads off to Acapulco; back at the office, Joan and Lane fight.

TCA Awards: Critics Honor Glee, Modern Family, The Pacific, Lost, Breaking Bad, Jane Lynch, Julianna Margulies, and More

At an awards ceremony hosted by Parenthood's Dax Shepard this evening in Beverly Hills, the Television Critics Association announced their award winners for 2010 as part of the annual summer press tour held twice a year by the professional organization.

Among the winners: Glee, Modern Family, The Pacific, Lost, Breaking Bad, Jane Lynch, and The Good Wife's Julianna Margulies.

Glee took home the top prizes for both Program of the Year and Outstanding New Program while the FOX musical-comedy's Jane Lynch walked away with the prize for Individual Achievement in Comedy. Her counterpart on the drama side? Julianna Margulies, who walked away with the award for Individual Achievement in Drama.

ABC's Modern Family was named the recipient of Outstanding Achievement in Comedy, while Lost and AMC's Breaking Bad tied for Outstanding Achievement in Drama.

In the other categories, James Garner received the Career Achievement award, while the Heritage Award went to M*A*S*H. The news and information category went to Discovery's Life, Nick Jr.'s Yo Gabba Gabba took home the top prize in Youth Programming, and HBO's World War II mini-series The Pacific was awarded an outstanding achievement prize in the movies, miniseries, and specials division.

UPDATE: Just home from the TCA Awards themselves. The highlights of the evening? Dax Shepard hosting (seriously, I take back every bad thing I've said about Dax over the years) and doing both a pitch-perfect Owen Wilson impression (admonishing a "fat" Luke Wilson for doing those ubiquitous mobile phone TV ads) and Arnold Schwarzenegger to boot; Tom Hank's acceptance speech for The Pacific ("This is the last time I f---ing dress up for you); the entire Television Critics Association singing happy birthday to Modern Family's Rico Rodriguez on his twelfth birthday; Damon Lindelof reading off mean-spirited tweets he received after the Lost series finale; the standing ovation for M*A*S*H; Modern Family co-creator Steve Levitan taking some digs at former ABC Entertainment president Steve McPherson; and Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan teasing four things that Jane Lynch's Sue Sylvester says in the second season premiere of Glee, including "You should’ve gone with the poop cookies, Will." (Yes, seriously.)

The full press release--along with the full list of the winners--can be found below.

THE TELEVISION CRITICS ASSOCIATION ANNOUNCES 2010 TCA AWARDS WINNERS

Fox’s “Glee” Takes Home Multiple Honors as “Program of the Year,” “Outstanding New Program” and “Individual Achievement in Comedy” for winning actress Jane Lynch
“Modern Family,” “The Pacific,” “The Good Wife,” “Life,” “Breaking Bad” and “Lost” are honored along with “M*A*S*H” and James Garner
BEVERLY HILLS – Members of the Television Critics Association (TCA) recognized the top programs and actors representing the 2009-2010 TV season tonight at its 26th Annual TCA Awards, held at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. Dax Shepard, star of NBC’s “Parenthood,” introduced the ceremony that bestowed 11 awards in categories reflecting comedy, drama, miniseries, news and youth programming at its annual event in conjunction with the TCA’s summer press tour.

The biggest winner of the night was Fox’s musical ensemble comedy “Glee” which was the only series to win multiple awards from the 200-plus professional TV critics association, garnering the top honor “Program of the Year,” as well as “Outstanding New Program,” and “Individual Achievement in Comedy,” with lead actress Jane Lynch’s victory.

ABC’s “Modern Family” was voted “Outstanding Achievement in Comedy,” and ABC’s “Lost” and AMC’s “Breaking Bad” tied as the victors in the category of “Outstanding Achievement in Drama.”

Nick Jr.’s children’s show “Yo Gabba Gabba” won its second consecutive TCA Award as “Outstanding Achievement in Youth Programming,” and Discovery Channel’s “Life” series took the top honors as “Outstanding Achievement in News & Information.”

Julianna Margulies, star of CBS’s “The Good Wife,” received the award for “Individual Achievement in Drama,” and HBO’s World War II miniseries epic “The Pacific” garnered “Outstanding Achievement in Movies, Miniseries and Specials.”

In addition to recognizing the year’s finest programming, the TCA bestowed a Heritage Award trophy to CBS’ former series “M*A*S*H” for the cultural and social impact that program has had on society.

The organization also presented actor James Garner with a Career Achievement Award for the influence his work has had on the small screen.

2010 TCA Award recipients are as follows:
• PROGRAM OF THE YEAR: “Glee” (FOX)
• OUTSTANDING NEW PROGRAM: “Glee” (FOX)
• INDIVIDUAL ACHIEVEMENT IN COMEDY: Jane Lynch, “Glee” (FOX)
• OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT IN COMEDY: “Modern Family” (ABC)
• OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT IN DRAMA: TIE - “Lost” (ABC) and “Breaking Bad” (AMC)
• INDIVIDUAL ACHIEVEMENT IN DRAMA: Julianna Margulies, “The Good Wife” (CBS)
• OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT IN NEWS & INFORMATION: “Life” (Discovery)
• OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT IN YOUTH PROGRAMMING: “Yo Gabba Gabba” (NICK JR.)
• OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT IN MOVIES, MINISERIES & SPECIALS: “The Pacific” (HBO)
• HERITAGE AWARD: “M*A*S*H*” (CBS)
• CAREER ACHIEVEMENT: James Garner

ABOUT THE TELEVISION CRITICS ASSOCIATION

The Television Critics Association represents more than 200 journalists writing about television for print and online outlets in the United States and Canada. For 26 years the TCA has honored outstanding achievement in television and enduring contributions to the medium’s heritage through the TCA Awards. Membership in the Television Critics Association is open to full-time TV writers at newspapers, magazines, trade publications, news wire services, news syndicates, and text-based Internet news organizations. For additional information on the TCA, please visit www.tvcritics.org

Not All Conspiracies Are Theories: Brief Thoughts on AMC's Rubicon

While you can read my feature piece on AMC's conspiracy thriller Rubicon here, I thought I'd also offer my brief thoughts on the first four episodes of the drama itself.

I found Rubicon--which stars James Badge Dale, Miranda Richardson, Lauren Hodges, Arliss Howard, Jessica Collins, Dallas Roberts, and Christopher Evan Welch--an intriguing glimpse behind the curtain of the intelligence community, where the focus wasn't on dashing Jack Bauer types but rather the analysts who are forced to pull together information and offer suggestions to an array of agencies on supported actions.

It's this specifically that provides the series' fourth episode--the best of the initial installments--its emotional heft, as the analysts at API are forced to content with a weighty moral decision that will impact the lives of countless people.

However, while there's a biting intelligence to Rubicon (which was created by Jason Horwitch and now overseen by Henry Bromell), it's nearly undone by its own languorously plodding pacing. AMC series aren't known initially for bolting out of the gate but there's a glacial quality to the unfolding plots here, a dual track of meandering currents that makes it hard to get into the overarching conspiracy. Not helping matters either: it's difficult to care about any of these characters in the first few episodes.

The aforementioned fourth episode goes to some lengths to add some much needed depth to both the analysts, Will Travers (James Badge Dale), and their shadowy boss Truxton Spangler (Michael Cristofer), particularly when the latter two embark on a trip to Washington D.C. Their strained interactions--which come to a head over a briefcase, of all things--provide some unexpected sparks as well as some well-earned tension there.

When Spandler admonishes Will about his low-key messenger bag because it lacks a "security tether," one can't help but feel that he might be talking about Rubicon itself. It needs not only an emotional tether but also a strong pull in the right direction.

Rubicon premieres Sunday evening at 8 pm ET/PT with a special two-hour launch (which includes the pilot that received its own sneak peek a few weeks back) on AMC.

The Daily Beast: "Rubicon's Paranoia TV"

Looking to dive deeper into AMC's new conspiracy thriller Rubicon?

Head over to The Daily Beast, where you can read my latest feature, entitled "Rubicon's Paranoid TV," where I talk to showrunner Henry Brommel and stars James Badge Dale and Miranda Richardson about the AMC drama and place in within the context of both 1970s conspiracy thrillers like The Conversation, All the President's Men, Klute, The Parallax View, and Three Days of the Condor and our current political climate post-9/11.

Rubicon premieres Sunday evening at 8 pm ET/PT with a special two-hour launch (which includes the pilot that received its own sneak peek a few weeks back) on AMC.

Channel Surfing: Damages Season Four Details, Susan Sarandon Gets Miraculous, RTD Teases Torchwood, Fringe, and More

Welcome to your Tuesday morning television briefing.

Now that the ink has dried on Damages's DirecTV deal, Entertainment Weekly's Michael Ausiello talks to executive producers Todd A. Kessler, Glenn Kessler, and Daniel Zelman about whether the format for the serpentine legal drama will be altered for its fourth and fifth seasons, whether the budget will be affected, why Ellen has gotten past the fact that Patty tried to have her killed, who will be returning, and a host of other issues. "DirecTV wants us to do the show that we’ve been doing," said Zelman. "If anything, they want us to push what we’ve been doing even further. They’re encouraging us to be as bold as possible, which is something we strive for anyway. There have been no discussions about altering the show in any fundamental way." Except for the fact that the episodes will be longer, that is. "What’s exciting for us as creators is that on the 101 Network there are no commercials, so it’ll be an uninterrupted hour," said Todd A. Kessler. "And that lends itself to the type of storytelling we do." Production on Season Four begins in January. (Entertainment Weekly's Ausiello Files)

The cast of HBO's drama The Miraculous Year--from writer John Logan and director Kathryn Bigelow--just keeps getting better and better. Susan Sarandon (The Lovely Bones) will join Norbert Leo Butz, Frank Langella, Hope Davis, Lee Pace, Patti LuPone, Eddie Redmayne, and Linus Roach, among others in the cast of the drama pilot, which follows the lives of a wealthy Manhattan family. Sarandon, who will guest star in the pilot, will play Patty Atwood, the director and choreographer for the new show that Norbert Leo Butz's Terry is mounting. (Deadline)

Russell T Davies has teased information about the upcoming fourth season of Torchwood that will air in the US on Starz next year, telling a journalist from SFX that it will be very dark indeed, if not darker than Torchwood: Children of Earth. "Actually, this story is also very dark," said Davies. "I think with that, Torchwood found its feet. People found something very compelling and very chilling about it. I love the way people got on their high horse saying, 'Oh, he killed his grandson!' Hello! He saved every single child in the world! If you would fail to do that then you're the monster, frankly. It's this extraordinary treatment that only science fiction heroes get You find that. If ever a word is said out of place by the Doctor or Captain Jack, or even by Sarah Jane sometimes, people throw their hands up in horror, whereas in any other drama any character is capable of any thing at any time. That's the only way to write, and it's the same for these people as well. I thought it was fascinating and challenging what he did there, but hard—it was so hard. I do think with the whole of Children Of Earth we found a new heartland for Torchwood." (via Blastr)

Entertainment Weekly's Michael Ausiello has a video interview with the stars of FOX's Fringe, in which Anna Torv, Josh Jackson, and John Noble discuss Season Three, the romance between Olivia and Peter, and familial bonds. Well worth a look if you don't mind vague spoilers. (Entertainment Weekly's Ausiello Files)

The Chicago Tribune's Maureen Ryan talks to Bruce Miller and Jaime Paglia, the producers of Syfy's Eureka about Felicia Day and Wil Wheaton's upcoming turns on the dramedy series as well as about James Callis' Dr. Grant. According to Paglia, Day will play a "very eccentric scientist, someone who was invited to be at Eureka but turned it down," when the series returns for the back half of its season in 2011. According to Ryan, Day's character will be "brought in to consult on a problem and Day's character and the character played by Wheaton, who will appear in several episodes, will be involved in a love triangle with a Eureka regular. The producers wouldn't say who it is, but I'd bet money that it's Fargo." (Chicago Tribune's The Watcher)

Glee fans, say goodbye to Coach Tanaka. TV Guide Magazine's Will Keck is reporting that Patrick Gallagher--who plays the surly high school coach/gym teacher, is not expected to return for the second season of Glee this fall and the producers will be introducing a new character--Dot Jones' Shannon Beiste--as the new football coach at William McKinnley High. "As he has not been written into the show's first few episodes," writes Keck, "it appears that Tanaka ran his course after failing in his attempt to marry Emma." (TV Guide Magazine)

Liam Neeson is set to guest star on an upcoming episode of Showtime's Laura Linney-led dark comedy The Big C, where he will play Bee Man, an eccentric man whom Cathy consults for a possible cancer treatment. (via press release)

Nigel Lythgoe is said to be thisclose to finalizing a deal that will see him return to FOX's American Idol as an executive producer for the tenth season. Lythgoe is widely expected to close the deal and serve alongside Ken Warwick, Simon Fuller, and Cecile Frot-Coutaz. "Fox is seeking to bring back Lythgoe to work on the hit series as part of a master plan to reboot the show following the exit of top judge Simon Cowell," writes The Hollywood Reporter's James Hibberd. "In addition, Idol fans can add pop star Justin Timberlake to the list of potential Cowell replacements. Timberlake, along with legendary singer Elton John, is on Idol producer 19 Entertainment chief Simon Fuller's wish list." (Hollywood Reporter's The Live Feed)

Deadline's Nellie Andreeva is reporting that Common (Date Night) has been cast in AMC period drama pilot Hell on Wheels, the first talent attachment to the drama, which depicts the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad. Common will play Elam, described as "a freed slave who comes west seeking work on the railroad and his place in the world" and who, "as a half black, half white man... does not completely belong to either world." (Deadline)

G4 has purchased four anime-inspired series based on Marvel characters from Sony Pictures Entertainment. The cabler has ordered twelve episodes each of X-Men, Wolverine, Iron Man and Blade, which it will launch in 2011. Marvel Entertainment will produce with Madhouse and each of the anime series will have some thread connecting it to Asia in some way. [Editor: the inclusion of Wolverine here then makes sense, given his history in Japan, but X-Men? Interesting.] (Variety)

It's thought quite elementary that BBC One's new mystery series Sherlock--a modern-day version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's sleuth from Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss--will be recommissioned for a second season after 7.5 million viewers tuned in on Sunday to watch the first episode. (Broadcast)

In other UK news, British viewers will be able to watch the CW's Nikita and NBC's Chase, following a deal between studio Warner Bros. Television and The Living TV Group (a division of BSkyB) that will bring the series to Living. Nikita will air this fall on the channel, while Chase will jump across the pond in 2011. (Hollywood Reporter)

Deadline's Nellie Andreeva is reporting that Jeff and Jackie Filgo have left ABC's comedy pilot Awkward Situations For Men, which is being reworked and will be reshot. The cast of the original pilot--Danny Wallace, Tony Hale, and Laura Prepon--will return for the redone pilot though studio Warner Bros. Television will have to find a replacement for the Filgos, who wrote the pilot with Wallace and served as executive producers on the project. (Deadline)

TV Guide Magazine's Will Keck is reporting that an earthquake will rock Los Angeles in the September 13th season premiere of 90210. "We wanted to open the season with an event that has both physical and emotional ramifications for several people," co-executive producer Jennie Snyder Urman told Keck and added that the incident will seriously affect one character. "One of them has a very serious injury that takes time to resolve and sort of changes the direction of his or her life." (TV Guide Magazine)

Epix has acquired rights to stand-up comedy film Louis C.K.: Hilarious, which premiered at Sundance earlier this year. The pay cabler will air the film on September 18th on Epix, its website, and its on demand service before Comedy Central gets a second window in 2011. (Variety)

CBS and CBS Studios have signed a talent holding deal with former King of Queens star Leah Remini, who will also serve as one of the hosts of CBS' new mom-centric daytime talk show. Under the terms of the deal, Remini will star in a new half-hour comedy pilot for the network. (Deadline)

Former ITV managing director Lee Bartlett has returned Stateside, where he has moved into the business affairs EVP position at Discovery Communications. He'll be based in Los Angeles and will report to Peter Ligouri. (Variety)

Stay tuned.