Season 2 Episode 8 – “A Night to Remember” Peggy stops by to visit Anita and listens to her complain about her husband and mother. It’s a very simple scene beautifully acted by the both of them that really makes it feel like they’re sisters. Fr. Gill stops by to...

Season 2 Episode 8 – “A Night to Remember” It’s a big night in the Draper residence. They’re having a dinner party for Don’s work colleagues and everything needs to be perfect, a situation that pushes Betty’s day-to-day need for surface perfection...

Season 2 Episode 8 – “A Night to Remember” Harry Crane is the new head and sole member of the television department and finds that he can’t do the work alone. He needs someone to read scripts of upcoming television shows and flag anything that may be of interest or...

Season 2 Episode 1 – “For Those Who Think Young” After the shock she received at the end of Season 1 (spoilers going forward, so you’re warned), we see an efficient, confident and knowledgeable Peggy going through her work day as if nothing had happened to her. She has...

Season 2 Episode 1 – “For Those Who Think Young” Betty and her friend Sarabeth spend time at the stables, a haven for rich bored housewives in their area. They both go on and on about Arthur, the young man taking riding lessons upon the orders of his very rich fiancee. Both...

Season 2 Episode 1 – “For Those Who Think Young” Joan surveys the Sterling Cooper landscape in search of an appropriate spot for the exciting new Xerox machine. Joan gets a little stern with the girls after they protest the suggestion of putting it in the break room and...

If you’re over the age of 45 and were raised Catholic, the characters of Katherine Olson (played by Myra Turley) and Anita Olson Respola (played by Audrey Wasilewski), Peggy’s mother and sister, will more than likely seem very familiar. Katherine and Anita are very much peripheral...

It’s very gratifying to read all the comments to the effect of “I’ve never watched it before, but this series of posts is making me want to check out Mad Men,” but we implore those of you who have not seen all of Season 1 and are planning to: PLEASE DON’T READ...

Season 1 Episode 9 – “Shoot” Betty does a little springtime pruning and smiles and waves to her neighbor while he releases his pigeons. She and the kids watch them fly away. Betty in the middle of a tranquil suburban utopia. By all appearances she is living the dream her...

Season 1 Episode 8 – “The Hobo Code” Another busy day for Joan. First, she drops off breakfast for the switchboard operators (because she had a favor to ask them), later she walks into the kitchen to hear the news that Belle Jolie loved Peggy’s copy (at first, she...

In many ways, the story of Mad Men is as much the story of Peggy Olson (played by Elisabeth Moss) as it is the story of the tortured Don Draper. Almost all of the characters on Mad Men are stuck in the ’50s or ill-prepared for the upheaval to come of the 1960s. All of them except Peggy,...

Betty Draper. How does one sum up this character when she is such a lightning rod for conflicting opinions? Victim of the pre-feminist times or bad mother? Spoiled little rich girl or long-suffering wife? The fact of the matter is, she’s pretty much all of these things. The beauty of...

Part of the reason we wanted to get at least one Joan post under our belts was because one simply cannot discuss Jane Siegel Sterling (played by Peyton List) without having some base understanding of Joan’s wardrobe. Jane was designed to be the Joan of her generation and her outfits...

It’s TIME, bitches! We know we said we were going to work our way up to the trifecta of fashiony Mad Men goodness (otherwise known as Betty, Peggy, and Joan), and believe us, we still have plenty of lower-tier characters’ costumes to look at. In fact we kind of can’t wait to...

Once you start looking at the fashions of Mad Men from a character perspective, a whole bunch of doors open up unexpectedly. Nowhere in any of our plans for this series did the names of Mona and Margaret Sterling (played by Talia Balsam and Elizabeth Rice, respectively) come up. They were...

Well before the seismic changes that characterized the end of season 3, the changes in both Trudy and the Campbell marriage were evident from the very first episode on. A marriage that formerly appeared to be little more than a disaster somehow righted itself and became a true partnership...

“They taught us at Barnard about that word, ‘utopia’. The Greeks had two meaning for it: ‘eu-topos’, meaning the good place, and ‘u-topos’ meaning the place that cannot be.”   Season 1 Episode 6 – “Babylon” Rachel meets...

Rather than do another Rachel Menken post, we thought we’d continue our look at Mad Men fashion by taking a moment to examine one of our favorite characters on the show, from both a personality and a fashion perspective. Costume Designer Janie Bryant has said that Trudy is one of her...

Unsurprisingly, if you’re doing a series of posts on the fashion of Mad Men and you want to work your way up to the inevitable Joan and Betty posts, the beginning of the series might as well be called “Don’s Mistresses,” because after examining Bobbie Barrett’s...

Darlings, we are so very excited about this series (you heard us: “series”) of posts. You see, we got it in our heads that we wanted to do a Top Ten Betty Draper Looks post as a way of counting down (and building up excitement) to the Season 4 premiere of Mad Men in a couple of...