- Michael Yarish/AMC
- Don Draper (Jon Hamm) and Megan Draper (Jessica Pare) in Mad Men
“Are you ready? Because I want you to pay attention. This is the beginning of something.”
We’ve spent the better part of six seasons exploring the following, and from lots of angles: Who is Don Draper? We seem to get more insight when he loses scope—or a wife or a lover or a job or anything that’s integral to the persona he’s created—so a good thing about season seven is that he’s lost a lot! He’s been put out to pasture (temporarily, supposedly) by SC&P, and he doesn’t have Megan to lean on for the five days a week when she’s in LA and he’s in NYC. The former being more important than the latter. He’s adrift. He’s lying to everyone about having to go to work, even a strange lady (or a familiar Neve Campbell) to whom he becomes attracted on a transcontinental flight. I had the thought when things started to unravel last season: Is Don even still desirable? If he doesn’t have a seat in the boardroom, does anyone want him in the bedroom? He wouldn’t be the sexual sociopath we know and love if he wasn’t plagued by those thoughts.
