Mad Men returns to AMC tonight for the beginning of the end. Here’s all you need to know.
Part 1 of the seventh and final season debuts at 9 p.m. There will be seven episodes in Part 1, with the final seven coming in Part 2 next spring.
Part 1 is labeled “The Beginning”; Part 2 is “The End of an Era.”
I’ll not attempt a long, involved recap for one of the most honored dramas in recent years. The series has won 15 Emmys, including the best drama Emmy its first four years running.
If you’re a fan, you already know all about the series by now. If not, you won’t care anyway.
As far as what to expect in Season 7, AMC and creator/ writer Matt Weiner have been especially tight-lipped.
The AMC press screener site came slathered with admonitions to not reveal stuff, including the year in which the season takes place (we were up to November 1968 at the end of last season), Don Draper’s (Jon Hamm) work status, new characters, the presence of something that if I mentioned it would give the thing away, and the relationship between two characters whose names I can’t reveal without cluing you into what AMC wants to be a surprise.
About tonight’s episode, “Time Zones,” AMC only reveals: “Don makes a new friend. Joan meets a client for drinks. Peggy hears impressive new work. Roger has a puzzling phone call.”
Does that pique your interest? I suspect not, so let’s throw in a few tidbits from Weiner’s recent interview with Variety.
“Once I knew what [the ending] was, I could see that there are things throughout the entire series that will seem related to it,” Weiner says. “Certainly there are things in these first seven episodes that you’ll go back to and be able to say, ‘Oh there it is.’”
About the split final season, Weiner says, “Creatively, we tried to see it as one season, but right away you come to the realization that you need to have two premieres and two finales.”
That’s the same bifurcated model used successfully for The Sopranos and Breaking Bad. It allows the network to milk that cash cow to the last drop.
“The first seven are about the material world - ambition and the things we can control,” Weiner adds. “Don has had almost everything taken away from him: his position, his status, his confidence.”
Don, you’ll recall, was semi-fired by his own ad agency at the end of Season 6.
“Watching [that] was hard for a lot of people. We’ve seen him go from a hungry and insecure person to someone who’s got growing children, a second marriage, and he’s on this third company.
“Then in the second half, we’re dealing with the immaterial. What happens to these people when [their] material needs are met. What else is on their mind? Love? God? I don’t want people to be afraid, and think it’s going to be a big dream sequence. But it is looking at the outside and the inside of these people.”
In essence, we have two seven-episode seasons that will differ thematically.
Tonight’s satisfying episode is fast-paced, packing several story lines, twists and foreshadowing into a single hour. While the focus remains on Don, expect to get meaningful moments from Roger Sterling (John Slattery), Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser), Joan Harris (Christina Hendricks), Ken Cosgrove (Aaron Staton) and Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss).
And so begins Don Draper’s final voyage of discovery. He’s broken. How does he fix himself?
Head’s up. Silicon Valley, a new geek-centric satire/comedy from Mike Judge (Beavis and Butt-Head, King of the Hill, Office Space), is airing at 9 p.m. today on HBO. The series debuted last week, so you’ll need to get caught up.
This is funny stuff. It’s about the bizarre world of nerdy programmers and startup companies and the millions of dollars bandied about when one of them stumbles upon a game-changing file compression algorithm.
It’s HBO, so there’s adult stuff here.
Final episodes. Warehouse 13 returns at 8 p.m. Monday on Syfy for its final, truncated fifth season.
The series, starring Eddie McClintock and Joanne Kelly, will wrap things up with only six episodes. I know that’s not many, but at least there will be closure.
Boston bombers. National Geographic Channel airs a two-hour special at 8 p.m. today to mark the one-year anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombings.
Inside the Hunt for the Boston Bombers is a “factual drama” featuring first-person interviews with the key players and compelling accounts from survivors, woven together with re-enactments to tell the tale of the 102-hour manhunt that resulted in one bombing suspect dead and the other captured.
The special also incorporates media footage, amateur video and “unprecedented access” to the investigative agencies.
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Style, Pages 54 on 04/13/2014