Let’s blame it on Jon Hamm. The second episode in the series was the first to be directed by the show’s lead actor. It was also the first to be shot, so perhaps nerves played a part. Either way, I only dare whisper, it wasn’t that good.
We knew it was going to be Betty’s episode from the pre-credit flashbacks (“Laaaast week on Mad Men”). There she was in the fourth series, the Grace Kelly lookalike, a cold-hearted mother-from-hell, sylph-like and beautiful, and here she is now – her children struggling (and failing) to zip her into a dress. Betty is fat. The impossible has happened. And my, did the show tell us a hundred different ways. We see Betty eating crisps, we see Betty’s fat mother-in-law tell her to get herself in shape, we see Betty’s even fatter and highly unrealistic body double climb out of a bath. I don’t know if it was the bad fake fat they applied to her face – her features were sandwiched in prosthetic – or the frequent mentions of the fact that she is fat, or Henry Francis’s plaintive cries that he doesn’t notice the fat, but the fat theme seemed too un-Mad Men in its obviousness and the way we were asked to gawp at Betty shovelling ice cream and compare her to willowy Megan in her slick little outfits.
There was a serious side to the fat, of course. Betty, possibly, had cancer. A disease which was still taboo (you’d never tell the kids you had it) was also a death sentence in the sixties, and the idea of spoilt, childlike Betty, of all people, having to face her imminent mortality was potentially fascinating. But the script let down its subject. It’s so unlike Mad Men to over-explain, to lose its enigma, that it feels almost sacrilegious to criticise it for doing exactly that. I mean, seriously, a dream sequence with the kids swathed in black, Sally upturning Betty’s empty chair, and Betty invisible to them all? Dream sequences are wincey at the best of times – but compare that to the brilliantly strange one in the last series where she goes into labour, and floats down the corridor, in a sort of psychedelic trance. The death dream, by contrast, took a baseball bat to subtlety – she might as well have written a list of her innermost fears, in alphabetical order, and recited them to the camera.
The episode was dominated by Betty, but there were brief detours for a new hire (wild, Jewish, a Peggy-provoker: potential excellent) and a Rolling Stones gig, which Harry and Don attented in a ludicrous attempt to persuade the band to star in a Heinz commercial. It was supposed to be comic – but Harry has become too hateful and cartoon-like to actually be funny. Pete also had a moment of gloating glory after signing the Mohawk airlines account, to which he patronisingly assigned Roger. (And there it was again – Mad Men betraying its true self, as Roger stomped out of a meeting and moaned to Don, barely able to offer up a wisecrack). Let’s just put it all down to first-night nerves and Hamm’s dodgy direction, console ourselves that last week was a joy, and pray that next week the show will return to its artful, unexpected best.
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