Anticipation

It's already time for the third season finale of Mad Men, which airs this Sunday night, November 8th. The waits between seasons are tough, but I don't think I'd want them to do more than 13 episodes a season. I think it's better to produce a season of a show (not just Mad Men, but any show, really) that's as good as can be and leaves the audience wanting more. This past spring and summer, FX aired a 22-episode season of Rescue Me, and while I thought it was one of the show's better seasons overall, it felt a little stretched out and overlong by the time the end rolled around.

One of the quirks surrounding the production of Mad Men is the terse, obtuse episode descriptions that deliberately give almost no information about what's going to happen in a given week's episode. These blurbs, which appear in listings and accompany DVR recordings, always pull out the most minuscule and unimportant bits of information, or understate more significant developments.

For example (this is gonna get kinda spoilery), for last season's episode "The Mountain King" the blurb says, "Don meets up with an old friend." Technically that was true, but (a) it was during his business trip in LA when he abandoned his work and literally disappeared for weeks, and (b) that "old friend" was his fake ex-wife. Or from this season's episode "Souvenir": "Pete helps a neighbor." Sure, Pete helped the neighbor's au pair deal with a stained dress that belonged to her employer, but then he also helped himself to the au pair, so I guess by "helps" they meant "drunkenly forces himself upon." See?

The same vagueness and misdirection extends to the little preview clips at the end of each episode. These are always disjointed assemblages of moments from the upcoming show that have nothing to do with each other, and are sequenced in such a way that they suggest Something Big is going to happen, but it's deliberately misleading: what they portend is never what actually ends up happening.

Clearly show creator/executive producer Matt Weiner keeps a very firm hand on exactly what information is revealed about each week's episode, and I suspect that if it was entirely up to him, the blurbs would contain nothing more than the episode titles, and there would be no preview clips at all.

Before seasons two and three began, there was much speculation as to how much time would have passed on the show. (This info usually ends up being revealed a few days before the season premiere by critics who have received review copies of the first episode.)

But even from week to week, we don't always know how much time has passed. Two episodes ago it was Halloween 1963, and then we saw at the beginning of last week's show that Roger Sterling's daughter Margaret's wedding had not yet taken place; early on in the season we'd seen the invitation with the date of November 23rd, so we knew it was somewhere between those two dates, but it wasn't until the scene in Harry's office, with the TV on in the corner, that we knew it was That Day, the one we'd been anticipating the show's treatment of all season.

And it was brilliantly done: Harry turned down the TV so he and Pete could talk seriously, as we the viewers saw the bulletin appear on the screen and could just barely make out the voice of Walter Cronkite, but the two of them were paying no attention to it until the door flew open and a bunch of people burst into Harry's office to commandeer the TV.

But rather than finding all this annoying, I find it endearing. I appreciate the show's commitment to building some anticipation for the episodes, and I applaud their restraint and secrecy, unlike some other networks (cough *NBC* cough) that are in the habit of giving away far too many details about upcoming shows in their promo ads.

And you know what? It works. I time-shift just about all of my TV watching, but on Sunday nights I try to watch Mad Men live, because I just don't want to wait until the next evening to see what happens. In fact, since the Mrs. goes to sleep rather early, I usually end up watching the episodes again with her on Monday evenings. And I usually go back later and watch the whole season again.

At the end of last week's episode, I was expecting AMC to show the usual batch of incongruous and unrelated snippets from the upcoming finale. Instead we got this clip, which is a rehash of things that have already happened this season. How's that for not giving anything away? And the blurb reads: "Don has an important meeting with Connie [that's Conrad Hilton, a client]. Betty receives some advice. Pete talks to his clients." We know what those things mean, but we don't know what the outcomes will be. I imagine critics won't be getting any advance copies of this episode.

Good thing the Patriots-Colts prime-time game is next week, but if I had to choose, I'd watch the Mad Men finale and record the game.