[Season 2, Complete]
*Spoilers*
So the game changes a lot during season two. The first season of Mad Men was about the shield Don Draper built for himself, against everyone and everything that tried digging Dick Whitman up. It's only normal, according to the show's pace and intents, that this shield would come apart sooner or later. While you don't see Dick Whitman crying for mercy, you see him witness the cracks in his fortress with unspeakable horror. While turning him a little bit into a cliché, it's still awesome.
What Mad Men does well, it does really well and it develops new ideas on it. The most interesting characters this season are Betty D. , Pete Campbell, Peggy Olson, Joanie Holloway and Salvatore Romano, who all played the second violin during the first stanza. They all bear heavy baggage and instead of loathing and "expressing their distress" on screen, and instead try to go on with weighted ankles, which makes their despair a lot stronger. It's always more convincing to drown than to yell "I'm drowning, I'm drowing", while both of your feet are still on the beach and you're wearing a life jacket. My favorite moment of the season is when Betty finds Glen, her divorced neighbor's (creepy) son, hidden in the kids playhouse in the yard. These two characters share a bond of loneliness that goes beyond words and I'm very eager to see how it turns out as Glen grows up.
I guess the biggest lesson any writer can learn from Mad Men is that when you don't have any crime, aliens or end-of-the-world of any kind, you have to have compelling, complex characters. A lot of them. The sixties was a game changing decade for the face of America. You can't change the way people live without breaking a lot of them and throw their habits to the garbage. Mad Men is the story of those people who dared to change the world for what they thought was best. It's not an easy watch, and like The Wire, it starts to lift off after season two.
It might sound weird to you, but at the start of season three, this change era seem on the verge of happening. Alienation is too strong for the characters to keep the facade for much longer. As the series is fine tuning in terms of pacing and dialog, its dramatic pursuits are also more bold.
