Mad Men

Mad Men remains a brilliant, perfectly designed and visually exciting series--one of the very best the medium has to offer--whether you take it at face value or find the experience of watching the TV series enriched by tracing the modern echoes.

Even in its sixth season Mad Men, remains a standout, a better series than 95 percent of what's on television.

Unlike Season 5's two-hour premiere, which easily could have been edited to half its length, every minute of Sunday's episode feels necessary, checking in with all our favorite players and dancing with Weiner's favorite theme, death.

AMC’s Mad Men returns for season 6 with two hours that are as rich and as deftly literary as anything in the history of the show. The premiere operates like a series of exquisitely written theatrical set pieces, one after another that add up to a moving, ironic, and often comic group portrait.

While many shows that have reached this point in the road have left their creative peak behind, Mad Men shows no such erosion. It still has things it wants to say and it still has the poetry to say them well.

The sumptuous two-hour opener to Season 6 is a remarkable piece of work--beautiful, provocative, and deep. It's an unexpectedly exquisite distillation of the show's themes and aspirations.

The AMC drama is full of sharp writing, ambiguous segues, effective surprises and the usual array of pitch-perfect performances.

It continues to be one of the most satisfying dramas in the history of the medium.

Don Draper's journey has been and remains maddening, in a very good way as far as what makes a great TV show.

Mad Men is back with another ridiculously addictive season.

A beautifully realized and dazzling re-creation of our collective past and a glimpse of the infinite and unknowable.

It’s a sumptuous pleasure to go through one doorway and another, feeling all the while the dawning knowledge that someday we will turn a corner, and come to the last.

What’s intriguing and partly amazing about the two hour "movie” called “The Doorway” that opens the season April 7 is that Weiner has not lost his touch at writing a beautifully crafted script--jammed with the sadness and humor and personal revelations we’ve all come to appreciate. But in addition to that, he’s decided to really hit home Mad Men’s key theme in the first two hours with a kind of ferocity of intent we’ve rarely seen from him.

Season 6 jumps ahead in time and launches with a beautifully written, contemplative two-hour opener called "The Doorway."

As always, there's no predicting where all of this is headed, but if one last reference to The Divine Comedy is any sign, this season's journey toward the final act of Mad Men's American epic promises to be its most challenging and rewarding.

Matthew Weiner has advanced the show far enough into the '60s that its fundamental philosophical question begins to generate its own oppressive suspense. [15 Apr 2013]

The suits are louder, the sideburns are longer; aside from that, the season-six premiere proves to be classic Mad Men with plenty of vice (maybe more than before, at least more pot), long hours at work and lots of questions.

Weiner’s end-game for his leading man does not appear to be brightly lit. Nor is Season 6 of Mad Men off to a particularly sparkling start creatively while we wait for the worst to come.

Two hours can be a long time for a show that's not heavy on action sequences, but "The Doorway" does eventually take us somewhere.

Even at its most ponderous and indulgent, Mad Men casts a mesmerizing spell, and that's true throughout this less-than-satisfying but intermittently intriguing chapter.

All are reintroduced in a premiere episode that lumbers along, overpopulated, burdened by the weight of its ambitions, flattened by misbegotten detours--but one, nevertheless, that surges to life in the end.

[A] clever, at times tricky season opener. In Lost-like style, it strategically withholds key information that would help us make immediate sense of Don’s behavior, which by turns suggests a prisoner, a sleepwalker, and a ghost.

Without giving anything away, the guest cast is unusually strong, offering the prospect of fertile subplots going forward, while some of the regulars don’t figure prominently at first--again, pretty par for the course.

The ultimate style show is still so fascinating that I couldn’t stop watching, all the while thinking, “Why is this so good?”

Like Betty's frumpy frocks, Mad Men's supersize episodes aren't flattering. Weiner should stick with tighter, denser storytelling packages. I hope he also delivers the season of change that the premiere seems to promise.

Moving, striving, trying, changing, it’s good for the characters on Mad Men and it’s good for the drama that is Mad Men. The back of Don Draper’s head is still gorgeous, but it’s starting to feel awfully still.