Mad Men Season 3
Overview
Sterling Cooper has new owners now — a British firm with polite smiles and sharp pencils — and the money worries trickle down into everything. Don Draper (Jon Hamm) spends the season juggling a demanding new client, Conrad Hilton, who phones at all hours and treats him like a son one day and a vendor the next, while at home Betty (January Jones) is pregnant, caring for her dying father, and running out of patience with a husband made of locked doors. This is the year the show's two ticking clocks — the marriage, and the buried secret of who Dick Whitman was — start ticking loud enough for other people to hear. Peggy (Elisabeth Moss) keeps climbing and wonders why she's still proving herself to men who will never catch up. There's a lawnmower incident at the office that people still quote, a trip to Rome that looks like a postcard and feels like a warning, and in November 1963 a wedding on the television stops the whole country mid-sentence. Matthew Weiner shoots it like memory rather than history. By the finale, nothing at Sterling Cooper — or in the Draper house — stands quite where it started.
