Mad Men Season 2
Overview
Sterling Cooper, 1962: the suits are sharper, the drinks are stronger, and everyone is quietly coming apart. Don Draper (Jon Hamm) drifts into an affair with Bobbie Barrett, the razor-tongued wife of a comedian client, while Betty (January Jones), shut out of her own marriage, takes up horse riding and starts losing the feeling in her hands for reasons no doctor can explain. Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss) is the one actually rising — she's writing copy that wins accounts now, dressing differently, holding her own with the boys — and she's sitting on a secret about her recent past that finally comes out in a devastating late-season scene with Pete Campbell, whose own marriage is straining over the baby he and Trudy can't seem to have. Around them, account man Freddy Rumsen drinks himself into disgrace, Joan (Christina Hendricks) plans a wedding to a man the audience quickly learns to hate, and the scheming Duck Phillips tries to sell the agency to a British firm behind everyone's backs. Creator Matthew Weiner ends the season under the shadow of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the whole country holding its breath. Barely a false note in the whole run.
