A time of change is descending on the America and the men and women of the Sterling Cooper ad agency. The civil rights movement is underway, and (at the end of the season), President Kennedy is assassinated. Personal lives are also undergoing upheaval. Peggy is learning to express her sexuality, while the closeted Stan wrestles with some painful reckonings involving his own. And Don's marriage hits a crisis thanks to his serial philandering and a huge secret from his past.

Easily one of the most acclaimed shows of recent memory, Mad Men hardly needs me to point out how strong its performances are, how intelligent its scripting is, and how beautifully it's shot. But at the risk of being branded a heretic, I would point out a few gaps in the emperor's clothes. The series is highly inaccessible to new viewers, assuming as it seems to that everyone watching has been doing so from the first. I had only seen a couple of episodes prior to plunging into this set, and was often frustrated by the plethora of significant glances between characters that clearly spoke volumes about past events. Not only did I have trouble figuring out what was going on, I wasn't always certain that anything was. Yes, the writing is very smart, but it can, at times, wear that intelligence a little too ostentatiously – little bits of business involving a child reading Gibbons' Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to her grandfather, or executives trading quips about Balzac feel show-offy to me. (And while we're on the topic, be wary of the knowledge you're going to parade. At one point in Episode 1, we are informed that London no longer has fogs. That is true now, but is a very anachronistic statement to be making in 1963, as my parents can attest to.) Finally, there is a certain coldness to the affair that I found made it hard to particularly care about any of the characters. Again, none of this is to deny the program's manifold and great qualities, but for my money, it isn't quite in the same stratospheric heights as something like The Wire.