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Dead Tree Alert: Mad Men '62

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FRANK OCKENFELS / AMC

Mad Men‘s second season debuts Sunday, and my review is in the print TIME this week. It begins:

“Nostalgia. It’s delicate. But potent.” It’s November 1960, and ad writer Don Draper (Jon Hamm), in the first-season finale of Mad Men, is pitching a room of Kodak executives on a campaign for their new slide projector. He’s loaded the carousel with his family pictures, a poignant gesture because of what we know about him: not only does he cheat on his wife–prolifically–but he also hides his true identity from her and the rest of the world. Born Dick Whitman and orphaned as a boy, he went to Korea, swiped the dog tags of a fallen soldier (the real Draper), abandoned his dirt-poor relatives and rose to the heights of swellegant, three-martini Wasp success on Madison Avenue.

In some ways, Don’s life is as phony as a stock photograph. Unloved as a child, he may never know how to love, though he’s learned the gestures. Yet looking at his compromised memories, he wells up, and so do we, even as we know we’re being sold. The Kodak suits want to focus on their machine’s technology. Don argues that its true pull is emotional. “In Greek,” Don says, “nostalgia literally means ‘the pain from an old wound.'”

Nostalgia is tricky for TV, which tends to render it as camp, sap or clichéd commentary. Mad Men could have been another index item in the boomer-centric ’60s-history textbook that includes We Didn’t Start the Fire and The Wonder Years. The New Frontier. The social upheaval. The same old times a-changin’ again.

In fact, it’s something very different, and beautiful.

Given Mad Men’s small audience, I tried to aim the review not just at regular viewers but people who may have missed the first season but noticed the $25 million ad campaign. For those familiar with the show, asking whether the new episodes are better or worse than last year’s is sort of beside the point because—the 15-month time jump notwithstanding—they play very much like episodes 14 and 15 of season one.

I’ll post a write-up after Sunday’s episode and we can discuss more then.