Let’s get this straight up front: I’m a Mad Men superfan.
If you want “proof,” you might take note that Mad Men is the #2 show on the current edition of the best 100 TV shows ever.
I’ve watched the pilot episode, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” countless times and consider it to be brilliant.
Which makes it all the more fun to pick apart and ruthlessly scrutinize it from every possible angle. Here are 9 things that drive me nuts – in mostly fun ways! – about “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.”
The single most insane making thing
Pete Campbell shows up at Peggy Olson’s apartment right after his bachelor party. Which is also just after Peggy’s first day of work at Sterling Cooper.
Which begets the question: how does Pete know where Peggy lives?
This is the single strangest and most enduring question about one of the great shows in television history. Even The Soprano’s “what happened to the Russian in ‘Pine Barrens’” doesn’t quite compare.
Did he spy it out somehow at the office – which would have likely required him leveraging a secretary as a co-conspirator? This would have presumably happened while he was still sober, before heading off to the bachelor party with the boys. Doesn’t seem likely.
I’ve also entertained the theory that “somehow” Pete knew Peggy before they interacted for the first time outside of Don Draper’s office. This theory breaks down in multiple respects. Not only do they come from completely different orbits (and boroughs of New York City, for that matter), they very much act like they didn’t know each other before during that scene.
The fact is that we’ll never know. Pete just happened to ferret out where a secretary he met that morning lives while super drunk just after his bachelor party.
Just drives me regular level TV nerd nuts
“It’s not like there’s some magic machine that makes identical copies of things.”
Don says this to Pete just after the iconic “It’s toasted!” meeting with Lucky Strike scene. It seems a little far fetched that Don could not fathom the concept that Pete could have “somehow” made copies of the cigarette use research report.
And sidenote that a photocopier is installed at Sterling Cooper in the 1962 of Season 2, roughly two years later.
“We’ll get a fresh start tomorrow.”
Don says this to Peggy at the end of her first day, which we know is the night of Pete’s bachelor party. This means that the bachelor party took place somewhere in the Monday to Thursday range. While there’s nothing “wrong” with this, it seems awfully strange to me.
Speaking of the bachelor party…
It’s Sterling Cooper employees only at the burlesque show hanging out with Pete for his bachelor party. Where’s his brother, Bud? How about any of his other pals, like the jai alai-loving Ho Ho?
Honorable mention minor “offenders”
The picture of Pete’s fiancé is not Trudy
This is forgivable, but it’s always distracting when we see the framed picture of Pete’s fiancé, and it’s absolutely not Alison Brie, who would go on to play Trudy Campbell throughout the series.
Kristen Schaal, one and done
Schaal, an incredible and hilarious actress, is spectacular in the one single scene she’s in, playing one of the phone operator’s at Sterling Cooper. And then she never shows up on Mad Men ever again. This is tragic in the best kind of pop culture sense.
Pete is buying at the bachelor party
I guess boys will be boys and it’s all hands on deck… but even the bachelor boy has to buy his own booze. Maybe there’s a hint here that his co-workers recognize how creepy he is?
The bar cart is open… early
Speaking of booze, we see Don and Sal having a cocktail somewhere between Don’s arrival at the office and the meeting with Rachel Mencken – which is before the meeting the meeting with Lucky Strike. This would place this time period “early-ish” in the day, I’d say. We know that this was a very different era with relation to drinking at the office, but this semes like really extreme?
Where did Don sleep last night?
Betty Draper tells Don that she assumed he was “staying in the city again” after he finally returns home at the end of the episode. Where does she imagine he sleeps when this happens – the couch in his office? A hotel?
He probably does tell her that he sleeps at the office, I suppose. Which might even be true occasionally.