On (and Off) the Tube

"Mad Men" returned last night, setting the stage for the final season - set in 1969 - and leading to the grand finale which will be broadcast . . . next year.

WHAT????????  Matthew Weiner, the show's creator, is shooting the final fourteen episodes, but only the first seven will be shown this April and May; the remaining seven will be shown next spring.  The series has done an excellent job of showing the cynical world of advertising in the sixties, an age we can now look back on as being rather naive (peace and love? really?), as well as the beginning of the breakdown of the "old boy" network that ran all of those snide ad agencies as the seventies loomed over the horizon.  Doyle Dane Bernbach, known for their honesty, was an exception to that rule.

Doyle Dane Bernbach had Volkswagen, of course, but Sterling Cooper Whatever, going into 1969, has Chevrolet - specifically, the ad campaign for the XP-887 project, which arrived in Chevrolet showrooms as the Vega in 1970.  Deemed revolutionary at the time for its all-aluminum engine, the Vega was a decent-handling car, but it was also cheap, crude, and haphazardly thrown together. Its corrosion resistance was so bad it rotted in the showrooms.  Because we all know what sort of lemon Don Draper's agency is about to sell to a gullible, unsuspecting American public that will discover the Toyota Corolla by the 1973 Arab oil embargo, we just know his career is going to end up in the crapper.

There was a sense of dark foreboding in the first episode of the last (truncated) season of "Mad Men."  Don's actress wife Megan, who has moved to California, has a house in the most remote part of the Hollywood hills, and Don finds the neighborhood scary.   In another scene, Peggy Olsen makes some coffee in the New York office - Folger's coffee.  The former point obviously has overtones of the Manson Family's murderous rampage that would unfold later in the year, leading to the murder of actress Sharon Tate, but the Folger's reference is much more subtle; one of the Manson Family's victims was coffee heiress and social activist Abigail Folger.  Is Megan going to be a victim of Charles Manson?  That's the guess going around the Net.  Is Don going to have a breakdown over it, assuming that's what happens?  As you may have already surmised in last night's episode, he's not handling this bi-coastal marriage pretty effectively now, even as he's on a leave of absence from his job for revealing too much about his personal life.  And if the idea of clues in a TV show for savvy guests to pick up is unthinkable to you, consider "How I Met Your Mother."

Oh yeah, that . . ..  The final season of "How I Met Your Mother" is coming out on video with an alternate ending.  It seems that Carter Bays and Craig Thomas gave themselves some wiggle room to end the show without necessarily killing off Tracy like they did, so now we get to find out how they would have ended it otherwise.  I hope I get to see it, or at least find out how it goes, because I'd love to see if it's an even bigger surprise that the ending we all saw two weeks ago (as of this writing).