The idea of Peggy's pregnancy is over the top, but I love the way the first season uses it to comment on the role of women in the office in that era. Starting from Joan's "put a bad on your head" speech and continuing with the way the men in the office treat her, Peggy spends the season thinking that she can be…

While I agree in general that the pilot contains a lot of "evolutionary dead ends" (as how could it help but), I really don't think the scene with Greta Guttman is one of them. On the contrary, I'd say that scene establishes the mission statement for the show as clearly as the ones discussed in the opening paragraph…

If the show is serialized, grading the episodes makes even less sense - you don't give individual grades to chapters in a book, after all.

I don't think the fact of the lie is that important (and the form it took - Don stealing the identity of a dead soldier to get out of Korea and then forming a semi-romantic relationship with his widow - is all but absurd), but what is crucial is who Don was and what he chose to remake himself into. Mad Men is…

Especially considering that the main plot of the series is driven by the most famous events of the rule of Caesar and Augustus, describing Rome as a show that doesn't call attention to its period is odd.

Even more than that, the point was for Peggy to come to terms with her pregnancy and giving her baby up. Hanks's character represents one end of the spectrum of approaches to that trauma, which expects Peggy to feel guilt for her transgression and to accept the (not overtly misogynistic, in this particular case, but…

"Some of the many attempts to adopt, update, or reimagine Sherlock Holmes
have run aground on the misconception that Holmes is a social crusader
who cares deeply about right and wrong, whose first commitment is to
seeing justice done."