Yeah, that's a pretty perfect crash course in early film comedy. I'd check out on Three Stooges (never got the appeal), but I suppose they're essential.

Y'know for a notorious nerd, Paul Feig has an exceptional sense of style. Love that suit in the photo.

If they were gonna buy him out they'd say so. No, he's just been effectively kicked out of the day to day operations of the office. He'll be like so many corporate partners in this world just a dude collecting a fat paycheck for doing jack shit.

With Selena ready to jump ship on the President (I will never say POTUS, sorry) I find it impossible to believe she'd stay on for Chung.

I doubt they gave St. Clair the room to improvise, but that part really felt like her comedic voice coming through.

"What'd I miss?"
"They were all celebrating how you weren't in the room!"

It's the perfect encapsulation of the show (that seems to be lost on a lot of the audience): terrible people gone mad with a pathetic amount of power.

It had that great Thick of It thing where everything starts to get exponentially more unwound and all of a sudden it snaps into place and you're just wrecked wondering how we got here.

I'll have to cop to not seeing Deadwood, so consideration pending. But as much as I love The Wire, no, I don't think the writing touches Mad Men's level of control with language. Like @avclub-9349e20458f64c9bfb83b5221e145937:disqus said, they're doing a different thing, very impressive in its own right. So while we…

I'm assuming this is in reply to me. Don does reach an emotional truth and then he baits and switches it for a brand name. That's what makes him so good at what he does. Let's take that Hershey's thing: of course he's right in getting at that feeling of someone who knows nothing of a functional childhood getting some…

Woo boy, I hate to break it to you, but the entire premise is built on a character whose talent is for taking people's deepest existential wanting and convincing them to fill with product consumption. It is the most ruthless depiction of advertising's utter moral bankruptcy.

Don being drunk or not, we can admit that minister had it coming, right?

He really is evocative of a lot of pop culture depictions of Satan, kindly and patriarcal until that moment he twists the knife. I've felt that way ever since he made Don sign his soul away.

Yeah I thought the same thing about that line. People who don't watch the show ask me why I won't shut up about it, and the reason I always give is that it's the best writing ever done on television, by a wide, wide margin. Nothing else operates on Mad Men's level.

Well no, because Sally's behavior isn't because she came from a "broken home" and not even Betty's less than stellar parenting (she's actually been pretty solid with Sally this season). In a shocking twist, Betty blames herself and it's not even for any of the number of things she did wrong.

You're definitely right about Bert and his power of intonation. Did you see that terrifying shot of him siting there flanked by Cutler and Sterling? Coming back to the Inferno theme, Dante's Satan is accompanied by three people as well (and it seemed purposeful to get Pete and Ted out of there): Judas, Brutus and…

Absolutely, in many episodes he had the suspect underestimating him to the point of volunteering how the murder might have taken place to help him out.

I was suddenly reminded what a huge nerd I was in high school when I realized they were doing a Flatland parody and got inexplicably excited.

I think that's what made it so funny, we the audience knew what was coming but the audience within the show didn't.

I want that "Phoenix" song that bookends the fourth season.