Matt Zoller Seitz, wrapping up his recap of Mad Men’s “The Other Woman”:
I want to go on record saying how flat-out amazing this season has been…Something Sgt. Peppers-level major is happening on Mad Men this year, a seismic creative flowering comparable to season one of The Sopranos and season three of Breaking Bad. Every season five episode is a creative experiment that draws on the cumulative power of every episode that preceded it. We’re nearing the point where everything on Mad Men seems to connect to everything else — not just from episode to episode within season five, but backwards, as if the new episodes are somehow unfurling tendrils into the past, fusing the whole run of Mad Men into a fiendishly intricate mega-story. It’s just extraordinary.
Damn right. I rarely get those “on the edge of my seat” moments when watching TV. Yet it happened with the The Wire, season four. Breaking Bad, season three onward. And now I can clearly add season five of Mad Men. We’ve had a few so-so episodes (e.g. “Hare Krishna” from last week), but many extraordinary ones: Signal 30, Far Away Places, and now The Other Woman.