Mad Men season 3


The third season of the American television drama series Mad Men premiered on August 16, 2009, and concluded on November 8, 2009. It consisted of thirteen episodes, each running approximately 48 minutes in length. AMC broadcast the third season on Sundays at 10:00 pm in the United States.
Season three begins in roughly April/May 1963 and ends on December 16, 1963. It covers the end of Kennedy's "Camelot era" in the country, and chronicles the characters going through immense change in their professional and personal lives.
The third season was exalted by television critics and was a major winner in many television awards. Mad Men won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series, Golden Globe Award for Best Drama Series, and acknowledgement by the American Film Institute for the third year in a row. According to year end lists collected by Metacritic, Mad Men was the most acclaimed show of 2009.

Cast

Main cast

Guest stars

Plot

Six months after the Cuban Missile Crisis, major changes have been made to the staff, including the addition of new financial officer Lane Pryce, a PPL executive brought in from the London office. Pete is offered the role of Head of Accounts by Lane, but is upset to learn that he will be sharing the title and responsibility with executive Ken Cosgrove.
At a country club party that Roger and Jane throw, Don and Betty both connect with strangers; Don strikes up a conversation with Conrad "Connie" Hilton, founder of Hilton Hotels, while Betty has a friendly conversation with Henry Francis, who works for Governor Rockefeller. Connie harasses Don with late night phone calls and seeks off the books help with regard to advertising, overwhelming Don, who struggles to create quality material. When Connie learns Don has no contract tying him to the agency, Bert uses his knowledge of Don's assumed identity to pressure him into signing a contract so as to retain Hilton's interest.
Joan announces her resignation at Sterling Cooper to become a housewife, but is troubled when Greg is passed over for an important promotion due to his subpar surgical skills. Greg later informs Joan that he is enlisting to become an Army surgeon. Meanwhile, executives from PPL travel from London to tour the Sterling Cooper offices and to present a new organization plan that places the agency under a new up-and-comer, Guy MacKendrick, and transferring Lane to Bombay. During a party celebrating Joan's departure, Ken brings a John Deere lawnmower that accidentally runs over MacKendrick's foot. MacKendrick is presumed unable to perform his duties and Lane is informed that he will keep his job in the States in the interim.
Betty's father Gene, suffering from his strokes, comes to live with the Drapers and strikes up a warm relationship with his granddaughter Sally. Gene soon dies, and Sally scolds her parents and relatives for their apparent lack of grief at his demise. Betty gives birth to a boy, naming him Gene over Don's strenuous objections. Betty later enlists Henry's help with a neighborhood petition and becomes smitten with him, sending him letters and meeting with him in secret, while Don begins having an affair with Sally's teacher Suzanne Farrell. During this period, Duck Phillips tempts both Pete and Peggy with business overtures to entice them to come to work with him at Grey; while neither accepts the business proposition, Peggy does accept Duck's initiation of a sexual relationship with her.
Near the end of the season, Betty breaks into the drawer to the desk in Don's den. She finds his box of Dick Whitman's family photos as well as evidence of Anna Draper's existence and Don's divorce from her. She directly confronts Don, who is forced to divulge the secret of his former identity and his desertion in Korea. The news of the assassination of John F. Kennedy shocks the employees of Sterling Cooper, although Don remains composed; Don's inability to connect to Betty's emotional grief over the death of the President leads Betty to tell Don that she doesn't love him anymore and that she wants a divorce.
Connie meets with Don to inform him that Sterling Cooper and PPL are both being bought out by McCann Ericson, the firm handling Hilton's other accounts. Infuriated, Don begins hatching plans with Bert and Roger to buy the company. When their offer is rebuffed, Don realizes that Lane's authority to fire the other conspirators would sever their contracts, giving them the ability to walk away and start a new advertising agency. Lane agrees with the scheme and becomes a partner, and Don and Roger start reaching out to other employees to join their new agency, including Pete and Peggy.
While drinking with Roger, Don learns about Betty's relationship with Henry Francis and confronts her physically. However, Don later calls Betty to tell her that he will not fight the divorce, and Betty leaves with the baby and Henry to get a divorce in Reno. Don, Peggy, Roger, Bert, Lane and Pete subsequently break into the Sterling Cooper office to take necessary supplies and files, with Joan and Harry called in to join the company and help them. The group meets in a small hotel room, where Joan answers calls with the name of the new firm: Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce.

Episodes


Production

Crew

Series creator Matthew Weiner also served as showrunner and executive producer, and is credited as a writer on 12 of the 13 episodes of the season, often co-writing the episodes with another writer. Lisa Albert remained supervising producer and wrote one episode. Writing team Andre Jacquemetton and Maria Jacquemetton became consulting producers and co-wrote one episode together. Robin Veith was promoted to executive story editor and wrote one episode. Kater Gordon was promoted to staff writer and wrote two episodes. Marti Noxon remained consulting producer and wrote one episode. New writers in the third season included Dahvi Waller, who wrote two episodes; writer's assistant Erin Levy, who wrote one episode; executive story editor Cathryn Humphris, who wrote two episodes; script coordinator Brett Johnson, who wrote one episode; and freelance writer Andrew Colville, who wrote one episode. Other producers included Blake McCormick, Dwayne Shattuck, and Scott Hornbacher, who was promoted to executive producer.
For the third season, seven of the nine writers for the show were women, in contrast to Writers Guild of America 2006 statistics that show male writers outnumber female writers by 2 to 1. As Maria Jacquemetton notes:
Phil Abraham directed the most episodes of the season with three, while Lesli Linka Glatter, Jennifer Getzinger, and Michael Uppendahl each directed two. The remaining episodes were directed by Daisy von Scherler Mayer, Scott Hornbacher, Barbet Schroeder, and Matthew Weiner, who directs each season finale.

Reception

Critical reception

The third season of Mad Men has received critical acclaim. Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reports that 97% of 29 critics have given the season a positive review with an average score of 9.4/10. The site's consensus is: "Mad Men brilliantly weaves its characters into its historical setting, and the result is thoughtful, shocking, and terrifically entertaining." On Metacritic, the third season scored 87 out of 100 based on 20 reviews, indicating universal acclaim.
Time critic James Poniewozik cited the show's excellence in writing and acting, and said "Mad Men's willingness to let moments play out seems as much a period flourish as its fedoras and highballs." Of the third season, Poniewozik felt that the third season was "a notch behind season 1 and ahead of season 2. It didn’t have the phenomenal run of one staggering episode and scene after another like the first did, but this season built confidently to a climax and did an outstanding job of both capturing the sweep of history and how it related to the characters’ lives." Tim Goodman of the San Francisco Chronicle warned viewers from falling for any inevitable backlash after the myriad of award wins for the series, saying that "the humor, the note-perfect clothing and sets, the creeping cultural change - are still there to be savored. But what the series traffics in with astute complexity is the troubling notion of self, of identity, of rootless, undefined purpose and unrealized happiness". Goodman also noted that the series was not made for a mass audience.
Robert Bianco of USA Today said the third season was compelling because "we all know the late-stage Camelot universe the characters occupy is about to shatter" and that the series was filled with "madness and passion". Alessandra Stanley of The New York Times described Mad Men as "essentially one long flashback, an artfully imagined historic re-enactment of an era when America was a soaring superpower feeling its first shivers of mortality." Robert Lloyd of the Los Angeles Times said the series was "a moral drama, a show about deciding who you are and who you want to be, of character as the sum of small choices. There are no heroes or villains here, only people working out or being carried toward their individual destinies. And in who we root for and in what we root for them to choose, we also define ourselves."
In one of the few negative reviews, Hank Stuever of The Washington Post said that Mad Men "has importance sickness, and its idea of levity is to inject moments of utter callousness." Stuever lamented that once "a TV show was just a TV show. It was on when it was on; if you missed it, you missed it. You certainly wouldn't build your life around talking about it or telling other grownups they had to watch old episodes of it in order to catch up. You were supposed to give it two seconds' thought."
Alan Sepinwall of The Star-Ledger said that by the end of the season "we've crossed a generational line in the series. Kennedy is dead. The Beatles fly into New York in a few months. The '50s are definitively over, and what we think of as the actual '60s is just beginning."

Accolades

The third season continued Mad Men's streak of award wins and nominations at the 62nd Primetime Emmy Awards. The series won both Outstanding Drama Series and Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series, both for the third year in a row.
In the acting categories, Jon Hamm and January Jones were nominated for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series and Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series, respectively. John Slattery and Robert Morse were nominated for Primetime Emmy Award for [Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series|Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series] and Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series, respectively. Christina Hendricks and Elisabeth Moss were both nominees in the Primetime Emmy Award for [Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series|Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series] category. Robin Veith and Matthew Weiner also received an additional nomination in the Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series category for writing "Guy Walks into an Advertising Agency". Lesli Linka Glatter was also nominated in Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series for her work on "Guy Walks into an Advertising Agency".
The American Film Institute honored the "transformative" third season of Mad Men as one of the ten greatest television achievements of 2009, exalting both January Jones and Jon Hamm for leading the strong ensemble. Mad Men won Best Television Drama Series at the 67th Golden Globe Awards for the third year in a row. Jon Hamm was nominated for Golden Globe [Award for Best Actor – Television Series Drama|Best Actor – Television Series Drama] for the third year in a row. January Jones was nominated for Golden Globe [Award for Best Actress – Television Series Drama|Best Actress – Television Series Drama] for the second year in a row.
At the 2009 Writers Guild of America Awards, the series was honored with the Dramatic Series award. The series also received Episodic Drama nominations for "The Grown Ups" and "Guy Walks into an Advertising Agency". At the 2009 Directors Guild Awards, Mad Men director Lesli Linka Glatter won for her work on "Guy Walks into an Advertising Agency". Matthew Weiner and Jennifer Getzinger were also nominated for their directorial work in the same "Dramatic Series" category.
The cast of Mad Men won Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series at the 16th [Screen Actors Guild Awards] for the second year in a row. Jon Hamm was also nominated for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Drama Series for the third year in a row. The series was nominated for the Outstanding Achievement in Drama award at the 26th TCA Awards.