Last week, Sarah Seltzer, Amanda Marcotte and Pamela Merritt held a spirited salon in anticipation of Mad Men's season premiere on Sunday. This week, join us for the debrief -- starting with Sarah's response to the premiere. 

I think Sarah's right that the third season of "Mad Men" is going to be about how you can't keep the lid on forever.  You see that with Don Draper's joyless cheating, and his sad statements that imply that he's simply accepted that faithlessness may be built into his character.  But now he's trying to deal by sleeping with women who don't threaten his primary relationship.  I suspect by next episode, we'll be seeing this theme employed in examining the shifting gender dynamic of Sterling Cooper.  We got some hints in the first episode--the first male secretary in the office is throwing a tantrum because being a man doesn't buy him special privileges, and the first female copywriter Peggy Olson is finally exercising her privileges as a senior member of the staff.  Let's just say the word "gynocracy" was tossed out.  The show won't be pulling its punches in showing the angst that attended the shift towards more workplace equality for women.

I'll take on Sarah's question about Peggy--what sacrifices will Peggy make to make it to the boardroom?  Peggy's in a sad spot, unable to be accepted by her male peers because she's a woman, but unable to fit in with the women because she's not a member of the secretarial pool.  I was intrigued to read that Matthew Weiner is inspired quite a bit by female poets like Sylvia Plath, who especially embodies the sense of the time that a woman could have ambition or avoid loneliness, but not both at the same time.  Even though Weiner was using Plath's problems as a template for the character of Betty Draper, I actually see a lot of The Bell Jar in Peggy's story.  Both the character of Esther in The Bell Jar and Peggy are ambivalent and more than a little overwhelmed by the hedonistic Manhattan lifestyle, and both have mental breakdowns.  Granted, Peggy's breakdown is predicated by giving birth after not realizing that she's pregnant (though it's implied that she was just in denial), but the atmosphere of the hospital, and the pain she suffers resembles that of the broken, overwhelmed Esther of The Bell Jar.  Both characters struggle because they don't want the lives of housewives (Peggy openly tells Pete she couldn't have shamed him, but didn't), but nor are they happy with being stuck in the secretarial pool. Peggy, however, seems to be on the road to a happier ending, being a step forward for feminism instead of lost in marital hell as Plath ended up.

That said, "Mad Men" is all about the hard truths, and the hard truth is that being a woman forging her own path in the early 60s was very lonely indeed.  Plath knew it, Weiner knows it, and I fear that Peggy Olson is going to continue to learn it.