'Mad Men:' Kudos

I’m sending congrats out to Matthew Weiner, the creator of “Mad Men,” for avoiding ruinous explosions. Sunday’s episode of the AMC series was another relatively cool, understated hour. Even the death of Betty’s father arrived on a downbeat -- without build up and with only modest fallout, as Sally pitched a righteous fit.

Surely, with all the awards and media-love “Mad Men” has won in the past year or two, Weiner must feel pressure -- internal and/or external -- to “grow” his viewership, to include big twists and more obvious water-cooler moments in order to draw in reticent viewers. Subtle psycho-dramatics such as Peggy taking roommate-ad advice from Joan or Betty reminding her father “I’m your little girl” aren’t exactly going to set the boards on fire. And the humor -- a guy nicknamed “Ho Ho,” another nicknamed “Number 2” -- is usually buried in the texture of the scripts. It’s not of the laugh-riot, audience-pleasing variety.

And yet the four episodes so far this season have been stubbornly and beautifully about subtext -- about what is not being said, but what we know is being felt. The writers have set up rich parallels -- this week’s were all about parenting, including Betty’s father and Peggy’s mother and Ho Ho’s father (Quentin Lives!) -- but never spelled them out. In a pair of parallel bedroom scenes, Sal had a go at the Ann-Margret sequence this week, during which his wife withered from her increasingly hard to ignore awareness that her husband is gay; two weeks ago, Peggy delivered her own creepy version of “Bye Bye Birdie,” in the mirror.

There’s nothing wrong with big twists and pulse-quickening buildups, of course; “True Blood,” which as extroverted as “Mad Men” is introverted, uses those conventions brilliantly. But “Mad Men” needs to stay dramatically repressed, and slow-paced, for the most part, to evoke a critical quality of its time period. The show is best when it stirs, rather than stampedes, our imaginations. Thankfully, Weiner hasn’t futzed with that key ingredient.

I keep hearing rumblings online about how slow “Mad Men” is this season, and it reminds me that this show works so differently from almost everything else on the air. To oversimplify it, “Mad Men” exists in our reactions to what we see. Weiner and his writers don’t really pin down how we should feel -- about whether Don is good or bad, about the strange resonance of Don telling Bobby to take off a "dead man’s hat." They don't entertain us, in the traditional sense. They leave it all suspended, little bits of melodrama, quiet character revelations, cultural snapshots. You have to return to the episodes after you’ve seen them, put the pieces together, to really see this show.

What do you think?