the electric internet

The best thing about individual Mad Men episodes is that you often can’t predict just where the storyline is going to go from the individual snippets at episode’s beginning. On nearly every other show on television, you can have the storyline narrowed down to a certain range of possibilities in the early going, and on more formulaic shows, you’ll probably have everything figured out within the first 15 minutes. Mad Men, however, is fond of taking random left turns into other storylines entirely or tying up loose ends through completely unexpected means or having a bunch of storylines dovetail in a way you wouldn’t expect them to. It’s not exactly like Don Draper steps out of his office one morning and gets on board a spaceship, but the show is always careful to find a way to do what you least expect it to, but still make it seem completely natural. It’s the only show on TV right now that is unpredictable in almost the exact way that life is.