Mad Men, series 7, episode 1, review: 'funny, sad, inspired'

With the continued hoopla surrounding Game of Thrones, the end of the exceptional True Detective and the incoming Fargo, this is a bad time to be a really good TV programme – you can get lost among all the riches on display. It’s a particularly bad time to be Mad Men (Sky Atlantic), given that its creator Matthew Weiner has already announced, with drum rolls please, that this is the beginning of the first half of the end of the seventh and final series which will conclude next year. That’s one hell of a way to kick off the farewell party. But if Mad Men is no longer the loudest noise in TV land, you only had to listen to the opening monologue on Wednesday night to see that it’s still the smartest guy in the room.

“Are you ready? Because I want you to pay attention. This is the beginning of something,” said a pudgy-faced man, before delivering an ad pitch so coquettishly persuasive that I found myself desiring an “Accutron” watch more than the sight of my own sweet children. Mad Men may not have the battles or the boobs but it remains the gold standard for writing on TV.

The monologue was delivered by Freddy Rumsden (Joel Murray), whom we last saw exiting Sterling Cooper having just wet his pants. It was of course Don Draper (Jon Hamm), we later learned, who had been feeding Freddy the sweet-talkin’ pitches for ad jobs all round Manhattan.

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Why would Don do that? Why does Don do anything? You’d have thought we might be able to take a stab at that hardy perennial after six series searching for the tao of Don, especially with all of the artistic and historical allusions Mad Men offers up as pointers to gauge his psyche. The opener, set in 1969, was like a Kodak Carousel of allusions and shadows, with the intro to Frank Capra’s 1937 Lost Horizon, which flashed up on a fuzzy TV screen, a particularly obvious nod to Don’s predicament – “Haven’t you ever dreamed of a place where there was peace and security, where living was not a struggle but a lasting delight?”