Mad Men (season 4) remains totally compelling - like a car wreck

Season 4 of "Mad Men," with the crew from Sterling Cooper now set up as a new, struggling agency (thought it looks pretty well established to me) and with Betty remarried to the governor's aide and Don living in dingy bachelor quarters reamins a totally engrossing, compelling, watchable series - much as a car wreck beside a highway is totally engrossing, compelling, and watchable. The characters in Mad Men remain (almost) totally unlikable and, even when sympathetic, deeply flawed, selfish, valueless - and yet, and yet - how can you not be curious about them and even root for them to get that next contract or to meeting a nice guy or gal and settle down with their lives? One of the many pleasures of the series is how well it captures the look and the idiom of the era, now moving forward to early 1964 - though still a bit retro, even for its day. These guys are 50s throwbacks in a changing world, and Peggy is at times a window onto this changing world, the youngest of the crew and though she seems to be a total "square" she is much more than she seems, as she begins to hang out with a Village crowd (her new boyfriend assumes she's inexperienced - boy, is he wrong). Betty/January Jones has moved more toward the margins of the series, and she has become even more ice-cold and a brutal mother. Don/John Hamm remains the stolid central character, plunging ever deeper into his alcoholism - we know he'll come out of it, we know he'll establish a relation of sorts with one of the many women around him (I'm betting on the public-opinion researcher), but will it save him or destroy her?