Too much of a good thing can make it a bad thing: Mad Men 6 premier

Unlike friend TB who enjoys the commercial interruptions on Mad Men as if they're commentary on the show itself, like illuminations in the margins of a medieval manuscript, I am thankful for DVRs that let us more or less skip over the ads to watch the admen - and still - even foreshortened - a 2-hour episode is just way too long; episodic TV is meant to be an hour or less and that's it - 2 hours makes it into a bad movie rather than a big episode - and in fact there was plenty of material for a good (if not great) episode in the MM Season 6 premier: Roger crying over the shoeshine guy's box, Donald's smirky expression while Meagan's having fun on the beach, Peggy oblivious and officious, a mean boss and the most talented one on the room, Betty's visit to the lower east side. And yet - all stretched too think way too much dead space, too many plots twisting around one another and strangling the life out of the series. Sadly, the show seems to be edging away from life in the office - the mixture of talent and debauchery, the office politics, the way in which we see how ad folks work and think, the strange moral confusions involved with client relationship - and becoming more about a bunch of relationships among people who just happen to work in the same place or in the same industry. Friends and sub-friends on FB have been chattering about this episode, and noting the many death injuries have surmised that Don will die in Season 6; I doubt that (especially as there will apparently be a final Season 7) - mostly I see the death images as being subsumed to the images of change in identity: we know that Don did assume a new identity after the Korean War, and the urge to shed his identity and assume a new one is more than broadly hinted at here: from his reading The Inferno in the opening scene (In the middle of my life ... ) to his obvious boredom with Meagan and with his work, to the encounter with the Army guy and the inadvertent exchange of lighters (his first ID change involved an Army buddy, too), the wedding in which Don an obvious outsider poses as a friend of the groom, and finally the bizarre ad campaign he develops for the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. By the end of Season 6, I predict, Don will be alive but will no longer be Don.