Is it possible that Don Draper is becoming a better person?  We have become accustomed to his moral degeneration and worrying when it will kick in again this season, but maybe it won’t.  Maybe he is actually "growing."

So far this season he has resisted sexual temptation and been supportive to his wife's job choices, and now he seems to be getting his Mojo back at work.  Last week he recovered his competitive juices when he saw the great creative work that Ginsburg was turning out and this week he gave a rousing St. Crispin’s Day speech (compare to the real thing: http://bit.ly/M5mH) in which he tells the troops that their holidays are ruined because they have to work on the Jaguar pitch – and they cheer like soldiers headed off to their deaths! Yay, we get to work on Christmas!

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What a disappointment the previous season of  “The Office” turned out to be.  A show that was once a glory of television comedy has now become merely “pretty good.”

Last year at this time, I pondered whether any sitcom could retain its creative energy for more than seven seasons, especially after the departure of its main star, and now I think we have the answer.  Unlike other great comedies that decided to go out on top (“The Dick Van Dyke Show,” “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “Cheers” and “Seinfeld”), “The Office” clearly lingered past its natural end point.

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Happy Mother’s Day ladies!  Sunday’s Mad Men was Matt Weiner’s gift to Moms everywhere.  Regardless of your own maternal shortcomings, you can console yourselves that at least you're not as bad as Betty Draper Francis.

Really, what can be worse than using your own daughter to drive a wedge between your former husband and his new wife?  Telling Sally about Don’s first wife, Anna, and then advising her to ask Megan for details, Betty secretly hoped that Don had kept it a secret from his new wife, just as he had kept it hidden from her.  She expected this to cause an explosion in the Megan/Don relationship.  Which is almost what happened.

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Once a quarter, Nielsen takes a break from ruining the mood of TV executives who can’t understand why their shows don’t get higher ratings, and delivers the calming message that all is generally OK in the TV industry.

Last week was no different.  Nielsen’s Cross Platform Report for the fourth quarter of 2011 showed once again that for all the hyperventilating about Hulu, Netflix, Rokku, Apple TV, Blu-ray players, iPads, smartphones and other potential TV-busting devices, television viewing habits remain largely unchanged.

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Congratulations to Matt Weiner for one of the great head fakes in Mad Man history.  The title of last night’s episode “Lady Lazarus” is also the name of a notoriously depressive Sylvia Plath Holocaust poem. If you want to slit your wrists, here is a reading from Plath herself:  http://bit.ly/DYn4v. This would make even Ingmar Bergman want to take a Zoloft. (Sample lines: “Dying/Is an art, like everything else/ I do it exceptionally well.” Sheesh.) 

Sylvia Plath? The Holocaust?  That could mean either a subplot about concentration camp-born Michael Ginsburg or the suicide that’s been hinted at since the “falling man” promotional ads started appearing earlier this year.

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I’m not sure what’s going on over at The Atlantic, the magazine formerly known as The Atlantic Monthly.  Last year they ran a provocative cover story, “Is Google Making us Stupid?” (see  http://bit.ly/cXNeCU) and last month it was “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” (see http://bit.ly/I0nwmI).  I wonder if they think there’s a Pulitzer Prize for Dumbest Rhetorical Question because the answer to both articles is so obviously nyet, nein, negatory.

In the Google piece, the author postulated that the Internet itself might be rewiring our brains and making us less able to focus for long periods of time, which seems disproven by the very fact that I was able to read that very long, but not very stimulating, piece to the end.  And if it turns out that it’s possible to change the very chemistry of our brains in less than one generation than maybe there’s something to Intelligent Design after all.

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Did you hear the one about the standup comedians who decided to become Internet entrepreneurs? First it was Louis C.K. and now it’s Aziz Ansari and Jim Gaffigan who are capitalizing on a new business model -- stand-up on demand -- that could theoretically alter the dynamic among performers, distributors and consumers of television comedy.

The three of them have essentially gone into business for themselves by cutting out the middleman (e.g., HBO and Comedy Central) and selling downloads of their acts directly to fans. They rented theatres, videotaped their shows in front of live audiences and began streaming them to online fans for five dollars each. (Here’s a sample.)  In other words, they are using the Internet to wrest control from producers and business executives and give it back to content providers and consumers.

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The title for this week’s Mad Men episode was “At the Codfish Ball”, the name of a song from the 1936 Shirley Temple movie “Captain January.”   Thanks to my good friends at Wikipedia I know that the noted film critic Graham Green thought the young star was something of a coquette:  "Shirley Temple acts and dances with immense vigour and assurance, but some of her popularity seems to rest on a coquetry […] and on an oddly precocious body as voluptuous in grey flannel as Dietrich’s." He described “Captain January” as “sentimental, a little depraved, with an appeal interestingly decadent."

That sounds like Mad Men, for sure.

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I always wondered if Matt Weiner is on drugs when he writes his Mad Men scripts and now I’m pretty sure that he is.  Sunday’s show “Far Away Places” has the most vivid acid trip in TV history – and he did it entirely without special effects.  Only someone who frequently hallucinates could have thought this up. 

The show itself feels like a hallucination, like some tripped out French “New Wave” movie playing with time and space, but the structure of the episode could not have been simpler.  The episode features three separate stories that take place at the same time over the same 24 hours.  Nothing new there, but we are so accustomed to TV’s convention of interwoven and parallel story lines in which you get multiple cuts among the various stories that when they play our serially it seems mind-blowing.  As the episode progressed, it felt like an increasingly complex puzzle but it was only at the conclusion that you realized it had actually been three mini plays one after another: 15 minutes of Peggy, 15 minutes of Roger and 15 minutes of Don.  Seriously, what could be less complicated?  

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As a big fan of Fox’s “New Girl,” I was surprised to hear that Zooey Deschanel, the show’s star, is, in some circles, considered to be a controversial figure.

Huh?  Who could be more anodyne than the cute and innocent star of this very funny show? Deschanel plays Jess, an elementary school teacher who moves into a loft with three guys she met on Craigslist.  This is a relationship sitcom, where 90% of the plot revolves around the attempts of the thirty-something main characters to manage their love lives; in that area, Jess is guileless and so averse to manipulation that she can’t even consummate a one-night stand.

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