Mad Men's Best Moments

Pete Campbell could only have more of a baby face if Wil Wheaton played him. Early in Season One he gets married and runs into the age-old problem of returning bad wedding gifts. Of course, first he needs to explain what the hell a ceramic Chip-and-Dip is for to everyone, including the people in line at the department store. When he finally gets through the line, he tries, and fails, to pick up the girl working the counter. To reaffirm his manhood, Pete swaps the girly party dish for a rifle. 

Of course, in Pete’s hands it looks more like a Red Ryder BB Gun, but that doesn’t stop him from trying to impress the guys at the office with it. When his new bride finds out about the trade, she lays into poor Pete, giving Pete his first taste of 1960s-style wedded bliss. He would’ve been better off shooting his eye out.

When the crew finds out that Sterling and Cooper is about to be sold off again by their British overlords, they come up with a plan. First, they have Lane Pryce fire them all and send a telegram about it to London. This happens on a Friday, and the telegram won’t be read until Monday, which gives them a short, but important window. The next step is to ransack the old office so they can get supplies and client portfolios to help with their new company, the cleverly named Sterling, Cooper, Draper and Pryce. Of course, they don’t know where anything is, so they call in Joan, who had been wasting her talents as a shop girl at the time. They bring on Pete as a partner to secure his client list, and Lane gleefully accepts his fate when the old company fires him. The look on Paul Kinsey’s face when he realizes that the old guard has left without him would make Danny Ocean proud.

How do you make alcoholism a pertinent topic on a show where everyone always has a drink in their hand? That question had to be going through the writers heads whenever they wrote about Freddy Rumsen. The old man was always a little more drunk than the rest of the team, but we liked him because he fought for Peggy’s chance to write copy. Right before he is supposed to pitch a new ad campaign to Samsonite, Freddy passes out in his office and pisses himself. Everyone stumbles around as if all of them just landed in a screwball comedy from the 1940s before Peggy steps up and plays "His Girl Friday" to save the day. This kind of tragicomic moment is what Mad Men excels at, and though it stinks to see Freddy go, it opens the door for Peggy to shine.

Of course, drinking isn’t just Freddy’s problem. The crew heads to the Clios after learning that the Life Cereal execs they were expecting are stranded at an airport. They begin celebrating in earnest, with Don throwing back his fair share of drinks before accepting an award for his Glo-Coat commercial. Unfortunately, the Life Cereal executives are waiting for Don back at the office, having found a new flight into New York. Three sheets to the wind, Don strolls in and gives them a lackluster pitch. When they reject it, he just starts rattling off whatever ideas come to mind. One of those is a lackluster gem he drunkenly steals from Roger’s idiot cousin-in-law, a kid named Danny. The Life Cereal team loves it, so Don goes back to drinking and blacks out for the rest of the weekend. When he comes back to work on Monday, he’s forced to hire Roger’s idiot, ensuring comic relief for the rest of Season Four.