It’s me again, for Dear Television at The New Republic.

“The Great Man Theory”

“As Emerson puts it, ‘Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds,’ and Don Draper, thus far, has been ‘Mad Men’’s primary lens. But Emerson also writes, ‘We are tendencies, or rather, symptoms, and none of us complete.’ Don Draper will never leave our purview, but ‘Mad Men’ is becoming mercifully more interested in highlighting his incompleteness, the ways in which those actions that might have previously scanned as heroic in context of his inner depravity, are in fact symptoms of that depravity.”