I spotted him on the street, his eyes glittering with energy. He said he thought we were going the same place, and we were.

A man met us in the lobby. You won’t be able to talk about what you see, he said, Not until we say so.

The floor numbers flickered as we rode up the soundless elevator in the sleek, buffered building in Soho, a few steps from one of the noisiest stretches of Broadway but a world away.  

It all felt  big-ticket, plush. My shoes looked pretty scuffed. But I wasn’t there to admire the creamy white walls, the sun-struck lobby, the chrome and leather offices filled with dark-haired men with sharp eyewear and complicated wristwatches.

I was there for a job.

But it wasn’t what it seemed, not by a mile, and I had no idea what I was getting into until it was too late. Until I was peering over the edge into something dark, strange, irresistible. Who was I to say no?

About six weeks ago, I got a dream assignment—to write a story set in my favorite time and place: Los Angeles, 1947. The epicenter of my imaginative life. And it was to be for an anthology titled L.A. Noire, to be published on June 6 by Mulholland Books.

The building in question was the headquarters of Rockstar Games, the developer/publisher behind such phenomena as Grand Theft Auto and Max Payne. I’d been invited by the editor of the anthology, the wonderful (and dashing) novelist/artist Jonathan Santlofer. Then, for an hour or more, I sat with fellow contributors Hard Case Crime wunderkind Charles Ardai and crime novelist Duane Swierczynski in a conference room and watched embargoed goods, a preview of a new videogame, L.A. Noire, developed with Team Bondi, which will be released on May 17.

Set in a hauntingly rendered Los Angeles of 1947, L.A. Noire requires its players to solve a series of crimes, most of which interweave fact (the Jeanne French-Red Lipstick Murder) and fiction. Aaron Staton of TV’s Mad Men (Ken Cosgrove, the blonde prepster and author of “Tapping A Maple On A Cold Vermont Morning”) portrays the lead police detective.

The accompanying short-story anthology is meant to compliment the game, a series of tales by authors including Lawrence Block, Joe Lansdale, Francine Prose, Joyce Carol Oates and Andrew Vachss, all set in this phantasmagoric world of 1947 Los Angeles.

I admit I am no gamer (lacking even the most fundamental skills). More to the point, though, I have an inherent suspicion of attempts to recreate 1940s Los Angeles, which, to me, must meet the exacting, sleazy, riotously violent and startlingly romantic standards of the Bible of my 1940s Los Angeles: Ellroy’s Los Angeles Quartet.

But watching the game that day, and the young man playing it for us, was quite an transporting experience. Burrowing past the venetian blinds-sheets-of-rain-bourbon-in-desk-drawer kitsch noir we all know so well, this Los Angeles is qualitatively different.

First, it’s in color.  It’s a sunny, sprawling yet infinitely sleazy realm, radiating so much of the haunted LA-ness I could ever have wanted: the pastel-drenched buildings, the low, dry courtyard apartments with their brooding eucalyptus, their flat sorrows and the off-screen sounds of bottles rolling and someone crying softly, somewhere.

It was uncanny, watching the game, engaging with it. It was different from seeing 1940s L.A. in a movie, its inherent “movie-ness,” and different too from the way an Ellroy novel can pitch its inky darkness through the front-most reaches of my head. It was different because it was happening and we were part of it. We were in the game, all of us. Questioning suspects, driving along Sunset, walking in the LAPD’s Old Central, passing Clifton’s Cafeteria, gazing up at the luminous white of City Hall at night. Of course, we were “in it”—that’s the special beauty of videogames. But the “it” this time was the luminous simulacrum.

But there was a different kind of uncanny too. Apparently, L.A. Noire makes use of a new MotionScan facial recognition technology.  The idea is to capture more  of the characters’ (actors’)  nuances. To look, essentially, more natural. More as we experience one another in life.

In the case  of L.A. Noire, the game depends on it, on how well we can read faces, detect lies. As we guide the police detective-hero, we need to be able to penetrate suspects and witnesses, to consider their body language to try uncover what they may have to hide. And when they are lying.

But watching it, and sometimes guessing correctly and other times not, I was struck by the most uncomfortable feeling. It was something in the way the suspects’ eyes moved, darted, vibrated, blinked, averted … mine. They seemed to be looking at me, and not looking at me, at once.

It reminded me of the term “uncanny valley,” which is a term coined by roboticist Masahiro Mori  (and relies heavily on Freud’s “The Uncanny“). It refers to, as I understand it, the point at which an almost-human object causes humans to be instinctively unnerved. The closer a robot (or prosthetic limb, or puppet, cyborg, etc.) becomes to being lifelike, the more the tiny elements that don’t seem lifelike—a slight stiffness in the gait, eyes that don’t quite focus on your eyes—we become unnerved. Mori called this plunge “the Uncanny Valley,” the precise point at which a simulation of life becomes so perfect it’s terrifying.

Frequently quoted in discussions of the uncanny valley is this line from C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe:

when you meet anything that’s going to be human and isn’t yet, or used to be human once and isn’t now, or ought to be human and isn’t, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet.

In the case of L.A. Noire, the feeling for me was magnified. Not only did these characters (many assayed by actors I was sure I recognized even when I couldn’t name them—because they looked like themselves, and yet not precisely) enact stories (famous 1947 crimes) I knew so well, but that had been, just slightly,  fictionalized. The same but different. Real but not real.

But there was this: I know this world through books, through movies, through driving through Los Angeles and finding the remaining haunts—battered tiki bars, peeling-leather-boothed bars, the sleek deco lines of the Pacific Dining Car.

Except this time, the police detectives, the victims, the criminals, the killers—were looking back at me. Were telling me things to see if I believed them. Were lying to me and seeing if I could tell.

The experience was powerful and made me understand something about the allure of games I hadn’t before. As much as one might believe technology distances us from ourselves, from each other, it might in fact do the opposite. Facing a game that plugged into my deepest imaginative life, any distance I had left from that time and place felt very nearly effaced.

Sitting there that afternoon, I came to recognize—those uncanny eyes flashing on me, looking straight into my own eyes—how intimate and personal games can be. How they can seep into your head, tug at things, make you feel. How there are times in all our lives when everything we thought we knew was not exactly what we thought at all. And how we may not be either. (And, within that gap, that particular valley, lies all kinds of unwanted revelation.)  How we make our own worlds and invest them with ideas of truth, permanence. But that’s a fiction too.

(My story, “The Girl,” is excerpted here.)

L.A. Noire is an upcoming video game for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, developed by Team Bondi, in conjunction with the notorious Rockstar Games, the company behind the immensely popular, and not to mention, controversial, Grand Theft Auto series and 2010’s Western epic, Red Dead Redemption.

Just as Grand Theft Auto dropped gamers into the centre of a living, breathing urban city, and Red Dead Redemption, the Wild West of the 1900s, L.A. Noire sees the action shift to the glamorous backdrop of Los Angeles of the 1940s; an age of gaudy excess in the wake of World War Two.

The first Rockstar game to feature a real city, over eight square miles of the City of Angels have been painstakingly recreated to provide a sense of historical accuracy and credibility.

Aesthetically speaking, the game lifts heavily from the film noir genre; crime dramas of the 1940s and 50s, stylishly shot with punchy, gritty dialogue and the hardboiled literary style of detective/crime fiction.

The game’s protagonist is Cole Phelps (motion captured by Aaron Staton AKA Ken Cosgrove of Mad Men), is a beat cop with a desire to clean up the streets of the city; from the back alley dope dealers to the corruption rife within L.A.’s supposed finest. Phelps’ also has his own demons to contend with, stemming from his actions during the war.

While the game will feature an open ended world and a HUD very similar to those in previous Rockstar Games, GTA meets L.A. Confidential this is not. Throughout the game, Phelps will progress through a series of “desks” in the police department, ranging from traffic, vice and homicide with the player solving crimes through a combination of investigating crime scenes, interviewing witnesses and interrogating suspects.

Investigating crime scenes will allow the gamer to think like a detective, where finding key pieces of evidence can make or break an investigation; while the game’s interrogation process implements a new system of facial motion capturing which captures everything from a twitch of the eye to a wince.

This facial motion capture is achieved by placing the actor in a large room full of cameras, where they perform their dialogue in full make-up, so If you think someone’s guilty, you’ll see it written all over their face.

With a campaign clocking in at between 25 and 30 hours, it seems there will be plenty for gamers to sink their teeth into.

Touted as Rockstar’s most mature game to date, L.A. Noire draws parallels to Quantic Dream’s 2010 interactive fiction game, Heavy Rain; a dark, mysterious thriller in which the way narrative unfolds is dependent on the way the player interacts with their environment, providing a truly immersive experience. Games like these are indicative of the depth and quality that many gamers are looking for.

Having already been postponed several times, the game is set to be released in North America on May 17 and on May 20 in Europe.

Judging by what we know so far, L.A. Noire is shaping up to be another sure-fire hit for Rockstar.

Now, where’s my fedora?

*Written by Rob Rimes. This article is pretty much spoiler free. It is also a rebuttal and a different take on the show than the Mises Institute VP Jeffrey A. Tucker’s article “Mad Men and Government Regulations”.

‘Mad Men’ is a show I just recently got into. Like most shows, I just didn’t want to start watching it because I didn’t want to find out I really liked it and then be stuck watching it like an obedient and perfectly timed zombie every week. That’s not a knock against the show, in actuality, it is a compliment. I hate having to be pulled in at a specific time, on a specific day, week after week because it disrupts my life and other things I could be doing, like writing an article such as this one.

You see, shows I fear of being too good, I typically avoid until they are over and then I sit down and have a marathon. This way I avoid a week, or god forbid a year thanks to a cliffhanger season finale, of tension and suspense waiting for answers to what just happened. I have been a regular watcher of ‘Dexter’ since the beginning and the end of season 4 (I won’t spoil it for you) left me fucking breathless, confused, saddened, puzzled and starving for answers! I had to wait nine goddamned months! Situations like this are why I waited until ‘Lost’ was completely over before delving into it. I am glad I did. That show was incredible and there was no way in hell I could’ve gone through that madness weekly and then for months during a prolonged break between seasons and writers’ strikes.

In regards to ‘Mad Men’, I had heard so much good stuff about it from a lot of my libertarian-leaning friends. Knowing that a new season starts every summer, I decided to finally sit down and watch the first four seasons to prep for the upcoming fifth season. It wasn’t until I finished Season 4 and then went to Wikipedia to see when Season 5 was set to air that I discovered that there were contract disputes and that it would be delayed until March of 2012, a year away! Damn it television demons! It figures that the moment I watched it, some bullshit would happen and the show would be delayed so the broadcasting gods above could laugh at me and my torment! Damn those gods, I defy the crap out of them!

Anyway, this article isn’t about my personal issues with television deities and my inability to be patient from episode to episode, it is actually about the rise of the Nanny State, which is very well present in the world of ‘Mad Men’. Being that it takes place in the 1960′s, we are shown a world that is going through a major metamorphosis. From the Kennedy-Nixon presidential race, through the assassination of JFK, the LBJ-Goldwater race and the Civil Rights movement, we are shown bits and pieces of a state that is slowly slipping into nannyism. Government regulation and intrusion into our lives really took a major turn for the worse in the 1960′s and ‘Mad Men’ does a good job at painting a picture of a world before the Nanny State took control and how the world had to adapt as the state’s grip slowly tightened.

Jeffrey A. Tucker, the Vice President of the Ludwig von Mises Institute wrote an article titled “Mad Men and Government Regulations” (which I posted here). In his article, he claims that the show glorifies the rapid expansion of government regulation and intrusion into our daily lives. I don’t feel that this is the case at all actually. I don’t find that the show glorifies it, I feel that they just display it and the audience is able to make up their own mind.

In my case, I see the regulation and it irritates me and I view the actions of the characters on the show and their distaste for it, as their show of utter resistance. I find it to be more of a heroic critique against the state’s control. Granted no one goes into an uproar over it on the show but that isn’t what the show is about. Many of these references are subtle and much of the defiance against it is wittily wedged into a single line of dialogue sprinkled into a lengthy conversation about old fashioneds, bear claws, Lucky Strikes and titties.

One example Mr. Tucker gave in his article about the glorification of regulation in ‘Mad Men’ was the incredible overabundance of smoking on the show. He cites that the chain smoking, which is done mostly indoors, is done to creep out the viewer and give them a sense of discomfort. He uses that example to say that it convinces the viewer into feeling a sense of relief over the government’s regulation of the tobacco industry, whether through labels and warnings on the packaging itself to endless laws limiting an American citizen’s right to smoke.

Well, I never took it that way. In fact, I took it just the opposite. While I don’t feel that everyone should just chain smoke an office space into a wood-burning barbecue smoker, I also don’t feel that it is the government’s job to force an office to comply. That should come down to company policy and if people are offended by a smokey workplace, don’t fucking apply.

The actions of the characters on ‘Mad Men’ are just doing whatever the hell they want to do and no one is saying a damn thing about it because in that day and age, they could grin it and bear it or they could leave. It is their choice to work in that environment. Maybe I am biased however, considering that my day job is being the Art Director for a major cigar manufacturer and sitting in smoke just comes with the territory. Whenever Don Draper lights up in his office, I see it as a big “fuck you” to the rising Nanny State within the confines of the show, as well as a message from the producers to the bureaucrats of our real world.

The issue of daytime office drinking is also used as an example that should raise eyebrows. Sure, pounding down scotches and vodka gimlets before noon while discussing the day’s sales pitch is a bit over the top but many executives in high profile companies have their little display of bottles and rocks glasses in the corner. A sip of some Laphroaig to ease the tension while going over the quarterly numbers isn’t unheard of in the real world today. Hell, it is common place.

I guess the issue with ‘Mad Men’ though is the amount that they drink. Sure, they do push the boundaries further than they should in their office space and in their own livers. However, I don’t take this as a glorification for regulation by the show’s producers; I take it as a glorification of the characters’ self-serving attitudes and their overwhelming desire to ignore the risks and to be the old school badass ad agency execs the show pimps them out as. It’s is their bodies, they can do what they want and no one is going to tell them otherwise. I think that they are all libertarians at heart. Well, we all know that Bertram Cooper is after he insisted that Don Draper use part of his bonus check to buy “Atlas Shrugged”.

Tucker also talks about the treatment of women on the show. Granted, as the show begins and then for quite some time, the attitudes of men towards women can be shocking in contrast to the way the world is today: 50 years later. However, as the show progresses, some of these attitudes change and some of the main woman on the show go from being just pretty objects to gaining the respect from the men who initially treated them that way. Once again, this is a sign of the times and a display of how well the show is able to evolve with the quickly changing times of the day.

For an example of this, one has to look no further than the character of Peggy Olson. In the beginning, Peggy is just starting out at Sterling Cooper and is a very timid and shy girl, who is seemingly easily flustered and pushed around by the men in the office. Pete Campbell, who is the meanest to her, also ends up having an affair with her right off the bat, which causes much more turmoil and confusion than she obviously needs. She is a second class citizen but she never gives up in this sexist man factory with impossible odds to succeed apart from putting out and doing “favors”. No, Peggy is the antithesis to what you think she is going to be when you first meet her.

Peggy goes through hell early on in the series but it doesn’t deter her, she nearly gives up but her boss, Don Draper sees something special in her that the other token chauvinists have overlooked. Peggy has talent, she has desire and she has the ability to be one of the biggest assets in the company. Don, being the only one with the foresight to see this, gives her that little shove she needs. By the third season, Peggy has an office next to Don’s, the guy she was the secretary for only a few years prior. In the fourth season, she is literally the creative glue that keeps the company afloat during hard times. Peggy hustles, she hustles better than most of the men on the show and is properly recognized and rewarded for it as time goes on. Peggy shatters the mold.

Joan Holloway also takes a similar path as Peggy Olson. Joan starts out as the token office bitch and head of all the women at Sterling Cooper. She is virtually the madame at the corporate playhouse. When Joan first meets Peggy, she coaches her on how to succeed. She tells her to basically stay out of the way, do what is asked, look pretty and don’t be shy if asked to go that extra mile. Joan is also Roger Sterling’s mistress at the beginning of the series. Roger is one of the partners of Sterling Cooper.

Joan is pretty much a cookie cutter character in the beginning. There are signs that someone is in there that deserves to be more than Roger’s doormat. By the end of the third season, she gets married to a decent guy, leaves that “do anything to please” schtick behind and her badass work ethic is also greatly recognized. She officially becomes the office manager of the company and oversees the fall of one company and then is an instrumental part in forming and growing a new company. By the end of Season 4, Joan literally runs shit. No she isn’t a partner but she is nearly at that level. Where Peggy owns the creative side, Joan owns the day-to-day and gets mad respect for it.

Does the development of these two characters make me want to thank the heavens for sexual harassment laws and women’s rights? No, not really. Granted I have no real problem with those things. It just makes me appreciate that two women were able to beat the odds and to truly make something great out of themselves. One played the game and one defied the game but in the end, they both persevered on their own, not because some laws helped them and made it more “fair”. These women fucking rock. I’d marry them both.

Also, who can forget Rachel Menken, who in Season 1 took over her father’s huge Manhattan department store? I wouldn’t consider her a victim of male chauvinism. In fact, she held her ground against Don in their first meeting. Eventually her and Don became a side item but in the end, she stood firm and had an incredible impact on Don. Her words steered the course of his character in a new direction. Rachel was able to make Don look inside of himself and question things he otherwise wouldn’t have if she were a pushover and just some sex toy.

Another thing Mr. Tucker made mention of in his article, while describing the theme of “patriarchal domination and savagery” is that housewives were so aloof and stupid that without government labels and regulations, they allowed their kids to do dumb and dangerous things. Well, kids just do that shit anyway, even today. There were times I did real dumb stuff with fireworks and they were covered in warning labels. All the flashy and colorful “DANGER” logos plastering the packaging didn’t stop me from launching multiple bottle rockets from my mouth.

One specific incident Tucker cited in the article is of a scene where one of the kids is wearing a plastic bag over their head. He mentions that because the Consumer Products Safety Commission didn’t yet exist, Betty Draper was too stupid to warn her kids of the possible suffocation that could occur playing their friendly game of “bag head”.

Well, watching the show and knowing the characters so well, when I saw that scene I felt it was meant to show how aloof Betty is. Not housewives in general and definitely not because warning labels weren’t on the bag. You see, over the course of the entire show, Betty is shown to have severe mental issues that make her act and think like a child. Something in her never properly developed and she is a grown woman living a grown woman’s life but with the mind of a child. This is an issue they hint at in the beginning of the series and it continues to grow and expand throughout all four seasons.

Tucker concludes, in his article, that he sees a constant theme that ‘Mad Men’ is glorifying, that being “the inability of society to improve itself without the helping hand of the master.” The theme I see in ‘Mad Men’ is that before government regulation was as widespread as it is today in our Diet Orwellian society, the people of the 1960′s didn’t need the help of the state. Instead, they lived without that helping hand and did just fine. The social issues would’ve worked themselves out and mothers would know what was too dangerous for their children without the labels. I’m sorry, I just don’t see ‘Mad Men’ as Hollywood’s attempt at force feeding us the paranoid idea that government regulation and control is cool and necessary. I actually see it as the polar opposite of that.

Now I am not knocking Tucker. I love Tucker, he is one of my favorite writers/bloggers out there. I love his book “Bourbon for Breakfast” and I repost a lot of his articles and lectures on The Swash. He has given me sound advice on fashion (although I can’t afford a pair of Alden Genuine Shell Cordovans.. yet) as well as how to properly utilize my water heater and how to combat Generation Sloth. That is why I found it odd to disagree on the subject of ‘Mad Men’. It’s all good though, great minds often times disagree and I actually really appreciate and respect his interpretation of the show, as we all have our own viewpoints. That is what makes us special. Besides, it’s a television show, we’re both probably over thinking it way more than we should. It is a story and it is fiction; I doubt the writers were really tinkering around with anything other than just trying to tell an awesome story.

Anyway, I am still kicking myself in the ass for missing the Mises Circle that was held in Naples, FL a few months back where Mr. Tucker spoke. Hopefully he will return to my neck of the woods and I won’t be too hungover from a late-night/early-morning bourbon bloodbath to wake up early on a Saturday morning. Thank God for the net and downloadable video links because the lecture was great. (see it here).

Via Press Release:

AMC AND LIONSGATE ANNOUNCE MULTIPLE SEASON DEAL FOR ‘Mad Men’ WITH MATTHEW WEINER SIGNING LONG-TERM AGREEMENT TO CONTINUE AS SHOWRUNNER

New York – March 31, 2011 – AMC and Lionsgate today announced the return of the iconic series “Mad Men” for seasons five and six with series creator Matthew Weiner back on board as showrunner.  Concurrently, it was announced that Weiner has signed a new long-term deal with Lionsgate, extending into a possible seventh season.  The announcements were made by Charlie Collier, president of AMC, and Kevin Beggs, president of Lionsgate Television Group.

When AMC debuted “Mad Men” in July 2007 it quickly became one of the most talked about series on television. Set in 1960s New York, “Mad Men” is a sexy and provocative original drama that follows the lives of the ruthlessly competitive men and women of Madison Avenue advertising. Produced by Lionsgate, “Mad Men” has made television history as the only cable series to win the Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama and the Golden Globe for Best Television Series-Drama for three consecutive years.

“I want to thank all of our wonderful fans for their support.” said Weiner. “I also want to thank AMC and Lionsgate for agreeing to support the artistic freedom of myself, the cast and the crew so that we can continue to make the show exactly as we have from the beginning.  I’m excited to get started on the next chapter of our story.”

“AMC’s original programming began with a mission to create bold storytelling of the highest quality, and ‘Mad Men’ was the perfect expression of that commitment. We’ve been proud to support this show from the day we read Matt’s ground-breaking pilot script and have loved building it with Matt and Lionsgate into the cultural phenomenon it has become,” said Collier. “For everyone involved in the show and its passionate fans, we are thrilled to announce that the series will continue on AMC under the exceptional vision of Matt Weiner.”

“We are proud to continue our successful relationships with AMC and the brilliantly talented Matt Weiner, whose vision has created one of the most distinguished series on television,” said Beggs. “We also appreciate the passion and patience of ‘Mad Men’ fans around the world who have been awaiting this good news, and we believe they will be rewarded with many more seasons of this extraordinary and groundbreaking series.”

Mad Men’s award-winning ensemble cast includes: Golden Globe-winner Jon Hamm, January Jones, Elisabeth Moss, Vincent Kartheiser, Christina Hendricks, John Slattery, Jared Harris, Rich Sommer, Aaron Staton, Robert Morse and Kiernan Shipka.

Mad Men has been great this season. Every episode delivers exactly what I expect, and while some may look down on that kind of predictability, I find it works perfectly for this show. Mad men is one of the few shows on television that isn’t meant to be a comedy, and also doesn’t try to reel viewers in with the threat of a character being killed off every week. You tune in knowing that every week is about the main character berating someone, drinking a whole lot, and somehow maintaining a like-ability that can’t be explained. On a Labor Day weekend that features no other new shows I care to view, Mad Men saves the day yet again.

This week’s episode is based around the excitement of the Cassius Clay (Muhammad Ali) vs Sonny Liston II, a rematch of a shocking brawl from 1964. Peggy’s crew of writers is tasked with coming up with a great campaign for Samsonite suitcases. Don eventually shoots down every ad concept Peggy brings him, and he eventually forces her to stay late on her birthday to work. The entire Draper/Peggy relationship is explored with great depth here. Instead of a lover’s quarrel it feels more like a Father/Daughter relationship, where Peggy is constantly looking for approval from Draper, while he misreads everything as usual. The conversations between both allude to multiple previous episodes in the series, which makes it even more enjoyable to anyone who has been keeping up this whole time.

The rest of the characters are in the peripheral for the most part this episode. Duck Phillips is the third lead in this episode, and the showdown between he and Draper is one of the most comical fight scenes in the history of television. If season four has shown anything, it’s that Draper isn’t as perfect as he’s been pretending to be this whole series. As Jon Hamm’s character slowly unravels in front of the rest of the cast, it’s interesting to see how they’re all reacting. Now that the real Don Draper’s wife has passed away, Peggy is the closest friend that Draper has left.

This episode of Mad Men featured the most sports references of any episode. There was the obvious centric boxing match that cost everyone their betting money, and there was the Joe Namath endorsement idea. This is a step up from the last episode where Pete was rocking a Mets pennant in his office. It’s always hard trying to decipher a Mad Men preview, as AMC always seems to be trying to make it seem like something more intense is brewing. I imagine there’ll be some comedic drunken one liners, a great line from Draper’s elderly secretary, and probably a couple nice shots of the beautiful Christina Hendricks.

Okay, perhaps I exaggerate – but only slightly.  Aaron Staton’s name has been in the opening credits since the beginning of the season, so I figured he’d be returning at some point.  (And we should continue to see more of him, I hope.)

It seems like of all the tertiary characters who didn’t make the leap to Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, Sal and Paul have the most partisans among fans.  The great thing about Mad Men is that all the characters, no matter how important, are well-developed and interesting so that their absence is felt.  (I was probably Duck Phillips’ only fan for a long time…until he starting sleeping with Peggy.  Eww.)  This may disappoint us as fans of a television show, but it is more true to life.  Fascinating people come and go from our lives all the time, just as we enter and exit the lives of others.

Still, if I’d had my wish to bring one of the old characters back, it wouldn’t have been Paul or even Sal.  No, my heart has always belonged to Ken Cosgrove.  I can’t say I thought too much about him one way or the other when I first started watching the show.  But in the third season, when they set him up as the perfect foil for Pete’s neurotic over-eagerness, I found that I really liked his character.  He seemed to be one of the few characters who was genuine and, more importantly, pretty much satisfied with his existence.  His and Pete’s very different reactions to having to compete for the Head of Accounts job said a lot about the character.  Pete immediately starts whining about how he deserves the job on his own, and that Ken isn’t as good as he is, and he’s pretty miserable about the whole deal.  Ken views it as an opportunity to prove himself.  He is happy and doesn’t resent it, which is probably one of the reasons he is ultimately successful in winning the job (no matter how much it doesn’t matter in the end) than Pete is.

In short, I think Ken is great.  He is smart, funny, but also a little bit goofy.  He seems almost…happy, which is a very strange thing in the Mad Men world.

So when Sunday’s episode started, and I heard Harry & Pete talking about Ken, I was so excited that it looked like I was finally going to have one of my favorite characters back, if only for a scene.  Of course, in typical Mad Men fashion, my expectations were upended.  There is no greater symbol of the depression that has taken hold of this season of Mad Men than that of a defeated Ken Cosgrove.  Sure, Don has been at his lowest this season, but we always knew it was just a matter of time with him.  But Ken?  Say it isn’t so, show!  Say it isn’t so!

Of course, I still loved every second of it.  Ken is still his earnest self – I read his comment about the world needing another Campbell to be a genuine one, devoid of any irony or sarcasm.  Also, he’s engaged, which will hopefully help him refine some of the rougher parts of his character (though I doubt his wife will be as good for him as Trudy has been for Pete).  But this Ken has endured some career setbacks.  His stint at McCann seems to have changed him greatly.  He was no longer his bubbly, jovial self.  We actually saw some cracks in him as he challenged Pete for talking about him behind his back.  This is the same Ken Cosgrove that pretty easily shook off Pete sucker punching him.  His ego has never seemed so fragile as it did in this episode.

I still love him though, and I’m looking forward to see what is going to happen with him next.