Add "Rubicon" to "Mad Men" and the crowded list of other quality Sunday-night cable shows

Am I the only one whose stomach churns now every time Betty Draper (January Jones) appears on Mad Men? Nobody's going to nominate ex-husband Don (Jon Hamm) as father of the year, but even if the Draper kids manage to survive their childhoods undamaged physically -- not at all a sure bet, given how wacko Betty has become -- can you imagine the future therapists' bills piling up for the three of them?

by Ken

We'll come back to Mad Men, which has become more and more disturbing, but first I want to say a few words bout AMC's Rubicon. I watched the sneak preview of this show about a small Lower Manhattan think tank (or think-tank front?) tied into U.S. intellligence awhile back, and really enjoyed it, but didn't quite know what to do when regular episodes started rolling on my crowded Sunday-night cable schedule.

For the summer, in addition to there's been AMC's Mad Men (and Breaking Bad when it's in season), Lifetime's Army Wives, TNT's Leverage, HBO's Entourage and Hung, TBS's My Boys, Food Network's Next Food Network Star . . . whew! And every now and then PBS throws in something interesting on Masterpiece Classic or Masterpiece Mystery, which one of my PBS stations runs on Sunday night. I tell you, it takes some serious juggling of the DVR, and wouldn't be possible without those endless cable repeats.

Before attacking the DVR-stockpiled Rubicon episodes, by odd coincidence I had just stumbled on a repeat of the final episode of HBO's The Pacific, and so I now had James Badge Dale's Robert Leckie fresh in mind when I returned to Rubicon He plays the central character, a super-smart young intelligence analyst who stumbles onto a mysterious conspiracy that seems to thread through the upper reaches of the intelligence world. Will, in addition to being the smartest person in most any room he's in, is in a state of extreme social withdrawal, which we finally learned is the result of the loss of his wife and daughter on 9/11. I don't know how smart Dale is, but on-screen he really does read as super-smart, as the repeat glance at his Bob Leckie in The Pacific reminded me, and I've found that he gives Rubicon a really solid, involving center.

And the rest of the cast of think-tank folk is also solidly involving. The producers went all out for the first episode, engaging the always-fascinating (if almost always unlikable) Harris Yulin for basically one scene before he shoots himself, and even better, Peter Gerety as Will's father-in-law (and thus also grieving the loss of a daughter and granddaughter) and immediate superior, in a performance so quirkilyl warm and charming that I at least was totally beguiled, and prepared to surrender myself to the aftereffects of the character's fate in that episode.

MEANWHILE, BACK AT MAD MEN . . .

Sure, I was shocked when Betty hauled off and walloped little Sally (Kiernan Shipka). Shocked, but not surprised. It was already pretty clear at the end of last season that Betty is now so securely walled into her Fortress of Entitlement, Resentment, and Confusion that she has degenerated into Monster Mom, as I've previously referred to her. This moment in the above clip is now my idea of a standard Betty Draper Moment:

DON: You didn't have to hit her.
BETTY: You're right. [Shouting up the stairs after SALLY.] It doesn't do any good!

The rage is now so close to the surface, and so out of control, that I'm really scared to think what she might be capable of. It was interesting to see how shocked replacement husband Henry was when Betty unloaded on Sally -- interesting but hardly relevant, since Henry (Christopher Stanley), wallowing in his own mommy issues, seems to have no strategy for dealing with his lovely new wife but giving in to her. Any plot line that involves Betty and especially the children now instantly sets my stomach churning.

Following last week's Great Masturbation Incident, there was some hope in Sally being hustled off to a child therapist, who seems relatively well-intentioned. And it didn't take her more than 15 or 20 seconds' worth of conversation with Betty to understand how urgently in need of help she is. The Jezebel blog had some sharp coverage of the masturbation plot line -- cf. Margaret Hartmann's Sally Draper's Sexual Revolution and Sadie Stein's "Have You Been Caught Masturbating? Do Tell," inviting readers to share their own caught-in-the-act stories.

There's also a sort of interesting piece by AlterNet's Don Hazen on the reflexively mysognynistic behavior of the men in Mad Men: "The 7 Worst Men of Mad Men: Do They Have to Be Such Jerks?." The question that seems to engage Don Hazen is the authenticity of its depiction of the advertising world as it was being transformed in the early 1960s. Mad Men's rendering of this period has been sharply criticized in Playboy by advertising legend George Lois, "an eminence grise of the creative forces that transformed advertising in the 1960s," who "thinks the show gets it all wrong."

The show's creator and principal writer, Matthew Weiner, counter-insists on the authenticity of his depiction, pointing out that the various incarnations of the Sterling Cooper agency are notably not in the vanguard of the profession. It's an issue worth thrashing out, but one thats' really of interest mostly to those who watch Mad Men as a piece of documentary rapportage on the evolution of the advertising industry and its attitudes toward women. in this issue of literal authenticity. Since this is a work of fiction, and a brilliant one, I'm more concerned with the internal coherence and human believability of its characters and situations, and while I do sometimes feel that the degree of male cluelessness is overstated, I'm by no means sure even of that, and even if it is, I can see that some exaggeration, or perhaps spotlighting, is useful for seeing that kind of unthinking misogyny clearly.

In the early seasons, Betty's pathetic dependence on male definitions of her and her role in life was sad, even heart-rending. Even her attempt to get help via therapy backfired, because the therapist was a prisoner of those same gender assumptions, even falling casually into cahoots with Don in controlling her therapy. But it's important to remember that Betty absorbed those attitudes from her departed helpless-goddess mother, and understandable as it is how she deteriorated into the hopeless, even dangerous psychological mess she's become, at some point people do have to take responsibility for their own behavior. Even now she refuses to see how much poison she absorbed from her father (whom we got to know in a really chillingly compelling performance by Ryan Cutrona).

Hint, Betty: It wasn't just your husband your dad hated. Your insistence on naming the baby after him wasn't just an act of aggression against Don. It was a sign of how far out of touch with reality you are.

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