Reel TV: The Best In Television This Past Week

Mad Men Finale (AMC)

The last episode of the season is now history.

In the finale, Don finds out from Conrad Hilton that Sterling Cooper is being sold to McCann, which means that Don loses Hilton’s biz.  Don informs Bert and Roger and they confront Lane and offer to buy the ad agency themselves.  Somewhat amused, Lane calls his boss in London to tell him about the offer, but is told that he is going to be sacked. Pete calls in sick, in order to stat looking for a job with another company.

Don, Bert, Roger and Lane decide to secretly start their own ad agency and to take along their best client accounts.  They talk Pete into joining them, after promising him a partnership, and also get Peggy and Ken to come on board. They connive to get the info they need over the weekend and, with Joan’s help in locating everything they need, they skidattle, leaving those left behind stunned.

Don’s personal life isn’t as triumphant, however. Betty goes to see a divorce lawyer who tells her that if she establishes 6 weeks of residency in Reno, she can easily obtain a divorce, if her husband consents.  She tells Don that he needs to secure a divorce lawyer.  He is still unaware of her involvement with Henry, until Roger inadvertently lets the cat out of the bag when they are having drinks at a bar.  A drunk Don goes home to confront Betty.  After saying some unkind things to her, he is ordered by Betty to move out of the house.  They tell the kids that he is moving out and Sally is especially distraught.  (This kid is going to have big problems next season, mark my word!)

At the end of the episode, Don calls Betty and tells him that he won’t stand in her way and she and Henry fly to Reno to start establishing her residency.

As always, Mad Men leaves you craving for more.

Big Love- “The Happiest Girl” Episode (HBO)

Besides Mad Men, Big Love is one of my favorite shows to watch. Unfortunately, it takes them forever to start a new season, so I have to be content with the Saturday night reruns for now.

For those who are not familiar with this excellent show, Big Love revolves around a loving, wholesome Utah family who just happen to be polygamists and also looks at the members of a cult of more extreme polygamists who live on a huge compound and follow a Warren Jeffries-like leader.  Big Love is full of weird, quirky, scary and endearing characters and always brings a surprise.

This weekend, they re-aired an episode titled, “The Happiest Girl.” Bill takes third wife Margene to a convention at a gambling casino.  Bill plans to go into the casino business himself, much to the horror of first wife Barb, who thinks it is immoral. When he runs into LDS friends of his and Barb’s at the casino, he tells them Margene is his secretary, since they don’t know he is a polygamist.  Of course, Margene gets upset. Bill calls Barb and asks her to come to the casino, so he can sit down and make a possible business connection with the couple.  She reluctantly agrees, causing friction between her and Margene.

Alby plots to gain leadership of the compound by bringing home his incapacitated father Roman from the hospital and holing him up in a room on the compound, while Alby’s first wife pumps sedatives into Roman.  Niki, Bill’s wife and Roman’s daughter, stops by the Juniper Creek compound and steals thousands of dollars worth of money, some of which she uses to throw an engagement party for Bill’s brother Joey and Kathy, who has agreed to become Joey’s second wife.

When Alby stops by the house and tells Nikki he knows she is the one who stole money from the compound, she denies it and blurts out that she doesn’t need to steal, because of Bill’s gaming enterprise. Once again Niki’s big mouth and deception have gotten her family into major trouble.

Rhonda, the obnoxious teen girl who fled the compound rather than be wed to decrepit old Roman, has become a media darling, though Bill’s daughter Sara and Sara’s friend Heather know the kind of brat she really is.

Just before going on t.v. to sing, Rhonda threatens to disclose Heather’s secret crush to Sarah.

Sure, it’s a lot to process, but Big Love is intriguing, no matter how many times you

watch it.

Fans will be relieved to know that a new season will begin in January.

Ancients Behaving Badly (The History Channel)

Maybe we wouldn’t complain as much about our own political leaders if we saw the kind of leaders they had to put up with in the ancient world.

The History Channel’s new program Ancients Behaving Badly gives us a chance to find out just what kind of rulers folks had to endure centuries ago.

I saw the episode on Roman emperor Caligula.  This man was evil personified.  Unfortunately, he couldn’t be thrown out of office, because emperors were not elected.  He could pretty much do exactly what he wanted to do, no matter how loathsome and cruel it was.

Want to talk about a bad human being?  Caligula held banquets and had the wives of his guests spirited out to another room, where he viciously raped them, and then returned with them to the banquet table to discuss the experience.  He also randomly chose banquet guests to murder on the spot.

This was just the tip of the iceberg of the horrendous things this guy did.  He tortured and killed throngs of innocent people and was a huge pervert who even married a horse.  He was so evil that his own guards ended up murdering him before he ended up annihilating everybody in Rome.

Ancients Behaving Badly helps us see real historical characters at a level we can understand and in a manner that fascinates us.

This is great for me and others who slept through high school history class back in the day.

The Daily Show (Comedy Central)

On Tuesday’s The Daily Show, Jon Stewart, in his own snarky way, proved that at least one Fox News pundit is less than consistent in reporting things honestly.  Stewart showed that a snippet of  video  footage shown during a report on Sean Hannity’s conservative talk show earlier that week was misleading.  Hannity was commenting on a recent anti- health reform rally and aired footage that implied that there was a larger number of people present than there actually was. The footage he aired was at an entirely different event.

The revelation embarrassed Hannity enough that he actually acknowledged the faux pas and apologized at the end of his show.

How often does that happen?

Cats 101 (The Animal Planet)

Even if you don’t particularly like cats, you will be fascinated by Animal Planet’s Cats 101.  Each episode features different breeds of cats, with facts about their origins, personality traits, grooming, heath issues and more, as well as comments from people who own these cats and professional breeders. Until I watched this show, I pretty much assumed all cats were basically the same, but it turns out that they can be as individual as human beings are.

This week, I watched an episode that showcased the Ocicat, Norwegian Forest C, Abyssinian, Bombay and Havana Brown cat breeds. Cats 101 presented information in a way that was surprisingly interesting.

Who knows?  Watching this show may even turn cat haters into cat lovers.