Mad Men Round Table: Season 3, “The Gypsy and the Hobo”

EJ – This episode really should not have been good.  After all, a big hunk of the episode revolved around Don sitting down with Betty and telling her things that the viewers already know.  That is inherently uninteresting TV.  But then, they really had to show us these scenes so that we would know exactly what Don told her. For a lot of shows, this would be an insurmountable obstacle – either making for a very boring episode or a clip show.  Instead, Jon Hamm and January Jones just killed in these scenes, making them riveting even with a complete lack of new information.