Over on House Next Door, they're thinking that JFK will be shot between seasons.

Makes sense -- it would also fit Weiner's style very well to come back in early in '64, having missed the big traumatic event but coming in when the emotions and the sense of things being shaken up are still raw. An OMG-turn-on-the-radio ep seems too heavy-handed, but a series of after-the-fact references and allusions would make perfect sense.

1964 has the added virtue of being All About the Beatles and heralding a huge cultural shift. Don and the other ad men are going to be on the wrong side of a generational divide.

Also, when Don was sitting in his dark office talking to Peggy about not informing him first about Freddy - he reminded me a lot of Michael Coreleone in Godfather II.

By the by, Mad Men V.2 Soundtrack was just released today.

Also, when Don was sitting in his dark office talking to Peggy about not informing him first about Freddy - he reminded me a lot of Michael Coreleone in Godfather II.

I give her some credit for not throwing Pete under the bus. She said that they should tell Don, and Pete said no. Then Pete went running to Duck and Roger.

I could see S3 starting with (or immediately after) the JFK assassination and ending with the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. That would cover a brief period of time when a generational divide really came to the fore.

That would be a really short timespan for the season, though, given how they've structured so far.

Let's see... S1 ran from March '60 to Thanksgiving of that year.

S2, so far has run from Valentine's Day '62 to currently, August of that year, with four eps remaining.

Not to say that Weiner wouldn't do it, because I think he's prone to doing the unexpected, but I'm not sure if he could get all the story he wanted into a little under three months of show time.

I could actually see him starting with New Year's Eve '63. Out with the old, in with the new, horrible things have happened, there's a change on the horizon and as Hec said, Don's going to be caught right in the middle of a cultural revolution that he's not exactly ready for.

Not to mention that Bewitched, with a main character working in an ad agency (that figured in a number of episodes!) premiered in the fall of 1964.

Another big cultural moment for the '64 season: Cassius Clay. We just ran into Floyd Patterson in the gambling joint with a brief scene about whether he's about to lose the heavyweight title; in about a month and a half, he's going to lose the title to Sonny Liston in the first round.

Liston meets Clay in February of 1964, so if it's true that we'll keep seeing every other year for more-or-less the calendar year, I'm calling it now. (And I can even guess who's going to win the big fight).

Oooh, was I was watching that scene, I thought to myself, I wish I knew boxing history better because this could be significant later. Thanks for the mini-lesson.

I'll admit that I had to turn to wikipedia for the exact dates -- but, yeah, Clay is just the kind of 1964 cultural moment we were talking about, and, of course, set to be an even bigger deal later in the 1960s.