The world's gone mad.
That's the tagline for AMC's Mad Men marketing campaign. Of course, it's a little hyperbolic; Mad Men has low ratings, even for a cable show. The critical darling started off with less than a million viewers for its first season premiere, but it's been growing ever since. Season two brought along roughly two million viewers with its premiere, while season three upped that to 2.8 million.
The change has been less drastic for "Public Relations," the season four premiere of the Emmy-winning series, but it's still going upward on the bar graph. The episode received 2.92 million viewers, a healthy amount. It's still nowhere near the circa seven million viewers that shows like USA's Royal Pains and TNT's Rizzoli & Isles get, but the growth definitely means that Mad Men certainly hasn't reached its peak, something that is rare for a fourth-season show.
The series reinvented itself with the twist episode "Shut the Door, Have a Seat," in which many of the main characters ventured off into the unknown and started their own advertising agency, Sterling-Cooper-Draper-Pryce. "Public Relations" was a big turn-around from where we last saw our heroes, despite only an eleven-month gap in the show's timeline.
While the show's creator, Matthew Weiner, wants to end the series in a couple of years, AMC and Lionsgate may have other plans for the period drama, especially after seeing this proof that Mad Men's growth might be slowing, but certainly isn't stopping.
Mad Men's fourth season will continue with it's second episode, "Christmas Comes But Once a Year," another holiday-themed outing after the Thanksgiving-set "Public Relations". The episode will air Sunday at 10/9c, following the two-hour series premiere of AMC's new drama Rubicon.
You can read my review of "Public Relations" here, or you can check out Ian Austin's more in-depth recap here.
