Joseph Clift

I've got 4 and a bit MM episodes left. One of the things that is very affecting is the children. Over the eight years the show ran, they literally grow up. Take Glen. Man, he was a strange boy, and grew into a squat and broad boy-man, as boys can do, but in the fifth to last episode, he is eighteen and he's quite tall and his face is lean and his torso longer and his strangeness is seen to be a serious young man now. He had a (strange ...) crush on Betty, and even though he's turned up with a girl, you can see in his eyes the ghost of his boyhood crush, but he's also been a brother-like friend to Betty and Don's daughter, Sally. He's off to 'Nam. Eighteen ... which was the average age of combatants ... Sally has told him he'll be murdering kids and stormed off. Betty said: Don't listen to Jane Fonda (Sally). MM hasn't been perfect. On occasion, it has tipped into soap opera, and ending of series/seasons have felt rushed and forced at times. But for the most part, it's been one of the best drama series I've seen. Like cinema stretched over tens of hours. For the most part, everything about it has been 'perfect'. It's given me a real insight into marriage and, sadly, divorce. I rooted for Don's after-Betty marriage to last, for love to last, but it didn't. It's made me misogynist at times - it's that immersive, and captures a time I lived through - and a misogyny which I felt uncomfortable with as a child and young teen - but the men, especially Don, have made me misandrist, too. Bottom line, I can see why it is critically acclaimed, and while it's probably too soon to be cult viewing, it will become so. I hope Glen doesn't come back in a flag, and I already know - reading spoiler comments online - that Betty dies. In the files in my head, it will always be under: that lonely but peaceful first summer at mine where I caught up with and watched the rest of as good a TV drama as I've ever watched.