‘This Will Be Our Year’: Mad Men’s Ten Best Cut-To-Black Musical Moments

Warning: depending on how far you are up to in Mad Men, there may be spoilers ahead. But anyone who’s watched past season seven, episode two is fine.

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Mad Men — glorious Mad Men — has sadly lost some of its luster among those who talk TV, supplanted at water-coolers by Game of Thrones and its frequent, horrifying WTF moments. (How can a show with only a few bloody sequences to boast of — a rogue lawnmower; a punch-up; a nipple in a box — compete with the frequent beheadings, poisonings, and sword-through-face-ings of Thrones?)

And yet Mad Men is still producing seismic, paradigm-shifting moments in its seventh and final season — like when downward-spiralling Don got an unexpected “I love you” from his estranged daughter Sally on Valentine’s Day, amplified by the strains of The Zombies’ undervalued ditty ‘This Will Be Our Year’. It’s as good as TV in 2014 gets, made all the more beautiful and lasting by the perfect soundtrack selection. No neck-breakings necessary.

The final season of Mad Men has been split in two parts, the first of which finishes up this afternoon. Before we get there, here’s a tribute to show-runner Matthew Weiner’s finest ‘cut-to-black’ musical moments. Spoilers ahoy.

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Season 1, Episode 1: ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’

Jingle: Vic Damone, ‘On The Street Where You Live’

Having concluded a day of sleeping around and blowing everyone away with his inscrutable marketing mind, Mad Men‘s pilot saw Don arriving home to (gasp) a wife and kids. This syrupy ballad from My Fair Lady plays as the camera slowly pulls away from the suburban Draper residence. Serene. Idyllic. As we’ll come to learn, a delusion.

Several episodes later, Betty Draper will be shooting pigeons, cigarette dangling from the mouth, and we’ll have learned of Don’s past as a war-dodging, hobo-mentored imposter. Not quite the picture of 1960 marital perfection.

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Season 1, Episode 13: ‘The Wheel’

Jingle: Bob Dylan, ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright’

Season One begins with a twist and closes with a fake-out, when Don finally decides to go with the family on their Thanksgiving holiday, jumping on the train and imagining an It’s a Wonderful Life-style welcome when he walks through the front door. What he finds instead is an empty house: they’ve already left without him.

He sits dejectedly on the stairs, as Dylan’s (slightly anachronistic!) 1962 track ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright’ reminds him that he’s the reason they’re “travelling on.” It comes just after he makes the infamous ‘Carousel’ pitch, reminding Kodak that nostalgia is the “pain from an old wound.” This episode, too, still stings.

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Season 3, Episode 13: ‘Shut The Door. Have A Seat.’

Jingle: Roy Orbison, ‘Shahdaroba’

Don’s careless destruction of the Draper household culminates in this caper-like instalment, in which he and some select cohorts abandon a British-invaded Sterling Cooper and start their own firm. Suffering from a rare case of compassion and clarity, he agrees to divorce long-suffering Betty. Then comes Orbison’s oddball, Arabian-flavoured ‘Shahdaroba’. It can’t be found on Orbison’s Best Of compilations, but thanks to the singer’s iconic intonation, it seems at once familiar and foreign, like Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce’s new hotel-room residence.

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Season 4, Episode 7: ‘The Suitcase’

Jingle: Simon & Garfunkel, ‘Bleecker Street’

Don, after a drunken evening that climaxed with a beating by — of all people — Duck, solidifies his friendship with mentee Peggy in this terrific two-hander. When he tells Peggy to leave his office door open, Simon & Garfunkel strumming in the background, it feels like our hero might be on the upswing.

That the previous night wasn’t even close to his rock bottom is something we learn much later on.

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Season 5, Episode 5: ‘Signal 30’

Jingle: Sir Georg Solti, ‘Ode To Joy’

‘Signal 30’ is Mad Men‘s best ever episode — and not just because it has Lane beating the snot out of Pete, or because it sprouted the catchphrase (at least in my house), “He was caught with chewing gum on his pubis!”

A tragic look at the trapped lives of those who share Don’s workspace, it ends with would-be author Ken narrating a short story about ‘The Man with the Miniature Orchestra’, a veiled allusion to Pete and his monstrous hi-fi system. We’re left on the image of a newly-humbled Pete haunted by the persistent dripping of his kitchen tap. We cut to black, and Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ simmers, almost to a boil, over the credits.

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Season 5, Episode 8: ‘Lady Lazarus’

Jingle: The Beatles, ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’

No one actually expected Mad Men to deploy a notoriously expensive Beatles song in Lady Lazarus, despite everyone mentioning their music incessantly throughout. But the show really did go there, paying $250,000 for the pleasure.

Don’s new wife Megan gifts her hubby with a copy of Revolver, hoping to help him understand the ‘new’ 1960s. He only gets a couple minutes into the final track before switching it off — although the psychedelic guitars roar back to life when the screen goes black.

Maybe Don’s more of a Beach Boys kinda guy. (Fittingly, ‘I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times’ popped up two episodes earlier.)

 

Season 5, Episode 11: ‘The Other Woman’

Jingle: The Kinks, ‘You Really Got Me’

Unfortunately not an inspiration for that Cameron Diaz movie, this chapter concludes with Peggy finally getting out from under Don and taking a promotion elsewhere. She quits, and he practically bows at her feet unable to process the news.

As the elevator opens, she slyly smiles, and her regrets are washed away by five of the most famous opening notes of all time.

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Season 5, Episode 13: ‘The Phantom’

Jingle: Nancy Sinatra, ‘You Only Live Twice’

Don/Dick Whitman has lived at least two lives, making Nancy Sinatra’s Bond theme more than suitable for this Season Five finale. Although the show is usually a little more subtle than this, you can’t fault Weiner for having a woman transparently ask Don at a bar, “Are you alone?”

The way he slowly eyes her before the sudden cut could have just as appropriately been the winking conclusion to any 007 flick. Here, as he mourns the death of a friend, the abandonment of a protégé, and the loss of his wife to the foul temptress that is ACTING!, it’s a slightly sadder affair.

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Season 6, Episode 13: ‘In Care Of’

Jingle: Judy Collins, ‘Both Sides, Now’

As the seasons rolled by, Sally Draper emerged as Mad Men‘s truly essential character; a tween attempting to understand the massive social and political upheavals of the era, not to mention her crush on that weird Glen kid. (It also helps that Kiernan Shipka, queen of the eye roll, acts everyone under the table.) In Care Of saw Don, suspended for s***ing the bed in a pitch to Hershey’s, find some redemption by revealing his brothel-bound origin story to his three kids. This flowery take on the Joni Mitchell-penned ‘Both Sides, Now’, about the ways in which adulthood kills all youthful hopes and dreams, should be a total bummer. As the soundtrack of Sally and Don’s inextricable bond, it couldn’t be sweeter.

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Season 7, Episode 2: ‘A Day’s Work’

Jingle: The Zombies, ‘This Will Be Our Year’

Which brings us to Season Seven’s finest moment so far, an off-handed yet totally loaded “I love you” from Sally to Don. The Zombies are better known for ‘Time Of The Season’, but ‘This Will Be Our Year’ can also be found tucked away on their 1968 album Odessey and Oracle.

A contender for loveliest ever love song, it suggests a potential happy ending for Don, even if he never gets his career or marriage back on track. His daughter still has him in her heart. Cue tears.

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Mad Men’s half-season finale airs on Showcase at 4.30pm, fast-tracked from the US.

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Simon Miraudo is Quickflix’s AFCA award-winning news editor and film critic. He is also co-host of The Podcasting Couch and tweets at @simonmiraudo.