When I think about Season 4, one word comes to mind -- "dark". This is the season of Don's discontent -- indeed, his comeuppance, if you will -- and as the season opens we find him living in a seedy Greenwich Village apartment, where his rendevous with the ladies end all too often in rebuffs rather than ravishings. On the work front, Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce has all the trappings of success. They have nice offices, a corral of secretaries, and a big client list. Don is being interviewed by a magazine asking the question "Who is Don Draper?" and further on into the season, we see him accepting a Cleo for his talents. The only problem is, he's drunk when he's accepting it. In fact, he's drunk most of the time. Dead drunk, and his decisions and fine-honed genius with words suffer for it.

Of course, being Don, he looks good. Hard to believe a man can drink that much and still not show the wages of sin. But as the season progresses, we see him losing his grip more and more, on the business as well as the personal front. He blows up at clients, neglects his children, and uses his women to get what he thinks he wants. At the same time, he is watching himself, from a distance, deconstruct. He starts keeping a journal and swims every day to clear his mind. You keep thinking he's going to get a grip on it. He has to. He's Don Draper.

The supporting staff is suffering too, all the with exception of Peggy, who seems to have really come into her own this season. She is confident, perky, and looks great. She's even dressing the part. Joan Holloway is given more to do this season, thankfully, and her character only gets more intriguing. There's really no telling what Joan can pull off, because no matter what happens to her, she keeps on going. As for Betty Draper, she isn't present too often, but when she is, she is still very much the Mom you love to hate, and she doesn't seem to have learned a thing.

I can't reveal too much more without spoiling the season. In fact, I probably should have put spoiler alerts in the beginning of this, but I don't think I've ruined anything for anybody. This is great stuff, amazing stuff for television, and no matter how painful the journey, you've just got to watch Season Four. All of it.

The excellence continues with this fourth season of MAD MEN. Matthew Weiner, its creator, was one of the writers on the SOPRANOS. He hovers over every detail of MAD MEN, getting it absolutely right, just as creator David Chase did for the SOPRANOS. The first choice he made was absolutely insisting that Jon Hamm had to play the lead. Everyone thought Weiner was crazy insisting on an unknown. Result? Jon Hamm is now a major tv star and probably going to be a major star period. Next bit of historical marvel was that HBO turned this show down so that Weiner took it to an upstart cable channel, AMC, and ended up putting AMC on the map. For those of you who don't know it, this show IS Weiner and this was nowhere more evident than at the 2010 Emmy Awards show where he walked up to the stage to receive Emmy after Emmy including the best drama show one, the big one. I am dwelling on this point because often viewers do not realize that it is one person off camera who is making the whole thing happen. That is certainly the case here.

Don Draper (played by Jon Hamm) continues to be the fulcrum for the show; everything pivots around him. However, it is a very rich band of characters indeed who do that pivoting. In season four, everyone is coming into his or her own, whether for good or ill. Draper himself goes through a huge melting down crisis post divorce, flailing around now that what little identity he had seems gone. His entire identity now comes down to his job, which is finding a way to brilliantly project falsity, which is a metaphor for his entire life.

Betty, his ex, is becoming more of what she has been in the prior three seasons. More brittle, more vicious, more intent on achieving her ever elusive goal of perfection. This becomes so paramount that one scarcely notices her Grace Kelly like appearance anymore. Her new husband belatedly realizes what a morass he has gotten himself into by marrying her. Her relationship with Sally becomes one of the best of the show. There is a boiling point coming between the two of them which I am awaiting more eagerly than any other plot development,

Don Draper's secretary also becomes a pivotal force. For half of the show it is an old battleaxe who is just fantastic and then we get a very attractive, very maternal young French Canadian woman. As the show gathers steam towards its end, it becomes apparent that this is a very important character to watch.

Peggy and Joan also remain big characters. Rounding them out as the women of the mid 60s in the work force, is a woman who is the harbinger of things to come. She has her doctorate in psychology and is using it to measure and predict consumer acts in the advertising world. She begins dating Don and Peggy sees her as a role model for herself, a woman much further up in the business world model. Joan is still mired in the head secretarial world and also is stuck with unfinished business with her major weasel of a boss, Roger Sterling.

Don Draper's nemesis Peter becomes no longer his nemesis but now a comrade in arms. Where once these two were at odds, they now need one another, more than even they realize as Roger Sterling gives them only half the tale of a major crisis. Pete Campbell has changed a great deal as a character and is now a force for stability that once seemed impossible.

The only bad thing about season four is that it ended. For those of us who are in its thrall, that we have to wait until next summer to delve into season five, is a very sad state of affairs indeed.

Some viewers were surprised by some of the twists in this season's MAD MEN. Having grown up in Don Draper's 1960s era, I think his character is utterly consistent with his time and place in America. Draper often tries but there is only so much he can overcome. He's creative and talented. He can be audacious in his ideas and his work. However, he is always a prisoner of his past and forever on the run from it. Hence, I am not surprised that his two closest people at the end of this season are women who appeal to the feminine side of his own creative nature. That one is superbly maternal would be an incredible draw to someone with his childhood always dragging along behind him. The other, Peggy, is what is best about himself, unaccompanied by the worst of himself.

I was very interested to also see how thin things are wearing between Betty and her new husband. Increasingly, he finds her doing one vicious or despicable thing after another. This brittleness in her nature is also becoming more and more apparent in her every scene. I wonder if this guy can survive another five years with her.

I also think Sally is becoming a major character and I can hardly wait until next season to see if I am right. Sally did well in her therapy with the psychiatrist but, predictably, Betty refused treatment for herself when the psychiatrist suggested it. I am just as interested in seeing the fireworks with Sally and Betty next season as I am anything else.

Also, that weasel Roger Sterling has some big surprises coming his way. I see fireworks in his future too.

In conclusion, sigh, I can't believe I have to wait a year for season five!

This show won best Emmy drama in 2010 and nothing else was even close in competition to it.