We couldn’t really say goodbye to the main “Mad Men” characters, so we imagined our own series for them. See if you would tune in to any of these.
‘Better Call Pete’
In his new job at Learjet, Pete Campbell becomes to go-to guy for billionaires seeking to make a good investment in a new plane. For the first month on the job, he seems like a good hire, until the president of the company is forced to hire Bob Benson (James Wolk), whose sugar daddy du jour is a Hollywood mogul with a few favors to call in. Recalling his bitter experience back in New York with Bob, who made him feel invisible — and bald — Pete reverts to his smarmy, backstabbing tactics, threatening to “out” Bob to the conservative Christian executives at the company. Trudy (Alison Brie) takes a Learjet back to New York.
‘Mad Woman’
In his ironic goodbye to Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss), Pete predicted that she would be the creative director of her own agency. In the spinoff “Mad Woman,” we meet Peggy, running her own agency in 1980, in her early 40s, with Stan Rizzo (Jay R. Ferguson) still working for her and married to her. So where’s the drama, you ask? It comes during Season 1’s November sweeps when the boy Peggy gave up for adoption comes looking for her, with his hand out. Peggy wants to reject him again, but Stan lobbies for a more lenient course.
‘Whatever Happened to Sally?’
Taylor Schilling of “Orange Is the New Black” plays the neurotic, grown-up Sally Draper who, following her mother’s death from lung cancer, had to drop out of boarding school and raise her two younger brothers, Bobby and Gene. So, right there, she’s angry, having to attend an ordinary high school with ordinary teenagers. After she is finally free of her siblings, Sally skips college and moves to New York, where she becomes a bohemian druggie, squatting in a tenement in Alphabet City and sneering at her well-heeled background — until one day when Glen Bishop returns from the Vietnam War, determined to save her. He’s got his work cut out for him, what with the PTSD and all. Glen is again played by Matt Weiner’s son (Marten Holden Weiner), and he still can’t act.
‘Sterling Acres’
It’s a twilight years remake of the cheesy CBS sitcom “Green Acres,” about NYC slicker Oliver Wendell Douglas and his socialite wife Lisa, who moved from a Park Avenue apartment to a farm in Hooterville to simplify their lives, to Lisa’s everlasting regret. In our version of the story, Roger Sterling (John Slattery) forsakes his highbrow Manhattan lifestyle for the pleasures of the country. Only problem? His new wife, the tempestuous Marie Calvet (Julia Ormond) cannot bear the pastures, the countryside, the smell of livestock or the local yokels. They bicker in English and French. With subtiles. No laugh track necessary.
‘Just Joan’
In an homage to the long-running feminist comedy “Murphy Brown,” Christina Hendricks negotiates with the big boys as the producer of her own TV news show, using her considerable feminine wiles to get the network president (John Slattery, in a recurring role) to let her have her way. Running jokes include Joan’s rotating assistants, some of whom last a day or two, and her inability to make it from marriage proposal to the altar. Her most persistent suitor will be played by Scott Bakula.