When you get beyond the cocktails and the costumes and the showy emotional breakdowns, what makes any given episode of Mad Men memorable is the dialogue. Matthew Weiner and his staff are particularly wonderful at crafting one-liners — funny quips, penetrating realizations, earth-shattering statements that cause time to stop and personalities to crumble. This season, we’ll be keeping track of which characters get each episode’s five best lines, assigning points to winners, and posting a cumulative leader board to determine Season 5’s pithiest mad man (or woman). The results of last night’s (weirdly scatological) two-hour premiere are after the jump — and the winner so far is pretty surprising.
1. Don Draper: When you’re 40, how old will I be? Bobby Draper: You’ll be dead.
2. Stan Rizzo: I have a ticket to the bean ballet and the curtain is about to go up.
3. Civil rights protester (to the immature Y&R ad men who have just dropped a bag full of ice water out the window on her little boy): And they call us savages.
4. Pete Campbell: Stable is that step backwards between successful and failing.
5. Megan Draper: You’re all so cynical. You don’t smile, you smirk.
Season 5 scoreboard Bobby Draper: 5 Stan Rizzo: 4 Civil rights protester: 3 Pete Campbell: 2 Megan Draper: 1