I’m sorry but Roger Sterling‘s flamboyant new moustache, inescapably present in “Severance,” the first episode of the final Mad Men season (airing tonight), is a huge mistake. The appearance of a character should never overwhelm what he/she is about within. One look at Sterling’s perverse, snow-white dandy stache and you can’t hear a word he says. All you can hear is your own startled voice saying over and over again, “Why the fuck did he grow that thing?” (In a 4.5.15 conversation with Vulture‘s Kyle Buchanan, Weiner said Roger “doesn’t look good with a white, trimmed mustache…this soup-strainer thing that’s going on is much more appropriate for him.”) On top of which it makes him look like he’s 75, and why would Roger want to look like an eccentric Civil War grandfather if he’s trying to nail the latest interesting youngish woman, which he always is? “Oh no!”-wise, Roger’s moustache is, no exaggeration, almost on the level of that Afro wig that Phil Spector wore to his murder trial. I was going to ask John Slattery about this at the Mad Men after-party but I wimped out, lazy coward that I sometimes am.

Legendary producer David Brown (Jaws, The Verdict).