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Thanks to Netflix and the woeful state of primetime television, The Missus and I have been checking out the first season of Mad Men on DVD this week.

Generally speaking, I’m a second season sort of guy. I need to listen to a groundswell of people tell me what a great show something is during the first season (The Sopranos, Entourage) before I start tuning in for the second season.

So that makes the Mad Men season one viewing more fun, especially when we know that much more about the characters, their secrets, their back stories, their fates.

I noticed the commuter train plays a much bigger part in the first three episodes. Clearly the creators are trying to show the great discrepancy between the shimmering city to the south and the sleepy burbs to the north, with that hurtling, dark, smoky train connecting the two worlds.

The pilot had Don Draper stepping off in Ossining and stumbling to his giant car, and episode three had him mocking a Volkswagen Beetle ad in the paper, then being spotted by an old army buddy who outs him as Dick Whitman. Later in the episode, Draper is unwinding with a smoke on the train when a friendly conductor hands him a newspaper he’s dropped. Draper/Whitman slips the conductor a ticket the size of a dollar bill. Still later, he’s to pick up a birthday cake for his lispy kid when he goes AWOL. Drunk, he wakes up in his car with the red lights of a train crossing reflecting off the windshield, a train flying by.

There’s much less Metro-North, or whatever it was in the early ’60s, in the subsequent seasons of Mad Men. Presumably the creators were less obsessed with the great divide between city and suburbs, and more interested in developing the characters they’d had some time to flesh out. (Mind you, there is one memorable recent episode where one of Don’s young paramours–the guy gets around more than Tiger Woods–ambushes him on the train before jumping off at the next stop.)

Too bad–the train scenes are terrific.