Nothing illustrates the busy plate-tectonic action in the television industry better than the reappearance of the sublime Mad Men, Saturday - behind not just one pay wall, but two.
The long-awaited new season is available only to Sky subscribers, and of those, only to viewers who pay a bit extra for the SoHo channel. Increasingly, the best of mass-market drama is quarantined this way.
Sky has so far re-run past Mad Men series some time later on free-to-air Prime. But it's clear the programmers are constantly testing the market to see how much pay-walling we can stand.
In Britain, the technique failed with Mad Men, which drew less than 50,000 viewers for its return - a pitiful result in such a big market, specially given a concerted publicity blitz for the show.
However, Game of Thrones, also back on SoHo this week, drew half a million British viewers, despite the pay wall.
While TVNZ and TV3 have some superb and addictive series, such as Homeland and Revenge, their cupboards are getting noticeably barer, while SoHo, with the free Prime as a sort of Judas goat bait, is increasingly dominating the quality end of the market.
How long before Downton Abbey goes behind a pay wall first? And with the reasonably well-stocked Quickflix streaming service offering another, possibly cheaper way to get new series instantly, the market is in for further quakes.
Because whatever viewers' philosophies may be about corporate greed versus sensible commercial practice - and let's face it, the Kim Dotcom case makes it clear there are impenetrable commercial and ethical issues in play - it's a troubling issue of will power to wait months for a show as fascinatingly original as Mad Men.
The movie-length new episode went from toe-curling moments of embarrassment through breathtaking cynicism to delicious humour - all with considerable surface style and polish which, as is the show's hallmark, made the dark undercurrents all the more murky.
We're up to about 1966, with the Vietnam War and racial tensions simmering in the background, and the advertising agencies' fortunes foundering in the foreground.
Don's impulse proposal to his sexy and capable young secretary Megan last series has led to both marriage and to her probably unmerited promotion to the copy department. And the seemingly self-effacing new Mrs Draper is rapidly turning out to be quite the attention junkie.
She insists on throwing Don a 40th birthday party, despite being assured he will hate it, and, in the course of it, performs the most excruciating sex bomb routine, singing a cutesy French song in a Lolita-esque manner which has all the men's tongues hanging out at the same time as they wrestle with a deep sense of unease at the inappropriateness of it.
And you could sense the sudden release of battery acid into the veins of the other women at the party. Here was a new, ingeniously passive-aggressive predator. She's so sweet - and now we really hate her.
For Don, who continues to live a comprehensive lie in pretty much all aspects of his life save for his creative talent, the advent of Megan appears already to have been a false dawn. Yes, she's sex and sunshine, and his kids love her, and he seems happy.
But Don is still Don. He does not melt and forgive Megan for the surprise party.
Even she cannot bring light into his dark places. Because, as we are again reminded, Don is locked firmly behind his own pay wall - an emotional one, financed by self-loathing and a formless sort of desolation you can sense just behind the eyes, however well things are going for him.
The firm is struggling in the wake of the Lucky Strike contract loss. Pete, who is on a rain-making streak, decides to assert his rights, somewhat suicidally, by demanding to be given Roger's office.
His ploy is to call a meeting of the partners in his pokey office, to illustrate how unbecoming it is for him to have to cram big-cheque-writing clients in there.
Roger naturally refuses to give up his golf-swinging acres of carpet. Pete, indignantly: "Where am I supposed to conduct business?"
Roger: "In the crapper for all I care."
Pete is clearly on a major story arc this series. Not only is he feeling martyred at work, but home life is dominated by his wife's baby blues. Something will snap.
As usual, dark teatimes of the soul abound. Roger's marriage to the fetching Jane is a wasteland of disappointments already. Peggy is bridling over Megan's unearned promotion. Joan has had Roger's baby, intent on passing it off as her absent husband's, but work is where her heart is. Her exchanges with her mother are vicious on this point - containing also a glimpse of where her steely core comes from.
And there's the unending fascination of the clients and the ads, and most especially the attitudes of the vintage. "Is it me," asks Roger on his way to the office, "or is this lobby full of negroes?" It's amazing how much tone and atmosphere can be conveyed through the discussion of airlines and pantyhose.
But perhaps the best trick Mad Men pulls off is that whatever is happening in it now, big chunks of past episodes are never far from your mind. Impossible to watch Lane without getting flashbacks of the shattering scene in which his pukka English father laid him out on the floor for having taken up with a "negro".
Peggy always appears trailing echoes of her awful affair with the doomed Duck, and her enduring feelings for Pete. And, of course, Don Draper's baggage hovers over his head like a suspended shroud.
- © Fairfax NZ News
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