Much as I enjoyed having my Sunday nights back so that I could watch the show for pleasure’s sake like everyone else, I wish I had found the time to review the first half of Mad Men’s seventh and final season the way I had done for Season 6. It’s the most emotionally and dramatically dense show on TV not to require double and triple agents in a cold war setting (though, hey, we’ve still got 7 more episodes; Comrade Bob Benson would make a surprising amount of sense), so I was never without something to say about it when I was covering the show week-to-week.

But it is nice to be able to just sit back with the show during its broken-in-half-by-stupid-network-demands swan song, because right now Mad Men might be my favorite show on television. It’s hard to judge as always, because the show’s power is at its height while on the air, so talking about it weeks after the finale means other things have come along to shift the conversation. And while the 7 episodes we got this year had their fair share of bumps and sputtering, the high points provided a yearly reminder that, when at its very best, Mad Men is in the top .0001% of TV.

The first 40-odd minutes of the finale, all centered on the moon landing and some exciting corporate hijinks, would have been enough to make it one of the year’s best episodes. But ending on a literal big finish from Robert Morse? Yeah, that’s Greatest of All Time material right there. Unlike some others, I think the show will still have plenty to address in the final 7 episodes that air in 2015, but there’s something remarkable about how a show as ephemeral and narratively freewheeling as Mad Men can reach this stage of its life span, and feel like it would be just as equipped to keep going as it would be to say goodbye. This is definitely in my top 5 for the year so far, and hopefully a rewatch will clarify its position further. But yeah, Mad Men, you guys. Mad Men.