I have much to be thankful for this season.

The third year of "Mad Men" was a fabulous ride. The fourth season of "Friday Night Lights" (pictured above) has been awe-inspiring. The transition the show made this year in introducing a host of new characters proves that the show's simple genius at portraying the life of regular folks in Small-ish Town, USA was no fluke. It's an amalgamation of the skill of a group of immensely talented, obviously dedicated people, led by showrunner Jason Katims.

Could Kyle Chandler possibly get any better in the role of Coach Eric Taylor? Every week, I think not and then he goes and blows me away the following episode. I'm glad "FNL" only just barely overlapped with "Mad Men" this year, it's a nice way to ease out of the craving for weekly "Mad Men" fix. Now the night I most wait for during the week is Wednesday (when "FNL" airs on DirecTV's 101 Network).

Wednesday is also "Modern Family" night, a show that I'm loving being able still love as the season progresses. The pilot was so good -- but I thought, 'How can they keep this up?' Talented writers, extremely talented, engaging cast (including the great Julie Bowen, pictured left) -- you do the math. Same goes for "The Big Bang Theory." I'm loving seeing it go to No. 1 (among primetime comedies) with a bullet. So well-deserved.

Between "Big Bang" (pictured below) and "Modern Family," I feel spoiled to have two young and growing comedies to look forward to each week. The shows make me laugh (out loud -- they are not infected with the cleverness virus) in very different ways. With "Modern Family," it's usually because I can give a knowing nod to one thread of the storyline as a mother, a daughter, a wife, a sister or a friend. And with "Big Bang" I laugh because they are very funny fellows (including Kaley Cuoco) doing silly things that, more often than not, make me laugh. You can't ask for more on a Monday night.

Yowza. The only thing missing from "Mad Men's" season finale was the theme from "Rocky."

We were treated to the sight of Don Draper getting off the ropes, finally, after getting a big injection of his old smooth-but-smoldering fire back as he fights back and plots the course for the rest of his life. I'm guessing this episode, "Shut the Door, Have a Seat," will be popular with the fans, but crix may carp that it was a little too "Dallas" in terms of the tidy storytelling. The seg penned by Erin Levy and Matthew Weiner and helmed by Weiner (as he did for the previous season closers) seemed to offer much more in the way of conclusions and set a deliberate course for next season than past "Mad Men" finales. But I'm in the fan camp and can't complain. The lighter moments sprinkled throughout the episode offset some of the on-the-nose plot points - All in all, I loved this season. Sorry to see it end.

This episode was monumental for Don, natch. What the JFK assassination was to Betty, the jolt of  McCann-Erickson buying Putnam, Powell and Lowe (and Sterling Cooper) was to Don. (I kept thinking about Albert Brooks in "Lost in America," telling anyone who'll listen that he's a senior vice president at M-E.) All the hard knocks and hard lessons learned of the season came to a head in fueling his single-minded determination not to become a cog at what he considers "a sausage factory." It's also made clear by the flashbacks to his boyhood with his hot-headed father that he wants to do everything he can to avoid being beaten down by life, to literally getting killed by a kick in the head from a horse.

By the end of this episode, as Don moves into his new apartment, you realize that for the first time in years he's really making a fundamental change in his life. He's (mostly) let go of the ruse of Don Draper, he's letting go of his idyllic vision of the wife and family, even at the great cost of hurting his older children, and he's starting to actually think about how he treats other people.

From the start of this season, Don was backsliding into his old patterns of fooling around in varying degrees (the one-night stand with the stewardess, the deeper entanglement with Suzanne) and keeping everyone around him at arm's length. I thought it was interesting that we didn't see Don running back to Suzanne, or into another's arms even though nothing's really stopping him. He's pouring everything he's got into the new venture. As he told Bert, "I'm sick of being batted around like a ping pong ball. I want to work. I want to build something myself."

We’ve come a long way in 13 weeks. “Mad Men” covered an incredible amount of territory in its just-wrapped third season, weaving social, cultural and political issues of the day (mid-to-late 1963) into its tapestry of the lives, loves and ambitions of a wonderfully distinct group of characters. “Mad Men” creator/exec producer

Matthew Weiner was kind enough to spend an hour on the phone sharing his thoughts about the grand design of the season, though he was careful not to say a word about Sunday’s finale, which I hadn’t seen at the time we spoke (Nov. 5).

How did you wrap your arms around something as monumental as the Kennedy assassination?

We have an experience to measure it against. I think 9/11 is a very close experience – it’s very different kind of experience but I was definitely trying to recreate the sensation that we had on that day: The collective shock, the loss of faith in institutions.

That’s why I did the thing about the heating and the air conditioning going off in and Hildy saying ‘The building will take care of it.’ Right there it was a way to say that (Sterling Cooper) is an institution. Marriage is an institution, the wedding is an institution, work is an institution, family is an institution.

Dramatically I wanted to hit the audience by surprise. We were going to do it in (episode) 11 originally and then we had enough story to push it into 12. It was never going to be the last episode because I wanted it to hit the characters and the audience in the way that it did. The episode starts out as a regular episode and then it takes a left turn.

You telegraphed it through the glimpse of the invitation for Margaret’s wedding on Nov. 23.

It’s kind of a ‘Twilight Zone’ move. (Alerting the aud that) this is going to happen this year and these people don’t know it.

After a season of twists, turns, trysts and trips (Roma anyone?), we're in the home stretch for what should be a momentous third-season finale for "Mad Men" on Sunday night.

Yes, I know that Weiner is of the David Chase/"Sopranos" school where the big, big stuff usually happens in the penultimate episode. And certainly, the JFK assassination in last week's episode, "The Grown Ups," set a number of interesting things in motion. But it's folly to predict this show (remember, Roger Sterling actually turned down an opportunity for cheap-and-easy drunken sex just a few episodes ago) -- so why bother.

Watch this space on Sunday night for a Q&A with the maestro himself, Matthew Weiner. We had a nice long chat on Thursday morning about the big themes and the grand design of this season, though he said not a peep about the finale. I've been spoiled with advance screeners for episodes this season (usually landing on my desk on the Fridays) but not for the season finale. I'll watch it like a civilian and do my best to make sense of it before the bars close (L.A. time).

The Q&A will pop up right after the finale ends, or a little after 11 p.m. (L.A. time). Matt, as always, covers a wide range of territory -- he offers some particularly interesting insights into the foot fiasco from "Guy Walks Into an Advertising Agency."

Can you guess who he's talking about with this observation: "His use of silence is such an advanced concept of acting."

I don't know where to begin. I want to scream at you for ruining all of this...But then you tried to fix it, and there's no point. There's no point, Don.

A season of monumental changes for "Mad Men's" central players came to its near-conclusion with a storyline that grabbed those of us at home by the throat, shook us up and left us in mourning for the loss so profound, and yet still so hard to define, even 46 years on.

"Mad Men" is particularly involving for viewers because there's so much to choose from, between the stable of fantastically rendered characters and the period touches that can provoke so much thought about the way we lived then, and now. But there was no choosing in this episode. The JFK assassination is something we've all lived with as a part of our collective consciousness, in too many ways to detail here.

So, to borrow a phrase from the "Mad Men" blogger I admire most, Alan Sepinwall: Damn. Damn. Damn, damn, damn. This was an impossible assignment, very, very, very well done.

After my first viewing of this episode,"The Grown-Ups," I barely processed the developments for Betty and Don, Betty and Henry, Pete, Peggy and Roger. By the time the angelic, and so purely American, voice of Miss Skeeter Davis sang of heartbreak, with her 1962 hit "The End of the World," over the closing credits, I just felt incredible sadness -- not sobbing sad, but a kind of aching in my bones, no kidding. Because this was no dramatist's concoction. This all happened in the world as it was just six years before I was born.