Mad Men is my favorite short story collection

Neil Gaiman — as prolific a writer of short stories as any contemporary author — once described the medium as a vessel for "tiny windows into other worlds and other minds and other dreams."

That's an equally apt way to describe a single episode of television, which offers a similarly brief window into somewhere else. TV is inherently episodic, but streaming has pushed many shows toward hyper-serialization. If you picked a random episode of a show like The Sopranos or The Wire or Breaking Bad and pushed play, you'd be lost, like starting a book or a movie in the middle — and undoubtedly missing much of what made those shows great in the first place.

Every now and again, a hyper-serialized show manages to spend a little time outside this mold. In the midst of its third season, The Sopranos spent a painful and unflinching hour on the rape of Dr. Jennifer Melfi. Breaking Bad's "Fly" chronicled a single claustrophobic night in the pressure cooker of a meth lab. Last year, Penny Dreadful diverted from its central narrative to luxuriate in the rich, classically gothic history of Vanessa Ives.

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But no series has walked the line between the serialized and the episodic as well as Mad Men, which has spent seven seasons embracing a long-form narrative while finding stories just as powerful in isolated, hour-long bursts.

On a macro level, Mad Men is as novelistic as television gets: sweeping, textured, and full of big ideas about who we are and what it all means. The show's most widely praised moments include the season 1 finale "The Carousel," which features an emotional Don Draper pitch that hinges on the dramatic irony built up over an entire season; season 3's "Shut the Door. Have a Seat," a plot-heavy episode that bravely shook up the show's fundamental status quo; or season 4's "The Suitcase," which paid off years of emotional complexity between Don and Peggy in a rich and satisfying manner.

I love all of those episodes, but the show has a different, less remarked-upon quality that's equally worthy of praise. At least a couple of times a season, Mad Men finds an excuse to mount a subtle shift into the episodic, telling punchy, self-contained stories within the greater context of its arc. Season 3's "The Grown Ups" is a show-stopping look at the cultural and personal impact of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Season 6's risky, dazzling "The Crash" has most of the show's characters hopped up on speed in a 24-hour bender designed to beat a project deadline. Season 4's "The Summer Man" even adopts the formal structure of a first-person short story, giving viewers a glimpse into Don Draper's psyche with voiceover narration:

As far as I'm concerned, Mad Men's finest hour — and the finest hour of television I've seen in the past decade — is season 5's "Far Away Places," which you might remember better as "the one where Roger Sterling does LSD." The episode, which aired right in the middle of Mad Men's terrific fifth season, offers a triptych of interlocking stories following Peggy, Roger, and Don over the course of a single 24-hour period.

Peggy's story finds her channeling Don, confronting a client on his skepticism over her pitch for Heinz Baked Beans. Unfortunately, she discovers that clients are far less receptive to this kind of professional aggression when it comes from a woman. She's dropped from the account, and spends the rest of her afternoon sulking the Don Draper way: watching a movie and hooking up with a relative stranger. When she returns to the office, she has a brief, strange conversation with Ginsberg, in which he reveals he was born in a concentration camp.

Roger's story is Mad Men at its most experimental, as Roger Sterling drops LSD for the first time at the insistence of his wife Jane. His trip is strange and visually playful: he hears music from an open vodka bottle, sees Don in his reflection in the mirror, and relives his childhood experience at the World Series:

In the midst of it all, Roger and Jane reach a gentle detente about the terms of their divorce. When they wake up in the morning, she doesn't remember the conversation, but it's too late to take it back; in Roger's mind, their marriage is already over.

Don's story, which follows the most conventional structure, sees him whisk his wife Megan away for a "client visit" that's a barely disguised excuse to hang out at a hotel. It's obvious that Megan, who works at SCDP at the time, is uncomfortable with the implications of her special relationship with Don, and genuinely invested in the work she's doing. Don doesn't notice. The tensions quietly build, as both Don and Megan snipe over everything but the actual problem, until a fight breaks out over Megan's dislike of orange sherbet. Don abandons Megan, then thinks better of it; when he returns, she's already gone, sparking a panicked hunt that ends with a crushing argument when he finally finds her back at their apartment in New York. They reconcile, but uneasily, as they return to the office for what Roger calls "a beautiful day."

Though Peggy, Roger, and Don briefly cross paths, each of these stories is more or less self-contained, putting each of its subjects in an individual spotlight. Peggy's story is layered and impressionistic; Roger's story is surreal and experimental; Don's story is a gutting, slow-burn marital drama, focused on building up the seemingly minuscule hurts that can lead an entire relationship to fracture. The connections between each of the arcs is more tenuous: thematic, visual, and chronological. (As Alan Sepinwall notes, each of the stories features a moment in which the passage of time feels warped, purposefully disorienting the character and the viewer alike.)

Most of all, "Far Away Places" is an hour of television that stands on its own. Its themes build on what regular Mad Men viewers know about these characters, and its events have greater implications in the episodes that come after. But it's also a full-formed, intricate, and narratively sophisticated story in its own right —the kind that you can easily imagine slipping gracefully into the pages of the New Yorker. Watching "Far Away Places" without the context of the rest of Mad Men wouldn't be the same experience, but it wouldn't be an incomplete experience, either — just a tiny window into other worlds and other minds and other dreams.

With just 7 episodes left until the series ends, Mad Men has plenty of long-running arcs to resolve — but it's the show's short story-like qualities that set it apart from any other show on television, and that's what I'll miss most when it's over.