The next day, Pete ponders his future at Sterling Cooper with Harry Crane, while Don Draper has an argument with Lane about his refusal to hire a new art director since Salvatore Romano's firing.
Duck, who had been watching the coverage but had unplugged the television shortly before Peggy's arrival, turns the news back on after the two have had sex to discover that Kennedy has died.
Many of the guests, including his wife Jane, Bert Cooper, and Ken, remain in the hotel's kitchen, glued to the news coverage of the assassination aftermath.
In the office, he finds Peggy reworking the advertising campaign strategy for AquaNet (which would have featured two couples in a convertible and likely invoked memories of the assassination).
"The Grown-Ups" was written by Brett Johnson and Matthew Weiner; it was directed by Barbet Schroeder, whose previous directorial work includes the films Reversal of Fortune and Single White Female.
But I also wanted to show what it would be like to really be knocked off your feet, to really have it penetrate into your life in such a gigantic way.”[1] Weiner further explained that “I called it ‘The Grown Ups,’ because to me, it's a lot of people realizing that they're orphaned, or that their father is gone, or that it's time to be an adult.” Weiner emphasized the importance of depicting the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald on November 24, explaining “[w]hen Oswald is shot, there is a kind of nihilism that takes over because the system does not work....Everything breaks down, and I wanted this to be the thing that says to Betty ‘that’s it.
It’s time to move on.’”[1] Addressing her character Betty’s response to the assassination, actress January Jones stated that “she’s letting this event become her emotional release.”[1] Of the last scene in the episode, which features Don and Peggy in the office, actress Elisabeth Moss claimed to love it because it showed how the characters are “trying to put [the assassination] aside, but they can’t quite put it aside—it’s too big.”[1] “The Grown Ups” received mixed reviews from critics.
Alan Sepinwall, of New Jersey's The Star Ledger, was less impressed with this week's entry, writing that “The Grown Ups” was “the first episode of season three I’ve found truly disappointing.” From his perspective, “watching a TV show about characters glued to their TV sets feels particularly slothful—and it felt even more unsatisfying coming on the heels of the astonishing second half of last week’s ‘The Gypsy and the Hobo.’”[3] Logan Hill’s assessment for New York Magazine's vulture.com was negative, too.
Writing for The Onion’s The AV Club, Keith Phipps awarded the episode a “B+,” explaining that it “entered slow motion at a certain point, but while I don’t think the slowness always worked I appreciated the commitment to staying close to the characters as they experienced the shock and its aftershocks.” He added “there was an extra degree of care put into the images this week and an unnerving immediacy to some of the newsbreaking scenes, which echoed my generation’s experience with 9/11, whether it tried to or not.”[5] Luke de Smet, at Slant Magazine, also had a more mixed assessment.