January Jones leaves Betty Draper behind with her quarantine Instagram feed

The New Yorker

Before the pandemic, "Jones seems to cherish, and even sometimes milk, her lasting connection to Betty Draper in the cultural imagination," says Rachel Syme. "Although she has worked steadily since Mad Men wrapped (she appeared in sixty-three episodes of the Fox comedy The Last Man on Earth and recently starred in the Netflix figure-skating soap opera Spinning Out), Jones’s Instagram feed seems honest about—one might even say fixated on—the outsized shadow of the role that made her famous." But, says Syme, "a scroll through Jones’s Instagram feed in recent months debunks the shallow notion that she’s Betty’s diffident doppelgänger. On March 18th, just as lockdowns were beginning in Los Angeles, she posted a video in which she stands in her bathroom, in a glittery caftan and a clay mask, describing her science-fair-esque bathtub ritual of 'making human stew' using baking soda and vinegar. She quickly followed up with a video of herself dancing around in a neon-red L.E.D. mask while drinking Coors Light through a straw. She hula-hoops, tap-dances, gives a Grey Gardens-esque tour of her rosebushes, sweeps her floor in a Venetian theatre mask, choreographs a solo synchronized-swimming routine, smiles with spinach in her teeth, and takes selfies in a variety of outfits that can only be described as Norma Desmond meets Samantha Stephens. I’ve written before that quarantined celebrities are better off being kooky clowns than righteous pundits. For some—Patti Lupone, Leslie Jordan—we wouldn’t expect anything less than crazed karaoke and baton-twirling monologues. For Jones, the wackiness is a breaking out, a surprise reinvention. While still riffing on her role as Betty, she’s left her behind; her videos have a whipped lightness to them that Mrs. Don Draper could never muster. In these pandemic days, Betty Draper’s struggles are suddenly more relatable (which, for better or worse, when it comes to female characters, is still synonymous with likable)."