NEW YORK, Sept. 24 -- Don Draper once left his daughter's birthday party to pick up the cake and came home after dark with a dog instead. It was the third episode of Mad Men, and the show spent seven seasons building on that scene: a father who was always somewhere else, charming everyone except the people who waited up for him. By the finale, his ex-wife was telling him over a long-distance line that the children's normal life did not include him.

Jon Hamm, who won an Emmy for playing Draper, is about to become a father for the first time. He is 55. And on Tuesday night he told Seth Meyers that he is "very excited and deeply terrified," a pairing that sounds like a punchline and, coming from this particular actor, reads closer to a conf...