Mad Men’s Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss), Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser) and Don Draper (Jon Hamm). By Frank Ockenfels/AMC.
I celebrated the 15th anniversary of Mad Men in 2022 by rewatching its pilot. I had forgotten how perfect that episode was—magnetic and cinematic and cryptic. When I first watched it back in 2007, there was no way I could have grasped how elegantly it introduced Mad Men’s central characters and laid out the ambitious themes that would underpin the narrative over seven seasons.
A romantic fog engulfed Mad Men in the show’s early years. Style magazines dedicated endless pages to the bygone chic of bullet bras, fedoras, and the three-martini lunch. Thrilled to have its first genuine culture-shifting hit, AMC capitalized on the mania by creating a “Mad Men Yourself” app. Social media back then was more like a chill coffee shop crammed with Lolcats and Rickrollers than a mechanism for polarizing and poisoning the nation. Suddenly my Twitter and Facebook feeds were giddy with stylized character avatars; everyone seemed to be asking themselves, Am I a Peggy or a Joan, a Don or a Roger? Banana Republic even created a whole Mad Men collection in collaboration with the show’s clothing designer, with how-to guides on dressing like each character.
Nostalgia for the “Mad Men era” snowballed, even as Matthew Weiner and his writers craftily demythologized the 1960s. Remember that old Monty Python sketch about the confectionery manufacturer and his box of deeply dubious chocolates? Bite into one sumptuous bonbon, and a spring-loaded steel bolt perforates your cheeks. That was Mad Men: seducing your eyes with its period clothes and decor, even as barbed dialogue exposing sexism, racism, and fealty to corporate power ran through almost every story line.
When we first meet Don (and Jon Hamm) in the pilot, he’s sitting in a smoky bar—instant flashback to a less regulated time—scribbling down ideas for the next morning’s pitch. The client: Lucky Strike cigarettes, who are trying to figure out how to lure in customers now that the trade commission has banned them from pretending tobacco is good for you. His colleague Pete (Vincent Kartheiser) suggests the brand embrace the dangerous whiff of death, but Don knows Americans want to buy into delusions.
“Advertising is based on one thing,” he says the next day, addressing the clients. “Happiness…happiness is the smell of a new car, is freedom from fear, is a billboard on the side of the road that screams that whatever you’re doing is okay. You are okay.” Don pulls a slogan out of his brain on the spur of the moment that neatly sidesteps truth. “Everybody else’s tobacco is poisonous,” he tells the clients. “Lucky Strike’s is toasted.”
Mad Men made the past look drop-dead glamorous while skewering our inherited clichés of the 1960s. The show even wittily addressed the theme of nostalgia itself at the end of the first season, when Don is asked to create an ad campaign for Kodak’s slide-projector wheel, which he renames “the carousel.” Using his own family photos, he mesmerizes his clients and colleagues with a speech about the power of memory. “This device isn’t a spaceship. It’s a time machine. It goes backwards and forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again.”
Even as he says this, his personal life is unraveling. His half brother died by suicide, and his marriage is on the verge of disintegrating. Instead of celebrating Thanksgiving with his family, he returns “home” to an empty suburban house. He is a great ad man, but a broken soul. As creator Matthew Weiner told Vanity Fair in 2009, “He invented himself. He is always going to be presenting something to the outside world that’s not who he is. You don’t have to be from his background to understand that. In fact, all you have to do, really, is to have any success at all and you immediately feel like a fraud—most of us, right?”
The thing that surprised me most in rewatching the pilot was how much it focused on female characters and their workplace struggles from the start. The very first time we see Peggy (Elisabeth Moss)–in the elevator on her first day of work as a steno girl at Sterling Cooper—she is being sexually harassed by one of her new colleagues. Everyone who encounters her has something to say about the way she looks. Joan (Christina Hendricks), the office’s capable and confident bombshell, advises Peggy to put a paper bag over head when she goes home, poke eyeholes in it, and evaluate her body’s strengths and weaknesses in the mirror. Joan also helps her procure birth control pills from a gynecologist, who sticks a speculum up Peggy while warning that she better not turn into “some kind of strumpet.”
Christina Hendricks and Elisabeth Moss in Season 7. © AMC/Everett Collection.
Being assaulted and insulted was all in a day’s work for Sterling Cooper’s female employees—and hardly a foreign experience for Mad Men’s actual staffers. According to Robin Veith, who spoke to Oprah.com in 2009 and is one of many female writers who populated the show’s writers room, “The truth is that a lot of these moments that seem period and horrible for women come directly from experiences that I and the other women writers have had in our lifetimes. Like the [first season] episode ‘Ladies Room’ where Peggy goes into the bathroom and there are women crying. That came from [consulting producer] Maria Jacquemetton’s life experience.”
Peggy rises within the agency because Don understands that she can help him tap into female consumers’ desires. He feels a kinship with her, but their relationship is full of land mines. In the show’s fourth season, Peggy confronts Don after he accepts an award for an ad based on her idea. “It’s your job: I give you money, you give me ideas!” he tells her. Wounded, she replies, “And you never say thank you!” “That’s what the money is for!” he shouts.
By the time #MeToo exploded in 2017, Mad Men had been off the air for two years. But as the movement rose, snippets of the series snapped into clear focus like a slide in the Kodak carousel. Peggy alone in the hospital deciding whether to keep her baby—click. Joan being raped by her fiancé on the Sterling Cooper carpet—click. Joan being pimped out by her colleagues—click. Betty on the fainting couch, an emblem for the suburban homemaker malaise identified in 1963’s The Feminine Mystique—click. Then there was the searing scene between Joan and Peggy in the show’s final season, when they try to find common ground after they’ve been belittled by a sexist client.
“I want to burn this place down,” Joan says. Peggy agrees the men were awful, but chides, “You can’t have it both ways. You can’t dress the way you do and expect…” Joan retorts sharply: “So what you’re saying is that I don’t dress the way you do because I don’t look like you? That’s very, very true.” They’ve spent so long being played against each other that it’s hard to let go of that resentment.
Several years ago, Weiner told me, “The show was about my interest, to the exclusion of plot sometimes, in what it is like to be powerless. Part of it was me saying, ‘Look how much everything’s changed…’ Part of me was saying, ‘It just got worse, actually, since then.’”
That’s why it was especially jarring when Weiner himself was accused of misconduct by his former assistant and Mad Men staff writer in 2017. Another former writer on the show described him, at the time, as “devilishly clever and witty. But he is also, in the words of one of his colleagues, an ‘emotional terrorist’ who will badger, seduce and even tantrum in an attempt to get his needs met.” Weiner denied any sexual misconduct, but when speaking to me in 2018, he admitted that he’d had anger issues. “You don’t get to be where I am without having a fair amount of rage,” he said. “What you don’t realize…I think this goes with all of it. It goes with sexist language, it goes with jokes, it goes with everything about what I believe I have examined in my own behavior—is just that you don’t know that you have any power.”
How could someone create such a nuanced show about power imbalances while being so seemingly unaware of the dynamics within his own workplace? Perhaps it’s not surprising that life imitated art to some degree. The advertising business and the world of showrunning are not so different: Creative people channel their own emotional needs and dysfunctions into mass-market seduction that manipulates the targeted audience’s own desires and dreams. Getting spectators to part with their time and attention is not so different from persuading consumers to part with their money. Those selling skills even slipped through the screen fiction and into real life: One researcher found that Mad Men’s fake ad campaign for Lucky Strike appears to have stoked the real cigarette brand’s sales. I wonder if those new Lucky Strike fans flinched in the final season when Betty, a chain-smoker, is revealed to be riddled with lung cancer.
Jessica Pare and Jon Hamm in Season 5. © AMC/Everett Collection.
Far from seeming long ago and far away, Mad Men feels newly resonant as our culture lurches back to the battleground of the 1960s, and issues that seemed settled have become the site of resumed struggle. The Supreme Court has rolled back Roe v. Wade (passed in 1973, a few years after Mad Men comes to a close) and other freedoms we’ve come to take for granted may be in jeopardy. Weiner once remarked that so much political and cultural tumult happened in 1968 “that when you look at the calendar, you cannot even believe that happened all at once. You feel the crushing of idealism, you feel civilization itself on the precipice.” That could be a description of the last few years: a rolling calamity, and underneath it a delusional determination to carry on business as usual.
The show doesn’t feel dated because its characters live in the present tense, unpolluted by a future they can’t see. The 1960 version of Roger has no idea that he will be a twice-divorced acid-tripping memoirist by the end of that decade; nor does Bert Cooper know that he soon will be retiring to the big ad agency in the sky, with a little soft shoe number to remember him by.
Mad Men was never a blockbuster success. It hasn’t left behind an obvious legacy in the TV universe; there are no spin-offs or prequels, no “Don Draper Universe” to exploit. Yet its invisible inspiration runs through any number of smart historical dramas—Halt and Catch Fire and Mrs. America, both written by Mad Men writers room alum, come to mind—that see the past through a cynical and cinematic filter. One of my favorite things about Mad Men is the way that the writers didn’t feel obliged to tick off every seismic moment on the historical checklist. A sense of the 1960s as crazy and turbulent breaks through into the insular world of advertising every so often, but we don’t see feminist marches or civil rights protests the show. Mostly, the times are just reflected in the characters’ daily skirmishes.
Each one of them is living through their own version of the 1960s, just as we all move through our individual story arcs against a backdrop of creeping fascism, escalating climate catastrophe, and a pandemic. Watching people making their way through the historical mayhem and trying to figure out who they are and what they should be doing—plus ça change, et zou bisou bisou.