So this is what we need to ask about Mad Men before we ask anything else. What’s the benefit? It’s a show about advertising, of course. (The “Mad” is short for Madison Avenue, the center of the advertising business.) It’s a show about sex and gender roles. It’s a period drama, a historical tour of upheaval. It’s a serial about secrets: stolen identities and secret pregnancies and office intrigue. It’s a love story, and sometimes a hate story. That’s the literal, pitch-meeting description—what you might say to someone who had never watched the show before.
But what is it really?
Well, let’s start with Don’s answer. Mad Men is a kind of time machine, but it’s a complicated one. It doesn’t go in only one direction. You start watching and it takes you to the past—early 1960—when you can smoke in any restaurant and doctors are just starting to prescribe the Pill. It moves forward: the Kennedy-Nixon campaign, Camelot, the Moon landing. But it also transports you from there to Don’s childhood as Dick Whitman in the Depression. It flashes to the Korean War, when the aimless orphan seizes the chance to reinvent himself, Gatsby-like, by stealing the identity of a fallen comrade (killed in an accident involving, natch, a cigarette lighter). It reminds us that the past has its own past. It moves, as Don says of the Carousel, “backwards and forwards.”
At the same time, Mad Men is very deliberately a story about our present. Creator Matthew Weiner is notoriously exacting about the show’s immersive period detail, yet surprisingly, as he explains in a series of interviews in 2014 while making the shows final season, he’s highly conscious of current events when he writes. When sketching the mood of the later seasons, set amid the assassinations and upheaval of the late 1960s, he says he was thinking of present-day America. “People were exhausted and terrified by the economic disaster of the last few years,” Weiner says. “They had low self-esteem and they were anxious about our place in the world.”
But maybe Mad Men’s most distinctive function is that it’s a time-lapse machine. Its most simple but radical premise has been to say: Here is what it looks like, how it feels, for ten years of life to pass. (Though the show could still flash forward before it ends—it’s not as if Weiner is telling—it’s run from 1960 to 1970 so far.) Most TV series distend time, deny it, cheat it. M*A*S*H took 11 years to fight a three-year war. Bart Simpson remains in grade school even though, as a character born in 1987, he is old enough to be his own father.
Mad Men, on the other hand, has covered about a decade of its time in about a decade of our own. We see hair grow longer, hemlines shorter. Paul Kinsey’s blazers give way to Stan Rizzo’s fringe jackets. Weiner has talked often about Don being a representation of American society, steeped in sin, haunted by his past but always asking the question: Why am I doing this again? Sexual liberation and feminism arrive, but the show is deeper than the sex—it’s about human experience and human nature and time unfolding. The children grow up (including four—count ’em, four—actors playing Bobby Draper). The colors get more saturated, the social mores more extreme. The cultural power shifts toward youth. The creatives are pitching TV storyboards, not text-heavy print ads. Characters get prosperous, get fat, get lost. It’s a potent effect: Just like in life, you don’t notice the gradual changes until you look back and—holy cow—how far have they come? How far have we? Where has the time gone, besides into the creases of our foreheads?
The last time I talked to Weiner, in December 2014, he was dealing with the passage of time physically: cleaning out his memorabilia-laden production office. (“There are a lot of liquor bottles! I don’t know what I’m going to do with it.”
Mad Men’s finale was already locked down by then. He, naturally, was not saying much about it—except that he hopes it feels like an ending.
