Alison Brie in Mad MenImage via AMC
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Thomas Butt
Published 30 minutes ago
Thomas Butt is a senior writer. An avid film connoisseur, Thomas actively logs his film consumption on Letterboxd and vows to connect with many more cinephiles through the platform. He is immensely passionate about the work of Martin Scorsese, John Ford, and Albert Brooks. His work can be read on Collider and Taste of Cinema. He also writes for his own blog, The Empty Theater, on Substack. He is also a big fan of courtroom dramas and DVD commentary tracks. For Thomas, movie theaters are a second home. A native of Wakefield, MA, he is often found scrolling through the scheduled programming on Turner Classic Movies and making more room for his physical media collection. Thomas habitually increases his watchlist and jumps down a YouTube rabbit hole of archived interviews with directors and actors. He is inspired to write about film to uphold the medium's artistic value and to express his undying love for the art form. Thomas looks to cinema as an outlet to better understand the world, human emotions, and himself.
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After years of being stuck in the streaming wilderness, Mad Men, arguably the pinnacle of prestige television, finally has a home on a prominent service in HBO Max starting on December 1. 10 years since its finale, the AMC period drama about advertising executives in Manhattan in the 1960s is still as venerated as ever, sitting at the upper echelon of every "best shows of all time" rankings. All seven seasons of extraordinary, probing, and riveting television will be available in 4K quality, making now the perfect time for a revisit or enlightening first-time experience.
It's fitting that Mad Men was created by Matthew Weiner, an alum of The Sopranos' writing staff, as his 16-time Emmy-winning series is the true successor to the HBO crime drama, carrying over all of David Chase's sophistication and rule-breaking approaches to turning television, once a formulaic medium, into a profound study of human psychology and America. Blessed with an epic scope of modern American history, a star-making cast in Jon Hamm, Elisabeth Moss, Christina Hendricks, and John Slattery, and a surprising sense of humor, Mad Men is a once-in-a-generation type of series.
'Mad Men' Was the Prestige Television Heir to 'The Sopranos'
Sitting in a white shirt and tie in his office, Don Draper (Jon Hamm) looks aggrevated and bemused as he argues with an employee in 'Mad Men' Season 4, Episode 7 "The Suitcase" (2011).Image via AMC
In 2007, the baton was passed from The Sopranos, which infamously cut to black in June 2007, to Mad Men, which debuted on AMC a month later. It was Weiner's turn to rise to the role of showrunner and oversee a weighty series, following an inscrutable, complex anti-hero and the perils of capitalism, as well as the futility of the American Dream. Weiner, however, expanded upon The Sopranos' cinematic sensibilities by creating perhaps the first literary television series, as Mad Men explored the human condition with the elegance and depth of a great novel.
Mad Men's central figure is the decorated advertising firm of Sterling Cooper (which undergoes various corporate takeovers and name changes throughout the series), where we follow America's commercialism boom through the eyes of the office's creative director, Don Draper (Hamm). A suave, fashionable marketing genius defined by his cryptic nature, Don's real name is Richard Whitman, a Korean War veteran who has taken the identity of his deceased superior officer, Donald Draper. Like James Gandolfini's Tony Soprano, Don has all the riches and luxuries of a king, yet he is cursed by internal demons that the naked eye can't diagnose.
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Posts By Jessie Nguyen Mar 31, 2024Due to his identity crisis, Don suffers from a form of disassociation, which further alienates him from his colleagues and two wives, Betty (January Jones) and Megan (Jessica Paré). Where Tony had the service of Dr. Melfi (Lorraine Bracco) to fill in the blanks, Mad Men episodes aggressively implore viewers to figure out what's eating away at Don, as he perpetually suppresses all his true emotions in this gilded cage. We're never told how we're supposed to feel about him, as he repeatedly oscillates between contemptible and sensitive in each episode.
'Mad Men's Rich Characters Challenged Audience Expectations
Mad Men, arguably more than any other series, featured an array of indelible supporting characters, including account executive Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser), office manager Joan Harris (Hendricks), British financial officer Lane Pryce (Jared Harris), and the wisecracking co-head of the firm, Roger Sterling (Slattery). However, Mad Men's breakthrough performance is undoubtedly Elisabeth Moss as Peggy Olson, the opposite pillar of the series and the foil to Don Draper. The only thing that evolved more dynamically than America throughout the '60s was Peggy's rise from being Don's timid secretary to a tough, outspoken authority figure in Sterling Cooper's copywriting/creative department. She represents the euphoria and perils of feminism in the office, where she experiences disgraceful misogyny by her colleagues while also proving her worth as the only person who can match Don's creative prowess and poke into his psyche.
Unlike its prestige TV counterparts, Mad Men doesn't possess the innate grandeur and spectacle of the criminal underworld depicted in The Sopranos, The Wire, or its contemporaneous AMC drama, Breaking Bad. In lieu of profane dialogue, bloodshed, and physical confrontations (minus one hilarious schoolyard fight between Pete and Lane in the office), there is banter between employees and business negotiations between ad executives and prospective clients. Not only is the series light on explicit action, but it also approaches its ideas deliberately and methodically, as many of the characters are hesitant to reveal their true feelings in this demanding world. While other prestige shows operated in familiar milieus, the lavish period setting of Mad Men often makes the employees of Sterling Cooper seem more removed, which is a product of each character's sense of disillusionment with their surroundings.
'Mad Men' Is a Cinematic Achievement on the Small Screen
Don Draper (Jon Hamm) sits at his desk in 'Mad Men' Season 4, Episode 7 "The Suitcase".Image via AMC
By no means does its stately setting and thematic richness suggest that Mad Men isn't anything but a pleasure to watch periodically or binge for months. The series is a marvelous achievement in production design and cinematography, and the lavish visual aesthetic keeps you engaged alone. Despite taking place inside offices and domestic quarters, the show's craftspeople make every episode feel cinematic without compromising the serialized flow of episodic television. For most of the canonical prestige dramas of the 2000s, their unsung sense of humor was integral to their enduring legacy. More than any other series, Mad Men continually surprises with its comedic chops. After all, the series is set in a workplace filled with selfish and temperamental employees, a recipe for countless sitcoms. The series indulges in absurdist, macabre (a lawnmower running over a client's foot) and wry humor (anything uttered by Robert Morse as Bert Cooper).
It's impossible to speak about the greatness of a widely venerated show like Mad Men without waxing poetically, but from a writing, acting, and direction perspective, it offers everything you'd want from an entertaining and artistically enriching television series. Where many prestige shows today aspire to break the medium as prolonged films, it found the delicate balance between intimate storytelling and broad examinations of lofty ideas akin to a mammoth cinematic epic. Characters evolve dramatically but patiently throughout each season, but there's enough conflict within each episode to act as a standalone text. Removed from the grander subtext of the series, episodes are concerned with the livelihood of people lost in a world of glamor hiding its emptiness.
"Advertising is based on one thing: happiness," Don Draper says in a client meeting in Mad Men's pilot. The irony shouldn't be lost on anyone that the people creating and selling happiness are deeply unhappy, but the series, across its 92 episodes, sympathetically explores why America continues to feel shallow in times of innocence and doom. The creative and account executives at Sterling Cooper sell happiness in the form of cars, cigarettes, and beauty products. In American capitalism, it has to be someone's job to market the nation as a utopia.
Mad Men
TV-14
Drama
Release Date
2007 - 2015-00-00
Genres
Drama
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