Mad Men

• 1. Introduction

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  Mad Men premiered on AMC on the 19th of July, 2007, and from its very first scene posed a question that would haunt seven seasons: who, exactly, is Don Draper? The man audiences met was handsome, magnetic, gifted at his work, and living under a name that was not his own. He had taken that name from a dead officer during the Korean War, leaving behind a person called Dick Whitman and constructing, in his place, a brilliant fiction.

  The show ran until the 17th of May, 2015, producing 92 episodes across seven seasons. It was set between March 1960 and November 1970, tracing the professional and personal lives of the people at Sterling Cooper, a Manhattan advertising agency on Madison Avenue. What it ended up becoming was something critics debated for years: a meditation on identity, a portrait of a decade in transformation, and the series that changed what basic cable television could be.

• 2. A Script Nobody Would Buy

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  In 2000, Matthew Weiner was a staff writer on the sitcom Becker when he wrote the first draft of what would become Mad Men. The pilot script sat for two years before television showrunner David Chase read it and recruited Weiner to write for The Sopranos on HBO. Chase described what he found in the script: "It was lively, and it had something new to say. Here was someone who had written a story about advertising in the 1960s, and was looking at recent American history through that prism."

  Weiner and his representatives at Industry Entertainment and ICM then tried to sell the pilot to HBO, which expressed interest but insisted that Chase serve as executive producer. Chase declined, despite his enthusiasm for the material. HBO CEO Richard Plepler later named passing on Mad Men as his biggest regret from his tenure at the network, calling the decision "inexcusable" and attributing it to "hubris."

  Showtime also passed. The script sat. Years later, a talent manager on Weiner's team named Ira Liss pitched the project to Christina Wayne, AMC's Vice President of Development. AMC was looking, in the words of its president Ed Carroll, for "distinction in launching its first original series," and decided to take a bet "that quality would win out over formulaic mass appeal." Mad Men became the network's first original scripted series, and the experiment would reshape American television.

• 3. Building the World

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  The pilot episode began filming on the 20th of April, 2006, at Silvercup Studios in New York City. Subsequent episodes moved to Los Angeles Center Studios. Each episode carried a budget of between two and two-and-a-half million dollars; the pilot alone cost over three million.

  Weiner cited Alfred Hitchcock as a primary influence on the visual style, specifically the 1959 film North by Northwest. The opening title sequence, created by the production house Imaginary Forces, paid direct homage to Saul Bass's skyscraper-filled titles for that film and to the falling-man poster Bass designed for Vertigo. Cinematographer Phil Abraham and production designer Dan Bishop worked with Weiner to develop what director Alan Taylor described as a visual grammar rooted in cinema rather than television. Taylor tended to shoot Don Draper from behind, or frame him partially obscured, to cast an "air of mystery" around the character. Sterling Cooper's offices were frequently shot below eye level to incorporate the ceilings into the frame, reflecting the graphic design and architecture of the period.

  The writers amassed volumes of research on the era so that set design, costumes, and props would hold up to scrutiny. Weiner was blunt about one detail: "Doing this show without smoking would've been a joke. It would've been sanitary and it would've been phony." The actors smoked herbal cigarettes throughout, because, as Weiner explained to The New York Times, real cigarettes make actors physically ill on set. Composer David Carbonara wrote the original score; the first volume was released on the 13th of January, 2009. Apple Corps authorized the use of the Beatles song "Tomorrow Never Knows" for the season five episode "Lady Lazarus" in a rare licensing of a Beatles recording to television. Lionsgate paid roughly $250,000 for the rights.

• 4. The People of Sterling Cooper

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  Jon Hamm's Don Draper is a hard-drinking, chain-smoking creative director whose real name, Richard Whitman, is a secret he has kept since the Korean War, when he assumed the identity of his commanding officer after the officer was killed in an ambush. His wife Betty, played by January Jones, is a former model raised in the Philadelphia suburb of Elkins Park, Pennsylvania and a graduate of Bryn Mawr College who slowly discovers the extent of her husband's deceptions over the show's first two seasons.

  Elisabeth Moss plays Peggy Olson, who begins the series as Don's secretary and rises to copywriter. Christina Hendricks plays Joan Holloway, the agency's office manager and head of the secretarial pool, who carries on a long-standing affair with Roger Sterling and eventually becomes a partner. John Slattery's Roger Sterling is a World War II Navy veteran whose father co-founded the firm; his primary function is managing the Lucky Strike account, which is responsible for more than half of SCDP's billings. Two heart attacks alter his perspective, though not his drinking.

  As of the third season, seven of the nine writers for the show were women, against a Writers Guild of America statistic from 2006 showing that male writers outnumbered female writers by two to one. Maria Jacquemetton described the room: "We have a predominately female writing staff, women from their early 20s to their 50s, and plenty of female department heads and directors."

  Weiner's creative control was total. He wrote or co-wrote every episode, approved costumes and set designs, and directed each of the season finales. Director Tim Hunter described a production process defined by layers of pre-production meetings: a first page turn, a tone meeting, and a final full crew production meeting, at each of which Weiner would explain his vision for the episode.

• 5. What the Sixties Were Really For

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  Weiner chose to set the series beginning in March 1960 for a specific reason he articulated directly: "Every time I would try and find something interesting that I wanted to do, it happened in 1960." The contraceptive pill became available in March of that year, and Weiner regarded it as the hinge point of the decade. "That's the largest change in the entire world," he said. "Seriously, it's just astounding. The central tension in every movie that does not take place on the battlefield is about a girl getting pregnant. So all of a sudden that entire issue has been removed from society."

  Critics noted that the show depicted this transformation obliquely, through the pressures on individual characters rather than through sweeping political statements. One outlet observed that the series "mostly remains disconnected from the outside world, so the politics and cultural trends of the time are illustrated through people and their lives, not broad, sweeping arguments."

  The show's treatment of gender provoked sustained critical debate. An op-ed in The Washington Post noted that the behavior depicted was "not as far back in our past as we would like to think," and that it remained painful to watch because it remained recognizable. The Los Angeles Times described the sexism as "almost suffocating," but argued that this was exactly the force against which the show's female characters defined themselves. In 2013, President Obama said that Peggy Olson gave him insight into how his grandmother dealt with life in a man's world. Two years later, in the 2014 State of the Union Address, Obama said it was "time to do away with workplace policies that belong in a Mad Men episode."

  The show's treatment of race drew criticism from several writers who argued that it distorted history by not depicting black advertising professionals who actually worked on Madison Avenue in the 1960s. Slate writer Tanner Colby offered a counter-reading, citing a storyline in the third season episode "The Fog" in which Pete Campbell's proposal to market products toward African Americans is rejected by the company. Colby also pointed to an exposé published in a 1963 issue of Ad Age that found, across more than 20,000 employees at major agencies, only 25 black workers in any professional or creative capacity.

• 6. The Identity at Its Core

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  Television critic Tim Goodman called identity the show's central motif, describing Don Draper as "a man who's been living a lie for a long time. He's built to be a loner. And over the course of three seasons we've watched him carry this existential angst through a fairy-tale life of his own creation."

  New Republic writer Ruth Franklin extended the theme outward from Draper to the advertising industry itself, writing that the show takes audiences "behind the scenes of the branding of American icons, Lucky Strike cigarettes, Hilton hotels, Life cereal, to show us not how the products themselves were created, but how their 'very sexy, very magical' images were dreamed up." Franklin went on to argue: "In this way, we are all Don Drapers, obsessed with selling an image rather than tending to what lies underneath."

  This connection between personal and commercial fabrication runs through the show's construction of Sterling Cooper itself. As one observer noted, "Not only is the agency of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce in the business of spinning them, or at least warping the truth, to sell product, but the main character, Don Draper, is built on a lie. Just like one of his campaigns, his whole identity is a sweet fabrication, a kind of candy floss spun out of opportunity, innuendo, and straight-up falsehood."

  In the series finale, it is implied that Don's time at a California retreat culminates in the creation of the famous 1971 Coca-Cola commercial known as "Hilltop." The show did not pay for use of that advertisement. The first episode had opened with Don devising the "It's Toasted" slogan for Lucky Strike, a line that was real; Lucky Strike had used it since 1917. The series began and ended with Don Draper attaching his name to something that already existed before he arrived.

• 7. Reception and Cultural Reach

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  Mad Men became the first basic cable series to win the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series, and it won that award for each of its first four seasons from 2008 through 2011. Its four wins tied the record for serial dramas held by Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law, and The West Wing. In total it collected 16 Emmys and 5 Golden Globes. In 2012, the show set a record with 17 Emmy nominations in a single year without winning any of them.

  The season five premiere on the 25th of March, 2012, titled "A Little Kiss," drew 3.54 million viewers, the highest audience the show ever reached in its original run. The series finale on the 17th of May, 2015, attracted 3.29 million viewers, the highest-rated episode since the sixth season premiere.

  The American Film Institute selected Mad Men as one of the top ten television programs for every year it aired: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2012, 2013, and 2014, and gave it a special award in 2015. The Television Critics Association and multiple national publications named it the best television show of 2007. According to Metacritic, it was the most acclaimed show on television in 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010.

  The show's success gave AMC the standing to greenlight other series, including Breaking Bad. Many television critics credit Mad Men with initiating the wave of prestige drama that critics named Peak TV. The Guardian ranked it third on its list of the 100 best television shows of the 21st century in 2019. In October 2023, the chief critics of The Hollywood Reporter ranked it the greatest show of the 21st century, writing that reconciling the show's optimism and cynicism over seven seasons was "heartbreaking, hilarious, bleak and inspiring."

  The cultural reach went beyond television awards. According to The Guardian, the show triggered a revival in men's suits with higher waistbands and shorter jackets, along with renewed interest in tortoiseshell glasses and fedoras. The website BabyCenter reported that the name Betty soared in popularity for baby girls in the United States in 2010. A 2015 sculpture of a bench featuring the image of Don Draper from the opening credits was unveiled in front of the Time-Life Building in New York City. Don Draper's recitation of the Frank O'Hara poem "Mayakovsky" from Meditations in an Emergency, heard at the end of a season two episode, sent the poet's work into the top fifty sales on Amazon.com.