Recently, my wife and I have been rewatching prestige TV classics. First, The Americans and, just now, Mad Men. Both period pieces today read as statements not only about the 1980s and the 1960s, respectively, but about where we still are. One thing stood out in the season two finale of AMC’s booze-soaked Madison Avenue epic: a feeling of living on the eve of destruction that has lasted 75 years and counting.
In the finale, “Meditations in an Emergency,” Don Draper watches Kennedy announce Soviet missiles in Cuba. Characters work out where they’d want to be if war occurs. Joan raises civil defense, and Don waves it off. Arguably, nothing about the crisis changes the plot. One critic calls it a clever backdrop. Another says it pushes characters to face what’s already in them. Don has just returned from one of his disappearing acts, and the anxiety of potential annihilation makes people do strange things.
