Mad Men, the most visually narcotic of the prestige cable shows, slinked back into our lives – thank god – via Netflix earlier this month (the greyest, most January January I’ve personally lived through). Forget the plot for a second; from the first scene – a suited, dark-haired man sits alone at a bar, glasses clink, a waiter strikes a match to light his cigarette – we’re bludgeoned into a pleasant stupor by this hyper-saturated rendering of 1960s New York. Creator Matthew Weiner offers us a glitzy jewel of a world, so bright and colourful, so stuffed with covetable mid-century homewares, that this winter’s leaden skies and the depressing did-he-didn’t-he saga of the Nazi salute all suddenly feel very far away.
I watched the show during its initial run – the first episode aired in 2007, the final in 2015 – but haven’t revisited it until now, though it has lived somewhere in the recesses of my mind. I remember it as a particular highlight from an era when newspaper headlines regularly proclaimed that television dramas were replacing the novel as the zenith of culture.
