Most period dramas tell us more about the era in which they are made than the era in which they are set. Think of Downton Abbey, which arrived in 2010 at the height of post-financial crisis austerity, touting a gently consolatory, “Keep Calm and Carry On” noblesse oblige that fit David Cameron’s incoming government like a glove. Mad Men aired for the first time on 19 July 2007. Now the show is 15 years old, enough time has elapsed for its prescient shakedown of the passing American century to look more like an elegy.
As Don Draper (Jon Hamm) knew, the US in the 20th century was primarily an exercise in branding. What Mad Men did, quite brilliantly, was explore the gaps between grim reality and that most enduring gambit of conceptual image creation: the American Dream. Since the turn of the century, US branding has become less confident. Most of the best dramas find a way of embedding tiny, personal, emotional nuances within wider, grander stories. Mad Men’s genius was to show that they were one and the same. Pretty much everyone in this show was wealthy and attractive. They were also, overwhelmingly, unhappy. This is the hinterland in which advertising thrives: where material solutions can be offered for existential problems.
