Mad Men is an American period drama television series created and produced by Matthew Weiner. The show is broadcast on the American cable network AMC and is produced by Lionsgate Television. It premiered on July 19, 2007 and completed its second season on October 26, 2008. The third season began on August 16, 2009 and will conclude on November 8. It has been renewed by AMC for a fourth season, which will air in 2010.
Set in New York City, Mad Men is set in the 1960s at the fictional Sterling Cooper advertising agency on Madison Avenue. The show centers on Don Draper (Jon Hamm), the agency's creative director, and those in his life, in and out of the office. It also depicts the changing social mores of 1960s America.
Themes
Mad Men depicts parts of American society and culture of the 1960s, highlighting cigarette smoking, drinking, sexism, adultery, homophobia, antisemitism, and racism as examples of how that era was so much different from the present. Smoking, far more common in the United States of the 1960s than it is now, is featured throughout the series; many characters can be seen smoking several times in the course of an episode. In the pilot, representatives of Lucky Strike cigarettes come to Sterling Cooper looking for a new advertising campaign in the wake of a Reader's Digest report that smoking will lead to various health issues including lung cancer. The show presents a subculture in which men who are engaged or married frequently enter sexual relationships with other women. The series also observes advertising as a corporate outlet for creativity for mainstream, middle-class, young, white men. Along with each of these examples, however, there are hints of the future and the radical changes of the 1960s; Betty's anxiety, the Beats that Draper discovers through Midge, even talk about how smoking is bad for health (usually dismissed or ignored). Characters also see stirrings of change in the ad industry itself, with the Volkswagen Beetle's "Think Small" ad campaign mentioned and dismissed by many at Sterling Cooper, although Don Draper brilliantly spots the nostalgic value and market potential of renaming the Kodak 'wheel' slide projector as the Kodak Carousel.
