Why Mad Men is better than The Sopranos

And The Wire, and Succession, and Breaking Bad, and Game of Thrones, and Twin Peaks…

Huge spoilers for all seven seasons of Mad Men follow.

I’ve already used a superlative for Kiernan Shipka and her performance as Sally Draper on Mad Men. But I just finished the series, properly¹, and have to make a bigger claim: that it’s the single most deserving of the title out of the contenders for “greatest entry of the prestige TV era”. Which, I don’t know if that era’s over, but I think it probably is (I think Netflix killed it, but that’s another post, for another day).

Consider the general contenders for the title of “the best TV show ever”, at least within that generally accepted “prestige” space.

They tend to be:

-       The Wire – which is about crime, race, poverty and governance/policing;

-       The Sopranos – about family, mental health and crime;

-       Breaking Bad – about the lengths to which someone can justify acting in their family’s interests (and also crime. A lot of these shows are about crime);

-       Succession – about seeking the approval of your parents, and about media and power in America;

-       Game of Thrones – about power but also, yeah, about dragons (not a criticism; the dragons are fucking cool);

-       Twin Peaks – about convincing people that you’re deep because you enjoy soft-focus shots of the Pacific Northwest set to a cool synth score.²

But Mad Men is about more than all of those things. It is, ultimately, about the 20^th century itself, which is a bigger and more relatable topic, and which includes many of those other subjects.

i. The impossibility of the anti-war film

Truffaut once said, semi-apocryphally, “You can’t make an anti-war film.” His point was that no matter how horrendous a filmmaker might show violent conflict to be – how full of death and maiming and rape and starvation and pain and, even, boredom – war is still inherently thrilling, and people will take those thrills from it whether you want them to or not.

Something similar applies to Mad Men. It paints the 1960s as a time full of prejudice, of political leaders being assassinated, of overseas war and domestic conflict, of tired gender roles and unhappy marriages. It is meant to be awful – but people watched it enthusiastically, almost aspirationally, when it aired. Why?

I think that just as war is secretly thrilling, so is the idea of the glamour of the bigoted past. People like Mad Men for the same reason they like old Mafia films: because it shows them a society that was still honour-led, and honour – real, Old World, blood-code, fight-to-the-death-over-a-perceived-slight honour – is now something most people very rarely encounter in their lives. People liked Mad Men because even when the men cheated on their wives, they wore suits and picked up the tab; secretly, men wanted to be Don Draper and women wanted men to be like him, but they were not allowed to admit it any more. And that’s still part of the allure.

But Mad Men was also more directly relatable than much of the rest of prestige TV, which generally required a greater suspension of disbelief. Most of us haven’t ever been Baltimore gang members or Dothraki bloodriders, but all of us have grandparents, most of whom lived through the 1960s as adults. A bit like analogue 35mm film photography, Mad Men sits in that perfect space between living memory and glamourisation: you’re seeing something you know is (was) genuine and real, but you’re looking at it through a lens that makes it look mythological. Old film photos capture a single visual moment, but the mood – the vibe – of that moment is filled in by your brain, after the fact.³ Mad Men achieved that same effect, time and again, over the course of its runtime.

ii. An advertisement for advertising

The other, related reason that Mad Men deserves its laurels on the podium of prestige TV is that it’s about the 20^th century as a concept. It takes the 1960s as its literal subject matter, sure, but you can watch how its characters change over that decade and apply that idea to any in living memory. Mad Men is about how social and cultural forces shape us without our realising it. And, not incidentally, that’s what advertising does, too. That’s the point.

Take a look at the characters, in 1960 (Season 1), compared to in 1970 (Season 7).

Harry Crane – pure wanker, whether in a bow tie or sideburns

Thank God for the fashions of the late 1960s and Stan Rizzo’s flowing locks. Note that the image on the left is actually from Rizzo’s first appearance, in season four, so 1965

Elisabeth Olson’s Peggy represents the single best performance in the show, and the best character transformation too

(Notably, Don looks exactly the same in seasons one through seven. He never grows sideburns or a moustache, barely changes his style… he remains a cipher throughout, which is another deliberate choice by the writers, I think.)

The characters in Mad Men are almost imperceptibly set up to embody the very change around them in the world. Note the famous ending scene, where Don sits in meditation at an Esalen-like retreat on the coast of Big Sur.

The face of a man about to come up with the most disingenuous advertising campaign in history

It’s the end of Don’s story – he has achieved a certain sort of self-awareness after walking out of his first stultifying creative meeting at McCann Erickson, having failed to escape being trapped in the corporate machine after his firm SC&P’s acquisition. He tells Peggy over the phone from “Esalen” that he’s realised that he’s never achieved anything meaningful with his life. That he’s scandalised his daughter⁴ and stolen another man’s name, and broken all his vows. Peggy reassures him that it’s not true. We, the viewers, know it is, even as we understand the reasons why.

And yet even as he breaks down, Don, the unmovable and unflappable cipher, the shark who can never stop moving or he’ll die, appears to be embracing the mumbo-jumbo Age of Aquarius mindset stereotypical of the 1970s: individualistic, pseudo-spiritual, led by emotion and impulse and not thought or fact. The ending strongly implies that he returns to McCann Erickson, having come up with the premise for the most famous advert ever made, Coca-Cola’s “Hilltop” commercial, featuring the song “I’d Like To Buy The World A Coke”(or something very similar to it, and presumably just as awful).

And so just as Don is changing, so is advertising, and so is Western society – the products you buy are newly associated with the values of the 1970s, namely a sort of ersatz peace, love, diversity and harmony. If ads in the 1960s were about practicality and material aspiration, ads in the 1970s are about spiritual fulfilment via product consumption. Even Don, who is literally a professional imposter, cannot escape the forces around him. And hey, maybe they will even help him.⁵

Over and over, Mad Men takes the personal and makes it universal, and vice versa. Joan’s ending is like Don’s, in a way – she has her own historical microcosm, where her new and otherwise promising boyfriend Richard breaks up with her because she founds a television production business, and he’s jealous. This is used as an obvious and bigger metaphor about women entering the workforce, but it also suits Joan’s character as developed over the previous 90 hours of television. Betty, say, would be unlikely to found a TV business; with tough-as-nails, enterprising Joan, it makes total sense. Oh – and she does a first-ever bump of cocaine with Richard before they break up, which is the clearest indicator that Mad Men is entering the 1970s of the lot.

Because of this broad, undefined scope and the relatively wide span of years, Mad Men could easily and believably offer storylines focused on all of those other subjects covered by the rival prestige shows I outlined above. Want a story about family? Watch the Drapers go from a typical 1950s 2.5-kids nuclear unit with a maid to a fractured (but happier?) 1970s proto-family with a stepdad – Betty’s second husband Henry Francis – and a responsible adult daughter – Sally – stepping into the role of woman of the house after Betty’s terminal cancer diagnosis. Or watch Roger Sterling and his ex-wife Mona drive to upstate to New York to try to “rescue” their daughter Margaret from a commune, whither she has fled to escape having to raise her own daughter.

Want a story about media and power in America? Watch as Don is abandoned by his clients after writing an anti-smoking opinion piece in the New York Times, perceived as having stabbed his one-time tobacco client, Lucky Strike, in the back. Want a story about corporate wheeling and dealing? Watch as the partners of boutique agency SC&P desperately try to come up with a way to avoid being acquired and subsumed into the advertising behemoth that is McCann Erickson.

Race? There’s Peggy in season six, drunk on her Upper East Side sofa and clumsily trying to commiserate with her black secretary after the killing of Martin Luther King. Mental health? There’s Lane Pryce in season five, who can’t afford his son’s private school fees and back taxes, and who takes drastic action after being caught embezzling from the firm. Crime? There’s Don, blackmailed (twice!) for literally stealing the identity of another man during the Korean War.

Mad Men had all of these things, and more. The only thing it was missing – and I’ll accept this point and take it on the chin – was dragons. And that’s why it’s the best TV show of the prestige TV era.

1. I did warn you this newsletter would take a liberal attitude to what constitutes “current” culture.

2. There are others, but to list them exhaustively would take too long. Get angry with me in the comments if you think something else deserves a place.

3. Videos and perfectly crisp photos taken on smartphones don’t do this, because they look too much like what you actually see, with your eyes. There’s nothing to fill in.

4. After Sally walks in on him having sex with their neighbour Sylvia Rosen in season six.

5. It’s almost irresistible to try to imagine what the Don Draper of the 1980s would be like. Or the 1990s. Would he take coke? Would he have voted for Clinton? (My guess is that Don doesn’t vote at all, and never has.)