Personally I disagree that it feels empty. The period it examines has a rich set of defining issues (e.g. post-war trauma, feminism, rise of consumerism, generational shifts, automation) with several character arcs that I found compelling and realistic.

Agreed. It felt far more realistic to me too. The characters in Breaking Bad, Sopranos, etc... most people aren't that complex; for some reason, they fail to hold my focus. Mad Men and The Wire are more realistic to me. (Not surprising, as The Wire is of course based on real life accounts).

It took me giving it a second chance to see past this.

The first time I watched it I didn’t get it, a bunch of office drama, cheating and pettiness mixed in a timepiece. Great visuals but that’s it.

What I understood better the second time(and I suck at putting this into words) is that it’s a show where you have to appreciate the metadata more than the main story. Its about the changes in the times, the contrast between what life seemed to be and what life actually was, the psychological changes as time progressed, the “tough looking but house of cards psychology” if everything at the time is what got me to appreciate it more the second time.

I've always took the view that a show about the birth of consumer society from the point of view of ad executives is a brilliant take. We get to witness the machinery of post war capitalism taking shape. If the same concept was applied to investment bankers in the 80's it could be pretty interesting.

Don is kinda like the past, trying to adapt. Struggling with a new identity, escaping past trauma. I think the character embodies the old fashioned behavior (as himself and Betty refer to themselves often), while Peggy is the youth of the 60, stumbling into an old world and at the same time making it her own because many of the epochal changes resonate with her. Her walk into the 70s ready to shake things up at the end of the series is amazing.

The periods are the characters we're following. The rest is just a vehicle for that portrait. In other period pieces it's often the reverse.

I think the main point of the show was how fast American culture changed in the 1960s rather about the characters. The beginning seasons in particular set in the early 1960s focused a lot on how openly people said racist and sexist things and how all the advertising execs were white men, with women only at the secretary level, but as the decade goes on, women, and finally people of color begin to show up at the executive level and society begins to resemble much more our society. Despite cultural changes since, the 1960s probably were the decade of the most cultural change in the shortest time.

Yes, nothing communicates this more than just the wardrobe of the first season vs. the last.

The show also followed several decades of demonization of the changes that happened in the 60s. I sometimes think of Mad Men as making the point that the 60s happened for (good) reasons.

Mad Men's popularity hinged on style over substance. There was a semi-interesting set of stories, but people mainly tuned in to experience an early 60's time capsule.

My mom watched the show because it reminded her of when she started work in an office, up to and including the casual sexual harassment. She wasn't so fond of that part but "that's the way it was back then". Similar to how cops claim The Shield was the most accurate depiction of policing.

> Mad Men's popularity hinged on style over substance

To the contrary, all of the fan base at the time hinged on character developments! Married Pete got Peggy pregnant in the first episode, was anything ever going to come of that? would Don ever stoop so low as to make a pass at Joan? would Roger and Joan's series-long tryst blow up their respective relationships? etc etc

A lot of it is left un-shown, as each season jumps ahead in time. You slowly figure out what happened during those jumps by inference. I thought it was great.

One attribute of the show I greatly appreciated was patience. We don’t get a “real” moment between Don and Joan—obliquely answering the “why not” question—until late in Season 5. It’s immensely more powerful and satisfying as a result. (Not to mention what happens later.)

The Don and Peggy relationship is also a fantastic slow burn.

I think about that scene a lot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WxUJ2qSp_E

"The only sin she's committed is being familiar."

I felt like none of this really paid off. Peggy has a child, that should be a life-changing event, but it's just ignored for the rest of the show because it's not convenient for where the writers wanted to take her character, I guess? I have to agree with other commenters that the show was stylistically impressive but dramatically hollow.

It is life-changing, and echoes in Peggy’s character and relationships through the entire series, as well as being called out explicitly at half a dozen key moments.

Peggy’s baby is a crystallization of the contrast between her and Don. Don tells her, “It will shock you how much this never happened.” He is always running, ignoring what life repeatedly tries to teach him. Peggy makes the decision to give up her baby the keystone of her character: She could have had Pete and the life of an adoring housewife, instead she embraced her choice and consciously took a different path.

What the writers resisted was the potential melodrama of reintroducing the baby to Peggy’s life in some way. But that would have undermined the moment of Peggy’s choice: It was gone.

That's all very tidy, but what you've described is barely in the show at all.

Until reading your comment my recollection was that she left it with her sister; apparently that's wrong and you can figure out what really happened by piecing together a few different short scenes across several seasons. As someone who watched the show as it came out over 8 years, it was like the baby fell off the face of the earth with no explanation.

The baby did fall off the face of (Peggy’s) earth. She gave it up shortly after it was born. That’s it.

As I said, it comes up again and again. Most directly in “Meditations in an Emergency”, wherein she tells Pete the whole story of his baby and why she gave it up.

So we're just going to pretend that Season 5 of The Wire never happened? Because that story sure stuck out like a sore thumb.

My point is, all shows have their ups and downs. Sopranos/BB/Wire were great and definitely kickstarted the golden age of television, but Mad Men just hits differently and I think I now know why: the visual richness and spectacular screenwriting/character development.

Indeed, being the nerd that I am, I have seen just one episode, which is where they brought in the IBM/360. It left me unsatisfied.

You saw one middle episode of a largely serialized show with no context as to the characters or overarching plot lines and you expected to be satisfied?

That's like flipping to a random chapter in the middle of the Harry Potter series and saying "I don't get what they're doing with the latin and these wands, and what's with the owl? Who's Ron? We never met him in this random chapter, whole book series is just unsatisfying."

It’s also a really off-kilter episode, of the kind in which Mad Men would occasionally indulge with varying degrees of success.

I enjoyed all the Kubrick references, but didn’t find it paid off the strangeness well.

To clarify, the only character I cared about was the IBM/360.