Skip to content, or skip to search.  the wider lens  What Makes
Mad Men Great?  Jon Hamm, Vincent Kartheiser.    Despite the
umpteen-zillion forest-for-the-trees “think pieces” grousing
that Mad Men doesn’t “get” sixties-era advertising, feminism,
racism, chauvinism, alcoholism, culture, fashion, etc., the
show’s appeal has little to do with period embellishment. The
hits Boardwalk Empire and Downton Abbey, the underappreciated
The Borgias, the promising but still unsteady Pan Am and Hell on
Wheels, and the dead-on-arrival The Playboy Club — to name but a
few lavish period dramas that followed in Mad Men’s wake — were
each wedded to a specific era and would have been unthinkable
without it. Not so Mad Men. Weiner’s show is set in the American
Northeast in the sixties, a time of immense social, sexual, and
political upheaval, but it isn’t solely, or even mostly, about
its time and place. The show’s main draw is behavior, observed
with such exactness that one can imagine the show’s being
transposed to the forti