Mad Men

Abstract

Don and Betty Draper live in a picture-perfect world. He is a hard-living advertising executive – a ‘mad man’ – on the fast track. She’s a Bryn Mawr graduate and former fashion model, now a suburban princess, mother of three children. If they’ve everything, why are they so unhappy? Why is their dream come true not enough? This book explores, analyses, celebrates the world of “Mad Men” in all its aspects, and includes an interview with it’s Executive Producer and an episode guide. Every few years a new television program comes along to capture and express the zeitgeist. “Mad Men” is now that show. Since premiering in July 2007, it’s won many awards and is syndicated across the globe. Its imprint is evident throughout contemporary culture, from features to fashions and online debate. Its creator Matthew Weiner, a former exec producer on “The Sopranos”, has created again compelling, complex characters, this time in the sophisticated go-go world of Madison Avenue through the 1960s, with the excessive drinking and smoking, as well as the playing out of the prejudices and anxieties of an era long neglected in popular culture. “Mad Men” is a zeitgeist show of the early twenty-first century, this book demonstrates, partly because its characters are an earlier, confused and conflicted version of ourselves, trying to make the best of a future unfolding at breakneck speed.