The Good, The Bad, The Mad: Revisiting Mad Men in 2020

Before we kick off to fun discussions of one of the last decade’s most-adored shows, allow me a bit of an academic digression with this bit from a paper about Mad Men.

 “The process of applying a melancholic framework to a media text like Mad Men involves identifying textual materials that deal with sexism as a culturally pervasive problem in the past and, by implication, the present… The relationship between the contextualized plots that take place in the 1960s and the problems of the present is made clear though multiple aspects of the text, including visual signifiers of modern-day sexism like the emphasis on women’s appearance, musical cues that link the 1960s to the present, and voiced critiques of sexism by characters within the show,”  (Phelps, 2013).

The above quote (Congrats if you bothered to look it over) came from my Master’s Project in Women’s and Gender Studies. At the culmination of my degree that made me the “Gender Master” I am today, I spent hours upon hours of my life researching, dissecting and defending the way Mad Men wrote about, meditated on and used the stories of women for a potentially politically progressive agenda. 

First, a little background: academics and critics alike tend to see nostalgia of any kind as a toxic impulse. I used my paper to argue that Mad Men uses nostalgia to draw viewers in, but then engages them in something deeper that’s used for progressive purposes. The pretty veneer catches our interest. The ugly truth reminds us of society’s ills in the past and, most importantly, in the present. 

There was a lot more to it, but in my eyes it seemed that the popularity of Mad Men signaled that people were willing to look at the problems of the past, analyze them, and recognize the way in which they mirrored contemporary sexism, racism, homophobia and so on. I argued that to look at a fictionalized past was to move toward a better future. 

Three years after I finished my big paper, a national election rocked my world and made me want to throw all my lovingly crafted academic arguments about a nostalgia’s role in a better tomorrow out the window. 

My whole country was thrown into rhetoric about returning to a collective “Again,” and I couldn’t stop feeling sick at the implication. The “Again” of our president’s famous slogan seemed to be a landscape I recognized from the hallways of Sterling Cooper Draper Price and the kitchen table of Betty Draper. 

Ever since then, I’ve had a pretty difficult time returning to the show I loved so very much. I’d spent literally countless hours with these charming, difficult, interesting characters and their stories…but they now felt like strangers to me. 

Now that we’re entering a new decade, though, I pondered about whether I could reconcile a bit with one of my former favorite shows. “What might one of my favorite shows from the last decade,” I wondered, “have to say to us as we enter the next one?”

So, after re-watching a smattering of episodes, I’ve been able to work toward a tenuous peace with the famous prestige drama. I found that some parts are still as difficult as I found them post-2016. Some parts, however are still worth appreciating and holding onto.