Mad Men

About the series

Contains story spoilers.

Mad Men begins in March 1960 with Don Draper trying to sell cigarettes while their health risks make the old advertising promises harder to defend. At Sterling Cooper, his answer for Lucky Strike is to call attention to toasted tobacco, presenting an ordinary part of manufacturing as a reason to choose that particular brand. The pitch shows how he finds emotional reassurance inside an awkward commercial problem. Around him, the agency is much less composed. New secretary Peggy Olson receives Joan Holloway’s advice on surviving the office and encounters Pete Campbell’s harassment almost immediately. Department-store owner Rachel Menken challenges the agency’s assumptions about her business, prompting Don to walk out of their meeting. He appears to command every room until somebody refuses the role he has assigned them. The pilot eventually follows him home to Betty and their children, revealing the suburban family behind a working life that has already included another woman.

The name Don Draper conceals Dick Whitman, a man who assumed the identity of a dead officer during the Korean War. That history makes his professional talent for invention more than a convenient metaphor: the respectable executive is himself a story built over a life he wants to escape. Anna, the original Don Draper’s widow, knows the truth, offering a connection that does not require him to keep performing the successful stranger. His marriages and his work demand something different. They give him status, but also create people who expect him to be present, honest and consistent. The interesting pressure is the distance between knowing how to express another person’s desire and knowing what to do with his own. His persuasive language can make an audience feel understood while leaving the people closest to him struggling to reach him. Reinvention provides an opening into a new life; maintaining it becomes another form of confinement.

The business repeatedly changes around its employees rather than serving as a fixed backdrop. In the third-season finale, Don learns that McCann is buying the agency’s British parent company. Instead of accepting another owner, he helps engineer an escape: Lane Pryce fires the partners, releasing them from contracts so they can establish Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. Starting again requires more than the senior men’s names. Joan returns to organize the removal of the files they need, Pete joins with a junior partnership, and Peggy refuses to assume that Don can simply order her into his new company. He must acknowledge what her work means to him. Their improvised office in a hotel captures the gamble’s practical awkwardness. At the same time, Betty prepares to leave for Reno with Henry Francis and baby Gene. Professional independence and the dissolution of Don’s family arrive together, rather than one clean victory balancing out the other.

Peggy’s relationship with Don becomes especially revealing during “The Suitcase,” an overnight struggle over a Samsonite campaign on her birthday. He rejects the team’s ideas and keeps her working while her boyfriend Mark waits at a restaurant with her family; that evening ends their relationship. At the office, arguments about recognition and gratitude expose how differently Peggy and Don understand their arrangement. A shared meal and laughter over Roger Sterling’s recorded recollections briefly soften the hostility, before a drunken Duck Phillips turns the night into another confrontation. Don is also avoiding a telephone call because he fears Anna has died. When the news finally reaches him, Peggy sees a grief he normally keeps hidden behind authority. Their eventual advertising idea and small gesture of reconciliation matter because the night has made the work personal. Their closeness does not erase the imbalance between them, but it explains why separating from this demanding mentor is difficult.

“The Other Woman” places Peggy’s ambitions alongside Joan’s bargaining power without pretending their choices are interchangeable. A Jaguar dealer, Herb Rennet, makes his support for the agency conditional on a night with Joan. Pete carries the proposition into the firm, and Lane advises Joan to demand an ownership stake rather than a cash payment. Don objects, but his later visit to dissuade her comes after the encounter has happened. The resulting partnership is an achievement inseparable from the humiliating condition attached to it. Meanwhile, Peggy supplies a useful idea for another client yet again finds her contribution absorbed into somebody else’s credit. After Don throws money at her during an argument, she considers leaving rather than negotiating another apology. Ted Chaough offers her a copy-chief position with higher pay than she requested. The episode gives both women consequential movement, while making the costs of that movement impossible to ignore.

The final episode takes place in the autumn of 1970, with Don travelling while the people at home make decisions that no longer depend on his return. Betty’s cancer forces Sally to confront what will happen to her younger brothers. Joan chooses a production business even as it costs her relationship with Richard, and Peggy and Stan finally acknowledge their love. In California, Don reaches a retreat with Anna’s niece Stephanie, who leaves him there after a distressing group session. He calls Peggy in despair, then connects with another participant describing the loneliness of feeling unseen and unwanted. The ending allows several different kinds of continuity: Sally caring for the boys, Joan working from home, Pete leaving with Trudy and their daughter, and Don smiling during meditation. It then cuts to the celebrated Coca-Cola commercial featuring a hillside chorus. The juxtaposition invites a connection between his experience and advertising’s ability to package it; the episode does not explicitly show him creating that campaign.