“If I made the show eight years ago, I don’t know if it would have resonated.”
— Matthew Weiner, creator of Mad Men (New York Times, 2008)

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 on AMC (formerly American Movie Classics from 1984 to 2003), it has attracted wide critical acclaim and an extraordinary amount of public attention for a series that appears on what was once an also-ran basic cable network.  Moreover, Mad Men is today syndicated in two-dozen countries across North/Central/and South America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Australia; its international reach is expanding all the time.

In its first two seasons, Mad Men won three Golden Globes, six Emmys, and a prestigious George Foster Peabody Award for excellence in broadcasting.  The Hollywood Foreign Press Association has voted Mad Men the Best Television Drama of both 2007 and 2008.  The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences has similarly selected Mad Men the Outstanding Drama Series of 2008, being the first basic cable series ever to win this award.  Most surprisingly, Mad Men’s imprint is evident throughout contemporary culture, inspiring TV commercials and print advertisements, magazine covers and feature articles, designer fashions and department store displays, and all sorts of ancillary merchandise from cigarette lighters to hip flasks to assorted media-related tie-ins such as soundtrack CDs, episode downloads, and season-long DVD sets.

The creator, executive producer, head writer, and showrunner of Mad Men is Matthew Weiner.  He broke into television as a staff writer working at various times on Party Girl (Fox, 1996), The Naked Truth (ABC, 1995-1996; NBC, 1996-1998), Becker (CBS 1998-2004) and Andy Richter Controls the Universe (Fox, 2002-2003), before sending his spec script, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” (which eventually became Mad Men’s pilot episode) to David Chase, the creator and executive producer of The Sopranos (HBO, 1999-2007).  According to Weiner, “a week after Chase got it” in 2003, “I was in New York on the show,” quickly working his way up on The Sopranos from staff writer to one of the executive producers during its final two seasons (NPR: Fresh Air, 9 August 2007).

Weiner’s first draft of “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” was actually written back in the spring and summer of 1999.  During his early years in broadcast TV, Matt Weiner grew progressively bored and frustrated with the strictures there, thus motivating him to write his Mad Men script and eventually send it to Chase, a television writer-producer he greatly admired.  In turn, David Chase instantly recognized Weiner’s talent and assumed the role of mentor to him for nearly four years.  On The Sopranos, for example, Weiner learned that a series could have “depth and complexity,” while “at the same time” be “commercially successful” (Fresh Air, 9 August 2007).  Although the historical backdrop, genre, and themes of Mad Men are much different than those of The Sopranos, both of these serial narratives develop in a slow and deliberate fashion and resist closure.  They are also emotionally complicated and populated with characters who are compelling though often conflicted.

Mad Men is set in the sleekly sophisticated go-go world of Madison Avenue in the early 1960s.  This period drama begins during the front end of the decade (season one takes place in 1960; season two 1962)—a time that has been largely suppressed and long forgotten in the popular remembrances of the 1960s.  Matthew Weiner has just signed on for two more seasons of Mad Men, while expressing interest in writing and producing at least six seasons altogether (if not more), taking his characters up through the turbulent end of the 1960s and into the 1970s.  My intention in editing this collection is to get out in front of what already promises to be one of the signature television programs of the late 2000s and early 2010s.  The men and women of Mad Men are depicted as mostly on the wrong side of history, particularly at a time when the country is experiencing a profound cultural shift.  The critical nostalgia of Mad Men comes with a much different attitude towards the past, often exposing the workaday sexism, racism, adultery, homophobia, and anti-Semitism of the era—not to mention all the excessive smoking and drinking.

Some viewers were initially surprised by the extent to which these attitudes and behaviors were foregrounded on Mad Men, wondering whether these portrayals had any basis in historical fact, and suggesting to some degree why the late fifties-early sixties has been conveniently forgotten in much of our current popular culture.  The characters in Mad Men—who are basically stand-ins for our parents and grandparent—are hardly representative of a “greatest generation.”  They are merely an earlier, confused, and conflicted version of ourselves, trying to make the best of a future that is unfolding before them at breakneck speed.  Today’s audiences understand and relate to their disorientation.  Where better to begin to make sense of yet another transformative moment like our own than in a narrative such as Mad Men where the characters are similarly caught in a kind of limbo wedged between the recent past and a shadowy foreboding future.

Consequently, this collection is designed to get out in front of what already promises to be one of the signature television programs of the late 2000s and early 2010s.  Reading Mad Men will appear as part of the “Reading Contemporary Television Series” that is coedited by Kim Akass and Janet McCabe.  This book series is published by I.B. Tauris, which is an imprint of Palgrave Macmillan.

Reading Mad Men: Dream Come True TV.  London and New York: I.B. Tauris, Forthcoming in 2010.