Something to watch tonight: Wednesday 28 August

Mad Men (Weiner, 2007-2015)

As if I didn’t need anoth­er thing to watch in my own life, I’ve star­ted rewatch­ing Mad Men from the beginning.

This was promp­ted by the dis­cov­ery that all sev­en sea­sons are now back on Netflix in Aotearoa which means that I can finally read Matt Zoller Seitz’s book Mad Men Carousel*, which has been sit­ting on my shelf for a few years, wait­ing for this moment.

Mad Men was one of the first shows in that incred­ible blos­som­ing of American prestige tele­vi­sion of the 2010s. Ostensibly a drama about a New York advert­ising agency in the 1960s, it is a bril­liantly con­struc­ted, cereb­ral, exam­in­a­tion of … oh, so many things, not least mas­cu­line iden­tity, the mak­ing of mod­ern America, cap­it­al­ism and its con­structs, lots of stuff.

There’s barely a wasted moment in the whole thing which is why I have been look­ing for­ward to read­ing Seitz’s book – a kind of bible for Mad Men – for so long.

Based on – but much expan­ded upon – Seitz’s epis­ode recaps for Vulture.com, it con­tains a deep dive into each epis­ode with lots of foot­notes. There’s also a timeline of the 60s show­ing how real events were reflec­ted in the show, some lovely black and white illus­tra­tions, and spe­cially com­mis­sioned poetry at the begin­ning of each season.

Seitz is one of the writers about film and tele­vi­sion who I most admire and wish I could com­pare myself to. He’s trenchantly obser­v­ant and as inter­ested in form as he is in themes, and both of those are extremely import­ant when it comes to Mad Men.

So, every Sunday night for the next couple of years I will be watch­ing a single epis­ode of Mad Men and then set­tling in to read Seitz’s chapter about it. I’m at sea­son one epis­ode three at the moment: the epis­ode where we dis­cov­er that the suave and con­trolled Don Draper (Jon Hamm) might not be all he is cracked up to be and when he aban­dons his own daughter’s birth­day party, con­tem­plates sui­cide by a rail­road track, and then tries to make up for it by buy­ing her a puppy.

Mad Men cre­at­or Matthew Weiner came to New Zealand in 2009 to speak (or rather be inter­viewed on stage) at the SPADA industry con­fer­ence and I was lucky enough to be there when he described his writ­ing pro­cess as basic­ally lying on a couch while someone takes his dic­ta­tion. He’s only made one more show since Mad Men, the single-season The Romanoffs which is on Prime Video. Has any­one seen it? Is it worth a shot?

*The link is to Matt Zoller Seitz’s own arts book­shop where he still has a hand­ful of auto­graphed cop­ies of the first paper­back edi­tion for sale. That’s the ver­sion that I have.

Where to watch Mad Men

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Aotearoa: Streaming on Netflix and AMC+ or on ThreeNow (free with ads)

Australia: Streaming on Netflix, Stan and AMC+

Canada: Streaming on Netflix and AMC+

Ireland: Streaming on Netflix and SkyGo

USA: Streaming on AMC+

UK: Streaming on SkyGo and MGM+ or Freevee (free with ads)