Arguments Against 'Mad Men'

Daniel Mendelsohn suggests that “the greatest part of the audience for Mad Men is made up not, as you might have imagined at one point, by people of the generation it depicts — people who were in their twenties and thirties and forties in the 1960s, and are now in their sixties and seventies and eighties — but by viewers in their forties and early fifties today, which is to say of an age with those characters’ children. The point of identification is, in the end, not Don but Sally, not Betty but Glen: the watching, hopeful, and so often disillusioned children who would grow up to be this program’s audience, watching their younger selves watch their parents screw up.” There’s a lot to chew on here; you will agree or disagree, but, if you read it, you will almost certainly print it out for your commute home; it’s a long one.