1960s. Advertising. Don Draper. Translation: Mad Men. Created by Matthew Weiner, the hit hour-long drama follows the staff of Sterling Cooper (an agency that changes names with some regularity) on New York's Madison Avenue. Sex, death, scandals and affairs abound.
Season one begins with Don Draper (Jon Hamm) as Creative Director, and the series largely centers around his personal and professional exploits. Other main characters include Don's wife, Betty Draper (January Jones), Peggy Olson, ambitious secretary (Elisabeth Moss), agency partners Roger Sterling (John Slattery) and Bertram Cooper (Robert Morse), account executive Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser), and office manager Joan Harris (Christina Hendricks). Many of the professional and personal titles of the main characters change as the seasons progress and characters receive promotions or choose different life partners. Several new characters also join the cast as the advertising agency expands.
Matthew Weiner penned the pilot of the show while he was an unhappy writer on Becker and looking to do a story about someone like him, "who was 35 years old and had everything and was miserable." Encouraged by the ground-breaking writing on The Sopranos (his pilot script for Mad Men actually got him his next big gig after Becker -- as a staff writer on The Sopranos), Weiner followed David Chase's lead, abandoning rote television conventions and complicating notions of the hero/anti-hero. Weiner pitched his pilot to several networks and received a series of negative responses: "It's a period piece which people hate. It's too abstract. This character and these people are all awful. All that smoking... there's just nothing in it that interests us." But the executives at AMC were interested.
Mad Men premiered on July 19, 2007 and quickly gained critical acclaim. The show won the Emmy for Best Drama Series in 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011 and is known for its classic '60's style, with costumes and set design beautifully capturing the tone of the era. In addition to Emmy wins for Best Drama, Mad Men has also won for Art Direction, Cinematography, Hairstyling, Writing, Casting, and Main Title Design -- click on the video below to watch the iconic intro with a silhouette of a man falling through ad-covered skyscrapers.
Matthew Weiner has confirmed that Mad Men will run for a total of seven seasons. In his Archive interview he states, "I just want to say to the audience, you know what the show is. You know how real it is. How do you think it ends? You know how it ends."
And there you have it.
Creator: Matthew Weiner
Programming History: July 19, 2007 - present
Sunday nights, AMC
- Adrienne Faillace
