Mad Men is a perfect example of a serialized historical melodrama that permits viewers to re-evaluate the past. The show was created by Matthew Weiner, a co-writer and producer of The Sopranos, in 1999. Mad Men arguably tells us less about the 1960s than it does about the current desire for collective nostalgia for the past. As viewers, we can escape our own dreary lives and indulge in the fantasy of someone else’s fictional memories.

The show purposely undermined the otherwise outwardly glamorous lives of workers at a Madison Avenue advertising agency in the early sixties. The office zeitgeist is dominated by successful white alpha-males who smoke, drink, make racist and anti-Semitic remarks and sexually harass their female secretaries. From a contemporary viewpoint, the misogynistic and xenophobic narratives are indicative of an emotionally flawed world.

After all, that was then this is now. Right?

Mad Men can be interpreted as a complex projection of contemporary sentiments. The show’s rendering of history – how it is produced and how it is received – reimages the past in order to destabilize the present in order to re-envision the future.

Humans have always been nostalgic for the ‘good ole days.’ Hollywood is constantly yearning for period pieces that focus on a nostalgic, often misleading version of the past.

When I was growing up in the early 70s, popular television shows like “Happy Days” and “Laverne & Shirley” celebrated the – nauseating – hegemonic virtues of 1950s America in the pre-Ronald Reagan-era.

in Mad Men everyone is seen as superficial media representations of the era: immaculately dressed and coifed housewives serving dinner to her their pipe-smoking husbands; the two perfect children – a boy and a girl, of course – and Spot, the dog. After dinner, mom and daughter clean up while dad and son play catch in a yard surrounded by a newly-painted white picket fence. A shiny blue Plymouth sits in the driveway.

TV families never just sat around watching TV or did regular stuff like the rest of us. Still, these were important cultural texts with a certain nostalgic aesthetic: a familiar historical fantasy we hold on to.

Mad Men was not so much about the past as it was the present: The anxiety of a post 9/11 world coupled with our collective fear about the persistence of racism and the dread of personal failure – are all sentiments which relate to the failings of our current society. Experiencing history through the serialized life of individuals differs fundamentally from reading about them in books. Television is the perfect medium for this kind of narrative.

The show used early 1960s domesticity as a framework within the mise-en-scene of the program. Mad Men‘s use of television references over several seasons has been analyzed through the theories of cultural memory.

Some scholars expand the critique of Mad Men’s racial politics to include the treatment of Asians. Asian women function as the object of white men’s “orientalist” desire. They effectively undercut the claim that the show’s depiction of racism is an ‘anti-racist’ act: Non-white characters are simply there to reveal the actions of the white main characters. It’s not just the setting that segregates and devalues them, but the narrative itself.

Mad Men manipulated the thread of history through the course of real events. The writers were in luck because the 60s were filled with earth-shattering events: JFK’s assassination, the Cold War, Civil Rights, Vietnam, and the beginnings of feminism. The show incorporates the genres of serials and soap opera with special attention paid to the role of personal and private histories in the character’s backstory and dreamscape. It makes liberal use of flashbacks and flash-forwards as narrative tools to enable the show to re-image the production values of the era – in order to deconstruct them. By focusing on serial characters Mad Men’s narrative provides space for re-evaluating history through personalization.

This unique representation of the process of change within the show helped to shed some light on how viewers perceive historical shifts in the series. The audience should have some idea of what historical changes are coming (…), and they are able to see the characters live through them firsthand, allowing viewers to experience history as they lived it. The show was able to portray a fairly authentic retelling of history because the characters are actually living through it onscreen. The narrative arc of Mad Men shows history unfolding.

Scholars will analyze and appreciate Mad Men for its nonlinear narratives as well as the its nostalgic take on a wide array of topics, including fashion, history, architecture, civil rights, feminism, consumerism, art, and cinema. It also utilizes compelling personal stories to engage critical subjects like race relations, gender and queer theory, consumerism, globalization and even psychoanalysis.

But it’s still just a goddam TV show.