Mad Men: Greatest TV drama?

That was the conclusion of this particular evaluative process put together by Vanity Fair:

Created by Matthew Weiner, Mad Men starred Jon Hamm as suave and troubled ’60s-era ad man Don Draper. It first aired on AMC on July 19, 2007, and ran until 2015. Mad Men was certainly celebrated in its time, picking up 16 Emmys and five Golden Globes over the course of its seven seasons—and yet all three agreed that Busis’s choice for the greatest drama series of all time has only gotten better in age.

“Mad Men is so well done and holds together over its seven seasons in a way that is surprising when you watch them in a binge,” says Busis. “It’s kind of surprising in retrospect that there wasn’t a plan for the ending from the beginning, because it wraps up so well.”

While many may argue that The Sopranos is the greatest drama series of all time, Lawson proposes that awarding Mad Men is a way of showering praise on The Sopranos as well. Weiner got hired to write on Sopranos after submitting a spec script for Mad Men; when he finally got a chance to make his own original show, they acted like natural counterparts. “Mad Men and The Sopranos are in such deep dialogue with each other,” said Lawson. “If Sopranos is about the very end of the American dream, Mad Men is about the first cough. It’s like, ‘Oh, something is going wrong here.’”

I’ve only watched Mad Men once, but I certainly agree it holds up better than The Sopranos, which I would put behind both The Wire and Breaking Bad in terms of the much narrower category of that sort of gangland drama.

These are all great shows of course, and these kinds of critical exercises are always a bit silly, but one good thing about this one is that it reminds me I’ve been wanting to re-watch Mad Men, which in retrospect seems like an even more timely example of cultural criticism than it did at the time. Note that it ended before Trumpism, which explicitly looks back at the Mad Men era (most of the show’s story arc takes place between the late 1950s and the mid-1960s) as a kind of golden age.