I’ve been surprised to find, looking through my archive, just how much I have written about Mad Men. I seem to have delivered at least one article for each of its seven seasons, right back to the first in 2008 when it started airing in Canada.  I had  already been turned onto the show by one of my editors at the National Post who, I now realise, must have caught it on its U.S. airing the previous year.  Thus began years of watching Mad Men on its transmission schedule, week by week. I didn’t have to binge-watch. (I’m old fashioned.)

For all my fidelity to the show, I was never able to hold it in the same esteem or affection as I held The Sopranos or The Wire. Maybe I find street-crime more dramatically compelling than white-collar crime, which was the essential subject-matter of Mad Men, even if its characters’ shenanigans seldom crossed any legal threshold. They were not, in the last resort, matters of life and death. And the language of the Madison Avenue boardroom wasn’t as colourful as the lingo of the Baltimore projects or of the New Jersey mob or – richest of all of the Wild West – as depicted in Deadwood.

None of this reflects on the acting. A wise theatre director once remarked to me that the first production of any play always looks definitive. I can think of a couple of exceptions to that rule but by and large he was right; barring actual visible incompetence, a performance always seems right if there is nothing to compare it to.  On TV, which rarely goes in for revivals, this applies even more, most of all in long-running series where the performances have so much space to impose themselves that they hardly seem like actors at all. It actually becomes impossible to accept them in other roles: witness the late James Gandolfini, who could never escape the shadow of Tony Soprano and, though it may be too early to tell, Jon Hamm, forever Don Draper. For whatever reason – maybe there isn’t one – their female opposite numbers have proved more resourceful survivors; Edie Falco was able to progress without strain from Carmela Soprano to Nurse Jackie while Elizabeth Moss in The Handmaid’s Tale has become practically the queen of prestige TV drama.

In my reviews of Mad Men I have paid happy tribute to the work of John Slattery and Robert Morse as the original Messrs Sterling and Cooper, heads and founders off the ad agency that, through its various permutations, continued to bear their names, and to Christina Hendricks, the fantasy of the sexy secretary made flesh and chafing against the role; hers was the performance that cut deepest emotionally.  (And she could sing too; not on this show, but she was wonderful as the vulnerable flight attendant in Sondheim’s Company: the same filmed concert performance that also gave us a singing and dancing Stephen Colbert.) I see too that, in all my articles on Mad Men, I shamefully failed to mention the only performance that rivalled Hendricks’ in poignancy, that of Jared Harris as Lane, the Englishman who came to destroy the firm, opted instead to be part of it, and ended up destroying himself: a performance that was to be matched, and in some respects replicated, by his George VI in The Crown. So I have reservations about Mad Men but I wouldn’t have missed it. And didn’t.

The Collected Reviews of
Mad Men

in chronological order