Mad Men (2007–15),not “Rad Men”: Or,from Brothel Pickpocket to Transcendental Advertiser

Introduction

On the strength of its run from 2007 to 2015 on American Movie Channel, Mad Men has claimed a niche in television history as an influential and popular series. Mad Men's prestige is indexed by 16 Primetime Emmys among 406 nominations and 143 award wins (Internet Movie Database, n.d.). Scott F. Stoddart opens a volume of academic essays by hailing Mad Men as “a pop culture phenomenon” (2011a, p.2) with impact “felt everywhere—from fashion merchandising to travel packaging, from furniture design to advertising” (2011a, p.2). Another Mad Men volume sports a panegyric subtitle—Dream Come True TV—and begins with the editor's account of his whirlwind recruitment into Mad Men fandom while he extols the series’ capacity to “capture and express the zeitgeist” (Edgerton, 2011, p.xxi). Mad Men protagonist Don Draper was voted most influential man of 2009 in one poll—a heady accomplishment for someone who does not exist (Edgerton, 2011, p.xxxii). Interest in and acclaim for the series extends further across space and time. In the United Kingdom, The Guardian published breathless, in-depth analyses of each new episode that are still archived on its website (The Guardian, 2022). More than seven years after the final episode, the internet still lights up with vigorous fan discourses on a lively subreddit (www.reddit.com/r/madmen) with more than 98,000 members where new material continues to be posted every day.

In many entries in the academic literature, Mad Men is also interpreted as an iconoclastic series. Stoddard announces that Mad Men “strives to de-romanticize the central myths of this period [1960s]” (2011, p.209). For Gary R. Edgerton, Mad Men “offers an alternative mythology to the overly simplified and saccharine poetics” across mass media “that bathe the ‘greatest generation’ in the unreflective mist of wistful nostalgia” (2011, p.xvi-xvii). For other scholars, Don Draper “rebels against the standards of society being forced upon him” (Hernandez and Holmberg, 2011, p.38). Don is posited as a “‘dissident’” (Stoddart, 2011b, p.210) rebelling against the 1950’s-60 s mythology of “the man in a gray flannel suit”, a mutiny with hints of revolt against capitalism and not just its uniforms (Stoddart, 2011b, pp.209–15). Indeed, the series “questions the assumed solidarity of the era's workplace” and by extension “the elusive American Dream” (Grady, 2011, p.46). Pivoting to gender, Melanie Hernandez and Daniel Thomas Holmberg posit that retrograde “gender archetypes still linger” in Mad Men. However, “nearly all are subverted and indicted” (2011, p.40) as the series pursues “overt denunciation of paternalistic social values” (2011, p.41).

Less scholarship addresses the capitalist system as constructed in Mad Men but, once again, the series is appraised as iconoclastic. J. M. Tyree posits Mad Men as a “debunking of the 1960s” that starts with Don as a rebel against his epoch's “stifling conformity” (2010, p.33) while he presents “a living critique” of Ayn Rand's “free market” fundamentalism (a fundamentalism academically critiqued by Corey Robin (2011, pp.76–96)). For Tyree, “Rand would not have approved” (2010, p.35) of Mad Men's often unflattering gaze on capitalism. He claims that the series has more in common with documentarian Adam Curtis’ astringent analyses of capitalist commercialism (Curtis, 2002) than it does with market celebration. In this view, Mad Men is a “scornful riposte to Baby Boomers’ self-congratulation” and exposes “the narcissism of consumer culture” (2010, p.39).

Deromanticizing, demythologizing, rebelling, dissenting, questioning, subverting, indicting, denouncing, debunking, scorning: The literature briefly surveyed above and the colorful verbs on which it draws contend that Mad Men wages a symbolic revolt against the society that produced it. However, in this investigation, I will develop a different, more nuanced analysis that is indebted to methods of collating the at times contradictory political valences embedded in audiovisual culture (Ryan and Kellner, 1988; Turner, 2006). In this view, Mad Men vibrates with tension around the relationship between US society and its capitalist economic base. That is, Mad Men does not engage with frictionless reproduction of the status quo. However, across its seven seasons, I posit the series as endorsing neoliberal capitalist premises that posit the unfettered market as optimal steering mechanism of society. I argue that Mad Men accepts the premises of capitalist meritocracy alongside anti-State tropology that favors market empowerment. One sign of Mad Men's compatibility with capitalism is the degree to which the production plugged into markets. Ties-ins included Brooks Brothers suits and Marc Jacobs dresses based on the series’ 1960s look while Advertising Age marveled at Mad Men's penchant for product placement (Stoddart, 2011a, pp.4–8).

Market Dynamism

As noted, many scholarly appraisals of Mad Men focus on its ostensible subversions. These readings of the series may conflate the convulsive impacts of markets that Mad Men captures with the series as a transformative agent in itself. Capitalism has long been critically interpreted as a disruptive force. Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels recognize that capitalism re-ordered relations between people and classes while generating new class formations in the wake of feudalism. In lyrical prose, they write,

All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned […]. (1848/2010, p.16)

Specifically, in the third season, British firm Puttnam Powell and Lowe (PPL) acquires Sterling Cooper, then slashes costs with an eye toward selling it off. With PPL-appointed finance chief Lane Pryce as their confederate, the Sterling Cooper partners slip PPL's leash and form a new firm, Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce (SCDP). After recovering from sagging revenues, SDCP merges with medium-size rivals Cutler Gleason Chaough to obtain the coveted Chevrolet account (Mad Men, 2007–15, 6:6), thereby forming Sterling Cooper & Partners (SC&P). As in real world of capitalism that eschews competition when possible (Crouch, 2011), McCann Erickson buys SC&P. Across a decade, Sterling Cooper is transformed into a PPL subsidiary that begets SCDP that begets SC&P before the firm is absorbed whole by McCann Erickson.

Alongside churn, what is old and new in the market order may permeate each other. In this vein, William Siska (2011) discusses the sociological distinction between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft. Gemeinschaft refers to pre-industrial communities in which “an individual is valued for who he or she is, existence alone confers value” as with traditional family relations (2011, p.197). By contrast, within complex bureaucratic societies that capitalism brings in its train, gesellschaft reigns and a person is valued for how he or she performs tasks and fulfills contractual obligations. Siska posits that contemporary workplace dramas calibrate between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft by transcoding the office in an industrial society into a surrogate family; a transformation that manages anxieties around the market's seismic impacts.

Traditional families and marriages fail everywhere in Mad Men. Against this backdrop, Peggy Olson rethinks the Burger Chef campaign (2007–15, 7:6) and enacts the logics of gemeinschaft and gesellschaft. Peggy rejects an ad campaign that features a nuclear family dining at home as a contrived anachronism for 1969. She opts for a concept of family as whomever one esteems to be at the table at the Burger Chef restaurant. The episode ends with Peggy, Don, and Pete Campbell eating together at Burger Chef; an exemplar of a surrogate family of people who have troubled relations with their biological families but who have become deeply bound to each other through the office. Mad Men attends to capitalism's corrosive impact on tradition (nuclear family)—while noting that new, surrogate formations may rise in its place.

Don Draper: Marketing the Market

Don as constructed in Mad Men demonstrates the complexity of the market that, in line with Wood's observations, strains against capitalism before affirming it. Born of a prostitute who died in childbirth, he initially lived on a Depression-era subsistence farm. After Don's drunken biological father Archie dies by a horse's kick in front of the young boy (2007–15, 3:13), the traumatized youth was subsequently raised in a brothel by Archie's widow Abigail and volatile “Uncle Mac”. Don's fictional trajectory to the executive suite is a made-to-order vehicle by which a capitalist society imagines class promotion as always already possible. By his thirties, Don's talents have been decorated with Clio award recognition and he is the invaluable Creative Director at Sterling Cooper. The adult version of Don nonetheless continues to surf the socioeconomic spectrum. In seasons 2 and 7, he flirts with shifting gears toward working on cars and car racing. Don also traverses the class scale in his voracious sexual tourism. In no particular order across seven seasons, Don beds, for example, his wife (bourgeoise Betty), working-class waitress Diana Bauer, earnest schoolteacher Suzanne Farrell, erudite department store scion Rachel Mencken, a couple of secretaries (Allison, Megan who is later Don's wife) along with the occasional sex worker (Candace, Eve).

Don exhibits unusual intelligence for how to package the kind of commodities unknown to him as a deprived Depression-era youth. In the final episode of Season 1, Don is in top form extolling Kodak's “wheel” for displaying picture slides. In his pitch to the Kodak executives to win the ad account, Don pointedly ignores the commodity's ostensibly useful qualities and instead posits the product as sublime. In Don's layered narrative for Kodak, a (surely invented) mentor named Teddy taught the younger Don about “a deeper bond with the product” than newness or meeting some narrow need. To wit, Teddy spoke of nostalgia that is “delicate, but powerful”. Turning to the plastic donut that holds the slides, Don poeticizes that “it's a time machine”:

It goes backwards, forwards, takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It's not called the wheel. It's called the carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels. Round and around, and back home again, to a place where we know we are loved. (Mad Men, 2007–15, 1:13)

Following Don's pitch-perfect emotive delivery, the stunned the Kodak representatives cancel subsequent meetings and hire Sterling Cooper.

The Kodak pitch implies that capitalist promotion is laden with what philosopher Harry Frankfort (2005) has theorized as “bullshit” that is not a lie so much as a socially acceptable form of tampering with reality. The photos that Don displays during the presentation capture moments of togetherness with Betty and their kids. It is nonetheless obvious by the end of Season 1 that Don and Betty's family life has become an empty pantomime. After the pitch, Don commutes to a conspicuously empty house in the suburbs as his wife and children have alighted to Betty's father's home for Thanksgiving. Whatever the contrivances of Don's Kodak pitch, he stokes deep-seated yearnings for self-actualization that extend beyond the commodity at hand. The tour-de-force Kodak pitch also anticipates Don's later embrace of transcendental marketing.

There are further turns in Mad Men's constructions of capitalism as envisioned through Don's work. In the finale of Season 6, an increasingly alcohol-befogged, erratic Don reaches his nadir in the presentation suite where he had previously been a peerless performer. He also exposes another side of capitalism with a rawness that nearly ends his career at the firm that he had been instrumental to founding. During a presentation to Hershey's chocolate representatives, Don fakes a script that draws on Norman Rockwell tropes of the childhood that he did not experience: “my father taking me to the drug store after I’d mowed the lawn and telling me I could have anything I wanted”, “my father tasseled my hair and forever his love and chocolate were forever tied together” (Mad Men 2007–15, 6:13).

This time, the bullshit cannot hold. Don implodes as he subsequently monologues on his raw, primordial experiences of capitalism and commodities:

I was an orphan. I grew up in Pennsylvania in a whorehouse. […]

Following the meltdown, Don begins Season 7 ostracized by the other SC&P partners: all but fired on an indefinite leave, getting up late and hungover for meandering days in his penthouse while trying to avoid further downward spiral.

Pickpocketing and overt prostitution are not readily found on the syllabus of the business school curriculum. However, in numerous moments, the spectrum of capitalist practices dramatized in Mad Men conjures the grubby and dystopian dimensions of market relations. Long before he worked on Madison Avenue, the young Don receives an early lesson about indifference to capitalist contracts in a flashback (2007–15, 1:8) as he witnesses Archie cheating an itinerant hobo out of his previously agreed pay.

Later in life, middle-aged Don benefits from the ethical twilight of capitalism in practice. Pete discovers Don's real identity as Dick Whitman by stealing a mail package in Don's office (1:12). In turn, Pete tries to leverage his discovery for a promotion through blackmail (itself an irregular form of capitalist contract). However, when Pete informs Bert that Don has at minimum committed identity fraud, Bert is resolutely and amorally disinterested in whatever Don may have done. Ethical sloth is close to the surface in Mad Men.

The market relations of prostitution are also a motif across the series and illustrate Mad Men's often jaundiced view of capitalism and its permeable membrane between licit and illicit. For instance, Don recruits Lane into holiday encounters with his habitual prostitute Candace and her friend Janine when both men are lonely if laden with cash (Mad Men, 2007–15, 4:3). Pete runs into his father-in-law Tom Vogel at a brothel in a notably awkward chance meeting (6:5) while Betty crosses paths with a former roommate turned high-end call girl (2:1). Joan is at the center of the series’ most audacious prostitution plot. She obtains a partnership stake in SCDP as compensation for indulging a repellent client; the “trick” wins SCDP a long-sought foothold with the auto industry (5:11). Indeed, it is indirectly through prostitution that Don encountered the magic of commodities and “only sweet thing” to sustain him in his deprived young life. That is, from a precocious age, he endowed commodities such as chocolate with qualities far beyond their straightforward functions—experience that he later recaptured in ad campaigns such as Kodak's and that powered his rise to the executive suite. In this manner, the deeply grounded substrates of shady (prostitution) and licit (Madison Avenue) capitalism are implied to be implicated in each other.

Neoliberal Mad Men and Women

In analyzing Mad Men's posture toward the market order, it is instructive to consider two broad versions of capitalism. The Fordist version of capitalism accepts unionization, pays workers well and prescribes a tighter latticework of government regulatory intervention to contain buccaneer capitalism in the interest of prosperity and stability. Industrial planning through strategic investment in public infrastructure (schools, health services) and research and development animated sunrise industries and propelled leading economies after World War II (Harvey, 2005, 1989).

Neoliberals ascended in the late 1970s and valorize the largely unbridled market as optimal steering mechanism of society (Friedman & Friedman, 1980; von Hayek, 1973/2013). For neoliberals, government intervention by definition impedes and distorts markets. Leading neoliberals have sloganized that, for example, “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem” (Reagan, 1981, para.9) that translated into, for instance, dramatically lowered tax rates particularly on wealth. Un-transparent, deregulated markets and aggressive financialization have characterized neoliberal casino capitalism (Strange, 1997). At the same time, neoliberalism does not arrest the State across the board; rather, it redirects the State's activities away from, for example, developing infrastructure and toward corporate priorities such as bailouts (Crouch, 2011, pp.101–2).

Although set in the years before the neoliberal ascendency in the late 1970s, Mad Men presents as a cultural offspring of the neoliberalism that was embedded by the time of the series’ production in the twenty-first century. As such, the series’ construction of the 1960s is saturated with neoliberal assumptions imported from the series’ twenty-first century frame of reference to its 1960s setting. Mad Men valorizes the carnivalesque thrills of market excess over government steerage of the market as needed.

In Mad Men, the State is rarely on stage—and, when it is, government actions are ineffective and / or undesirable. In the opening episode of the series, Don's first task is to promote cigarettes in the face of new Federal Trade Commission (FTC) restrictions that prohibit touting cigarettes as healthy (!). Despite the merits of the FTC's case, its writ is antagonistic to Don's work as the series’ obvious figure of audience identification. However, Don outsmarts the spectral government bureaucrats by reframing regulations as an opportunity to extol cigarettes in new ways. Don's game-change insight arrives in the tagline, “Lucky Strike: It's toasted” (Mad Men, 2007–15, 1:1). Lucky Strike's ownership pivots from anxiety at what they deride as Sovietism in FTC regulation to delight with Don's new tagline. In other words, the government is readily outmaneuvered by the clever and nimble private sector—a staple neoliberal trope.

As the series winds down, Joan confronts McCann Erickson boss Jim Hobart with the threat of a complaint to the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) over gendered workplace harassment (2007–15, 7:12). Hobart is unmoved. In the end, Joan reluctantly agrees to accept half of her partnership stake as a severance. It is a partial win for Joan—but not for the broader class of women who lack Joan's status, whom government agencies such as EEOC are supposed to protect. Once again, the private sector is paces ahead of the government that cannot effectively regulate, Mad Men suggests, even when its intentions are noble.

The US government is not the only one constructed as meddling and ineffective in Mad Men. Unlike his British colleagues, Lane Pryce is eager to participate in the vulgar energies of the US, pinning a New York Mets pennant to his office wall and engaging in sexual tourism with local women. Alas, Lane's attempts to succeed in the US are fatally impacted by the British government. Lane's suicide is set in motion by back taxes that he owed to the British exchequer and his subsequently exposed, desperate plot to embezzle funds from SC&P. “Taxes kill”—but evidently do not build schools—could indeed be a neoliberal slogan.

The State has a face in Mad Men since Henry Francis makes his living in government as an aide, at various times, to New York City Mayor John Lindsay and Governor Nelson Rockefeller. Later, Henry is a representative in the New York state assembly. Henry looks the part of the patrician politician with a confident, self-important demeanor that begins with seducing pregnant and married Betty Draper. However, Henry's work never rises to more than maneuvering around alpha male political patrons to advance his career. When Betty objects to aggressive cancer treatments as merely putting off inevitable death, Henry crassly blusters about what Rockefeller would do. Henry's seat in the New York assembly was won unopposed, Betty acerbically notes, begging the question of what elected officials actually do within Mad Men's neoliberal-inflected world.

As concerns the executive apex of US government, the Kennedy-Nixon confrontation in 1960 presents a motif during the first season of Mad Men. As the campaign unfolds, Sterling Cooper's solidly Republican mad men's contempt for Kennedy is infused with fear because his ads exhibit command of persuasive messaging. Pete compares Kennedy with Elvis Presley in a moment of grudging respect (Mad Men, 2007–15, 1:7). By contrast, Sterling Cooper staff judge Nixon's ads as unwatchable since the candidate technocratically riffs on polices with grim determination. In Mad Men's world, the private sector has absorbed politics and its messaging. Nixon loses in 1960, in this view, because he did not get the corporate memo on how to message like a mad man.

Even the US's once vaunted military is constructed as woefully ineffective. In flashback, young and frightened Don is a soldier known by his birthname of Dick Whitman in the Korean War (2007–15, 1:12). Following an episode of intense enemy fire, the rattled soldier accidently drops a lighter. As a result, his commanding officer—the real Don Draper—is gruesomely barbecued when spilled petroleum ignites. The accident enables Dick Whitman theft of Don Draper's identity. Government service is, in other words, distinctly not equated with valor.

Two decades later at a veterans’ party in Oklahoma, Don suddenly confesses to having killed his commanding officer in Korea. The World War II veterans have their own tales of dire wartime atrocities (murder and cannibalism) and are unfazed by Don's confession. The intoxicated veterans aver that the whole point of serving in the US military is to get home alive and recast the patriotic fight song “Over There” as a call for more alcohol. In line with Mad Men's neoliberally-informed gaze on government, the construction of the military is doused in cynicism. Among Mad Men's rising generation, ever-wayward Glen Bishop volunteers for the army not out of idealism—but to evade his stepfather's wrath over failing out of college (2007–15, 7:10).

In Mad Men, the market and its corporate offices provide the medium through which captivating intrigues play out and the subject's mettle is tested. By contrast, the State is dull, distant and inept—tropology that, as noted, strongly backs neoliberal dogma. Mad Men's America exudes the market uber alles—from Betty opening the front door to become sexually aroused by an earnest air-conditioning salesman (Mad Men, 2007–15, 1:11) to the advertisements in commercial media that Don studies throughout the series. Indeed, the private sector is the arbiter of reality within this world. In the series’ first episode, Don confidently asserts to Rachel Mencken that love does not exist. Don claims that love has been invented by Madison Avenue potentates like himself in order to hawk panty hose. In Season 7 (2007–15, 7:12), Jim Hobart similarly indexes corporate power as he unwittingly busts a Herman & Chomsky “Propaganda Model” move (1988). Hobart ridicules Joan's threat to alert The New York Times’ to rampant sexism at McCann Erickson. Hobart indignantly points to McCann Erickson's institutionalized influence through advertising accounts with the Times, a substantial revenue stream for the newspaper. Given its view of an anemic State, Mad Men's world imagines vanishingly slight countervailing influences that can or should check private sector power.

Beyond the Perimeter of the Market

The market may exploit a large share of subject populations with work that is unfulfilling and/or undervalued. At the same time, to be excluded from paid work presents dire circumstances. Betty Draper Francis illustrates the perils of being external to market relations when capitalism reigns.

Betty was Bryn Mawr-educated and married two prosperous men: self-made Don and stable, “empty suit” Henry. In material terms, Betty wants for nothing in wealthy Westchester County, New York with hired help in raising three children. However, Betty exudes bitter frustration with her Freidanian “problem with no name” existence (Edgerton, 2011, p.xxiv). While ensconced in suburban prosperity, Betty never tests her efficacy by working a job. Dr. Arnold Wayne's psychotherapeutic services in Season 1 are a commodity that ministers to Betty's neurosis. However, Wayne never gets close to the straightforward explanation of Betty's malaise as grounded in her lack of an independent income and correspondingly limited agency in a capitalist milieu.

During Season 1, Jim Hobart arranges for Betty to model for Coca-Cola as a creepy gambit to attract Don to his industry-leading firm (Mad Men, 2007–15, 1:9). Hobart's risible plan to instrumentalize Betty backfires as Don contemptuously refuses Hobart's overtures to join McCann Eriksen. Having no value in the market of her own, Betty is immediately terminated after a single photoshoot by McCann Erickson, her hopes of (“glamourous”) work dashed.

Within a capitalist society, stay-at-home Betty becomes an accoutrement to a man in a suit to be displayed but not heard. It is a role that Henry lividly enforces after Betty ventures her (more right-wing than Nixon) political views to the neighbors (2007–15, 7:5). During lunch with Francine, contrast is painfully obvious between the two former neighbors / confidants. While Francine enthuses about working in a travel agency, Betty has little to add beyond narrating Henry's unrequited pursuit of higher office (2007–15, 7:3). Having been thwarted in her efforts to participate in market relations, Betty at least tries academics by enrolling in a master's program immediately prior to her cancer diagnosis.

The world of Mad Men also encompasses seemingly anti-capitalist subjectivities. Don's Season 1 mistress Midge is, however, less of a champion for revolution than her social reference group of Madison Avenue-bashing beatniks may imply. In the opening minutes of the series’ pilot episode, Midge presents as successful within the market regime as a self-employed, subcontracted commercial artist. In one of her first utterances, Midge observes that the market-driven “invention” of the “Grandmother's Day” holiday will be a boon for her in filling orders. In other words, Midge is savvy as to how capitalism is always generating new commodities and thrives on (rather than being outrun by) the sheen of novelty and innovation. While indulging her ostentatiously anti-capitalist beatnik friends, Midge appears comfortable with market relations through sub-contracted work that calls on her specialized skills.

After Season 1, Midge appears only once more in the series, to devastating effect. After manufacturing a “chance” meeting with Don and taking him to her shabby flat, it is evident that Midge and her husband are heroin addicts (2007–15, 4:12). Her husband signals willingness to effectively pimp Midge to score money for smack. Don declines the tacit offer of sex but gifts Midge with cash through pained ambivalence as the money is destined for a heroin fix. Whereas Midge had formerly carved out a niche as a skilled subcontracted worker, she succumbs to a tragic form of consumerism: the drug addict descending to the bottom. In this manner, Mad Men suggests there is little escape from capitalism including the shadows of the illicit economy where consumption readily ruins lives.

In Season 7, two spaces are coded as havens from the mainstream market relations—and both are manifestly flawed. The first space is the commune in which Roger and Mona's disgruntled daughter Margaret (now named “Marigold”) takes up residence. The commune appears to fulfill its anti-system proclamations as electricity is verboten while work-sharing and connection with nature are evident by day. Dedication to life outside the system is, however, undermined by suggestions of sexual exploitation by night. The commune's project is further vexed by the extent to which Margaret has always been a privileged brat, not an idealist. Her stated motives for staying on the commune come back to resentment at her parents’ lack of attentiveness, coupled with disinterest in raising her child.

The other ostensibly anti-market haven is the retreat campus to which Stephanie takes Don in the final episode. Whatever its touchy-feely trappings, the retreat campus is a straight-up capitalist enterprise. In this vein, the receptionist chirpily assures Don in bottoming-out mode that he is paid up through the end of the week and is thus entitled to participate in the campus’ activities / commodities. The implication is that the campus functions to re-charge the batteries of the white-collar workforce in its times of malaise—for a price. This is indeed how it plays out for Don as he dusts himself off to reach new heights as a mad man through the transcendent Coke ad.

Conclusion: All is Well That Ends Well

A narrative's closing is where conflicts and contradictions may be sorted out. Although Mad Men's final sequence is necessarily a small segment of the 70-hour epic, it reveals how the series resolves its often-conflicted postures toward market relations. In the moments prior to Don's hilltop epiphany, the series repeatedly rehearses its final judgement; capitalism is good and it is the best means for allocating resources and fulfilment. While the market can be tough and grubby, in Mad Men's world, capitalist endeavor leads to success for its ensemble of good if flawed personages.

Across its seven seasons, Mad Men conjures tragedy such as Lane Pryce's suicide. Nonetheless, capitalism is ultimately an exhilarating circus where all is well that ends well. In the montage that precedes Don's epiphanic rejuvenation, the audience witnesses Peggy finally bringing her work and private life together in a loving relationship with colleague and confidant Stan Rizzo. The montage also captures bon vivants Roger and Marie Calvet settling into an autumn-of-life romantic partnership. A tempered Pete reconstitutes family with Trudy and Tammy in the Lear jet milieu. In her montage moment, Joan is already wealthy but rejects hedonistic-if-gender-traditionalist boyfriend Richard to lead her own media production firm. Don, Peggy, Roger, Pete, Joan: the convulsive market order has in the end redeemed and rewarded these characters whom we first met 91 episodes earlier.

The only discordant note in Mad Men's closing sequence concerns Betty. Her life is winding down as she continues to smoke through terminal cancer with back turned to daughter Sally. Betty alone within the ensemble has not directly tested her mettle by proving herself equal to the rigors of capitalism in the arena of corporate work. Mad Men's resolution pulls its myriad plotlines into a final affirmation of market relations—with the only harsh outcome among the core adult characters reserved for the one who had not made money on her own in a corporate milieu. The closing sequence of Mad Men thereby demonstrates how an often-contradictory text that unfolded over seven seasons can confront deeply grounded flaws in capitalism—before finally rallying to reproduction of the status quo.

In the big picture, the stakes are high in unpicking culturally resonant texts, in this case one that implicates neoliberalism's corrosive impact on social democratic State intervention into capitalism. The neoliberal market's ascendency over the State's remit to steer capitalism has been extensively analyzed by long-form investigative journalists (Mayer, 2017) and academic historians (McLean, 2017, pp.207–34) as well as legal analysis that unpacks recent US Supreme Court efforts at “kneecapping” the regulatory apparatus in defiance of existential challenges posed by climate change (Linden, 2022, para.16). In the light of these stakes, fictionalized worlds such as Mad Men demand to be interpreted with respect to their gaze on neoliberalism and in relation to urgent crises set in motion by unfettered capitalism.