Mad Men made TV history following its debut, providing a psychologically fascinating look at the lives of New York City advertising men in 1960. The period and setting proved integral to the identity of the show, and there were soon countless imitators on television that wanted to capture its magic — but failed to grasp the zeitgeist of its era in the same insightful and powerful manner.
That is, until The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel came along a decade later. With both shows set in New York City around the year 1960, it’s only logical to compare what each production has to say about the city and how each reflected life at the time. Making that comparison, Mad Men deoesn’t come close to conveying the same breadth or depth of life as Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.
Both shows touch on many similar themes and subject matter. Mad Men focused on the lives of Don Draper (played by Jon Hamm, who’s returning to Good Omens) and those who worked around him at a New York City ad agency. Draper is a magnetic and charismatic figure, but those in his orbit helped balance out the show to portray a larger view of what life was like in 1960. While Draper embodied the dissociated and materialistic lifestyle of a successful white male — precariously balancing his projected image as a loving family man in New York City with his personal vices — figures like Peggy Olson showed the struggles of a young woman competing for success and happiness in a male-dominated world.
And yet, when compared to Mrs. Maisel, it does not seem as though Mad Men cast a very wide net at all. The Prime Video series makes the woman competing in a predominantly male profession its protagonist with Miriam “Midge” Maisel, surrounds her with an upper-class Jewish family and partners her with the financially struggling Susie Myerson. It’s constantly mixing and remixing the social environments every character inhabits throughout the show, even shaking things up at the end of Season 3. Mad Men seemed to have a laser focus on an extremely particular slice of life in 1960s New York. Mrs. Maisel is interested in the whole pie.
While Mad Men would feature occasional dalliances with subcultures of the team or feature subplots where a character’s identity or lifestyle came into conflict with the narrow expectations of the world around them, Mrs. Maisel samples the broad varieties of life in practically every episode — much like other popular projects making strides in representation, such as the Arrowverse and Sony’s The Mitchells vs. The Machines. Midge’s father explores the academic intelligentsia and beatnik cultures while trying to find himself, her mother bounces around social circles and careers in discovering her own independence, and Midge herself inhabits the lowest dive bars to the biggest venues which run the gamut of race and ethnicity.
The more the series progresses, the more life and diversity the show portrays. Season 2 saw the introduction of a black and closeted gay professional singer named Shy Baldwin as well as the Chinese-American Mei Lin, and both became central to the season’s overarching plot. The current Season 4 deals with the fallout of Shy ending his professional relationship with Midge and further explores Lin’s romantic relationship with her ex-husband, proving the series’ commitment to elevating diverse stories and doing them justice. It’s not treating them as disposable one-episode detours that allow white characters to reflect on their own lives.
No show could ever capture the fullness or broad spectrum that life in any era represents. But when comparing Mrs. Maisel to Mad Men, the former does a far better job of it while the latter didn’t show much interest in trying. There is no reason why a story focusing on the lives on high-level ad executives in the 1960s would need to have a narrower focus than the tale of a young comedian beginning her career in the same era, but the shows take very different approaches to their subject matter.
Mad Men set the gold standard for period pieces for the decade following its debut, but there’s a new standard now. Any future series set in 1960s New York City would do well to remember just how big and broad the city has always been, how many different lives inhabit it, and how many stories it has to tell. And for that, Mrs. Maisel is the series to beat.
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