1. The particular brand of historicity. I like that this show is trying to portray a generation of Americans who have been excessively abused over the last fifty years as real and sympathetic human beings. Its conceit alone must be honored simply for existing: take the most reviled elements of the culture to which the counterculture was counter, namely Madison Avenue ad men, and show how they were in fact human beings, not mindless servants of the mass media (since, indeed, such people do not exist), and how human choices led to their fashioning the mass media to become what we know it as now. Because of the present election, I’ve been thinking about how tired I am of the baby boomers’ stupid, historical quarrels. I had thought Kerry’s conflicted but ultimately conclusive war record would make all that Vietnam crap go away in 2004, but I was quite wrong: people of my parents’ age were willing to fight that over again. So, I’m ready to take the baby boomers’ parents seriously, and I’m glad this show tries to do that.

Even more so, I’m glad that its execution is so straightforward, that even in its refusing to blame too much, its portrayal of the early 1960s is untainted by hagiography. After watching several Scorsese movies, which love to recreate the 1960s in the luscious technicolor of fond memories, and after the general pablum that says pre-1963 was a time of beautiful innocence, I’m ready for a work that aims towards the opposite side of the mean, which Mad Men certainly does. Yet even though it impliedly criticizes the errors of the past, it does so within its effort to portray the past as it conceives it really was. It misses the mark on innumerable occasions (telegraphing what can only be criticisms of certain behaviors like drunk driving), but I’m grateful for the effort. Even more importantly, it manages not to stomp upon the buzzwords of the earlier era’s critics (and they are legion), even as it picks its strawmen to knock down. For not making cheap attacks on the Ivy League, but instead showing how these ad men (at least) valued their earlier attempts at education, or felt the conflict between the work of drunken bonhomie and the deeper notions of virtue that they’d glimpsed at college, I’m also grateful. For its not tilting at the anti-black racism of the time (and indeed treating it as a de rigueur injustice), and for trying to portray a subtler interaction between Jews and non-Jews (even if it can’t resist some pot-shots at Anti-Semitism), I’m pleased. Even for its tracking the 1960 election (very similar to the 2000 election except the better man won) in such detail, but making its liberal audience root (even just a little) for Nixon, I’m tickled.

2. Its containing a frank argument for nihilism, or at least the argument that when we die, we’re dead, and that’s in some way horrible and good. (It’s not nearly so trite as I’ve put it here, I swear.) I have to admit, I was pretty well sold that this was indeed a serious show, dedicated to exploring how someone might live with this death-embracing desire, by the antepenultimate scene of the first episode and its juxtaposition with the last scene. I was a little spooked, then, by much of the rest of the first season. It then took me till the penultimate episode of the first season to get back to thinking that the show was in fact serious about this question (alongside its many subplots and conventional TV elements). But I think its gestures in this direction are worthy of praise.

3. Its portrayal of non-feminist women as people who are not ignorant or brainwashed, but people who in many cases understood and valued different things from those that were later claimed to be the highest values for women by the feminist movement. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for equal treatment under the law, and this show provides the most vivid picture I’ve ever experienced of how terrible omnipresent sexual harassment must ha’sve been. But in watching the Peggy, Joan, and especially Betsy characters live with their lots, I’ve learned a ton or been reminded of much that I’d first learned from Virginia Woolf. At its best, on this topic and others, the show gives us a glimpse of that lost wisdom that, in our frenzied dialectic circa 1963-73 or whenever, America destroyed and is only now able to begin sublating.

4. Its drawing of its central character. For reasons that it would be spoiling to elucidate, he gives me some at least potential (though likely imagined) insight into what my grandfather’s life was like. Beyond that, the show’s trying to understand a certain mythic character in American life, showing us what he keeps hidden beside the universal admiration he receives. And then he’s an individual man with peculiar insights that themselves are worth thinking about.

So, I recommend people check it out. Like I said, there’s a lot that’s wrong with it. It’s definitely a TV show (unlike, say, the best thing ever to be shown on television, The Wire), with all that goes with that. Still, there’s a fair amount to learn from it.