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looks interesting - educate me!
I'll leave the teaching to Wiki, as they're much more eloquent about it than I could be:
Set in New York City, Mad Men takes place in the 1960s at the fictional Sterling Cooper advertising agency on New York City's Madison Avenue and centers on Don Draper, a high-level advertising executive, and the people in his life in and out of the office. It also depicts the changing social mores of early 1960s America.
Mad Men depicts the society and culture of the early 1960s, highlighting cigarette smoking, drinking (alcoholic beverages), sexism, and racial bias as examples of how that era, not so long ago, was so radically different from the present.[4][5] Smoking, more common in 1960 than it is now, is featured throughout the series; almost every character can be seen smoking multiple times in the course of one episode.[4] In the pilot, representatives of Lucky Strike cigarettes come to Sterling Cooper looking for a new advertising campaign in the wake of a Reader's Digest report that smoking will lead to various health issues including lung cancer.[6] The show presents a culture where men who are engaged or married freely partake of sexual relationships with other women. The series also observes advertising as a corporate outlet for creativity for mainstream, middle-class, young, white men. The main character, Don Draper, observes at one point about Sterling-Cooper, "This place has more failed artists and intellectuals than the Third Reich."[7] Along with each of these examples, however, there are hints of the future and the radical changes of the later 1960s; Betty's anxiety, the Beats Draper discovers through Midge, even talk about how smoking is bad for health (usually dismissed or ignored). Characters also see stirrings of change in the ad industry itself, with the Volkswagen Beetle's "Think Small" ad campaign mentioned and dismissed by many at Sterling Cooper.
