It has been 10 years since AMC’s Mad Men ended. As the show finished its retelling of the upheavals of the 1960s, the real America was entering a decade of similar convulsions over race, sex, demography, and economics. Now, after our own age of rage, we can better appreciate the traditional view of society that lay beneath Mad Men’s whiskey- and cigarette-infused glamour. The fictional experiences of the men and women of ad agency Sterling, Cooper, Draper, Price, not only serve judgment on the excesses of the ‘60s, but also help explain a likely conservative turn in American social and political trends in the decade ahead. A story about the Age of Aquarius may explain the beginning of the end of the Great Awokening.

Mad Men began its story at the end of what many once idealized as the post-World War II Golden Age, with its cultural and social certainty, long-defined genders and gender roles, and a feeling of common national purpose. Those verities were to be flayed, strip by strip, throughout the series’ seven seasons, as it tackled conformity, sexism, and race relations. Mad Men ended its tale in the early 1970s, at the beginning of post-modern America, a country socially freer and more equal, yet also more lost and lacking in identity, community, and confidence. The show exposed traditional values as hypocritical, outdated, and even immoral—until they ultimately were vindicated by the series’ conclusion.

Like most of current American popular culture, Mad Men largely ignored organized religion, and a subplot that could have explored the decline of faith was dropped early in the second season. Also uneven were the show’s attempts to deal directly with prejudice, whether antisemitism or race relations and the civil rights movement, its transient Jewish and Black characters seemingly pushed to the center of the stage for a few moments.

Mad Men’s focus was the WASP world entering its death throes in the 1960s. From that perspective, it is the cinematic counterpart to Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, his classic study of the changes in White America from 1960 to 2010. The show delivered its ostensible message about the hypocrisy of middle-class White American life in the very first episode, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” Urbane, handsome New York advertising executive Don Draper spends his evening drinking with his youthful subordinates and having intimate relations with a young woman. He then quietly enters a suburban home late at night and sits in his sleeping children’s dark bedroom while his wife, her face encased in shadows, stands silently in the lighted doorway, the two of them isolated physically and emotionally from each other.

Mad Men may have been at its most poignant in these early seasons, in its elegiac depiction of late-1950s/early-1960s suburbia. While the series meant to peel away the veneer of false utopia attached post facto to American suburban life—White, privileged, family-centered—at the same time it fed back into every sense of loss, whether actual or imagined, by those who currently live in the real world birthed during the era Mad Men fictionally portrayed.

For that reason, the saddest character in the series was not the hopelessly lost Don Draper, but his picture-perfect first wife, Betty, whose tragic arc in many ways seems truest to the show’s sub rosa message about the world that has passed. Long after their split and the collapse of their supposedly perfect life, the specter of what Don lost when Betty divorced him for his serial infidelities haunts him (and us) throughout the rest of the series.

A child of privilege and a former model, Betty appears to have won life’s lottery. She entertains perfectly and is the envy of her circle of suburban friends and her husband’s co-workers. She lives the life of mid-century leisure that we are to assume most women aspired to, but only a small fraction attained. Yet we come to see that she is emotionally stunted, betrayed by her husband, callous towards her children, and in almost every way unsatisfied. Even her own remarriage, to a man more successful and prominent than Don, seems less a vindication of her worth than a desperate attempt to recapture what she lost when she defended her honor by finally kicking Don out of the house.

Mad Men delivers an unsparing portrait of our modern existential crisis.

If the Drapers’ hometown of Ossining, New York, is cynically portrayed as a suburban Eden hiding serpents and trees of forbidden knowledge, then Don and Betty’s split throws them both out of the Garden. Unlike their Biblical forebears, however, they are condemned to wander separately, alone even when they have found new mates. Don’s pathetic wistfulness, when he visits his children in Betty’s new home late in the series, is a visceral reminder that he chose a path that destroyed the happiness they all could have had. During these scenes, one cannot avoid remembering Don’s piercing speech from the first season, during his ad pitch to Kodak executives for their new Carousel slide projector. As joyous scenes from his own family’s past flash on the projector screen, Don both sells to his clients and relives for himself a hopeful and innocent life that is fast disintegrating in his turbulent present, yearning for a return to “a place where we know we are loved.” 

It is that remembrance which makes Don and Betty’s last phone call to each other, near the very end of the series, so heartrending. Few television shows have so starkly portrayed the pain of divorce and its effects on all involved. Unable to get over their disagreements even so many years later, Don and Betty nonetheless seem haunted by the harsh finality that what they had will never be recovered. Both suffer the almost unbearable pain of confronting their past’s aborted future as an alternate reality they let slip out of their hands. In that brief phone conversation, the ghosts of what that life could have been swirl about them both, etched vividly in a piece of acting by both leads that cannot be overpraised.

By then, Betty has been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, a mordant twist by the show’s writers, who showered us with innumerable smoking scenes throughout the series. Indeed, Betty was rarely seen without a cigarette, her ethereal looks and perfectly coiffed hair often wreathed in smoke. Cancer is the cruelest blow for Betty, a horrid, slow wasting of the beauty that defined her. And her demise is the more brutal, for she has just begun, after so many years wandering in her own personal purgatory, to climb up from the depths of the meaninglessness of her life by enrolling in college. She is fated not to finish the degree that will give her a sense of her own individuality, but she has seen across the river to a land where she knows that life has promise and meaning and is thus in her own way saved.

Betty lives her final days on her own terms. We last see her sitting in her usual poised style at her kitchen table, serenely smoking the cigarettes that have already killed her, while her once-estranged daughter Sally takes up the household chores at the sink. Even the farewell letter she pens to her daughter, giving precise instructions for how her body is to be prepared for her funeral, is at once unbearably heartbreaking and an affirmation of her spirit.

Compared to Betty’s journey, Don’s odyssey is far more ambiguous. The moral questions at the center of Mad Men become clear through the character of Don Draper. As a Madison Avenue man, Draper is possessed of uncommon excellence, a full development of the social “virtue” that brings success in the cutthroat professional world he inhabits. Yet as a private man, Don lacks all real virtue, his life being bereft of any excellence as a husband, father, or friend. An aristocrat at the advertising storyboards, he is spiritually and emotionally a beggar amidst the plenty of post-war upper-middle-class life. He is one of T. S. Eliot’s “hollow men, stuffed men,” between whose idea and reality falls the shadow.

Don’s alienation from those around him grows throughout the series, leading to two failed marriages. We learn early on why Don is so isolated, for he is, above all, alienated from himself. He is a man living a lie at the very core of his being, having taken the name and identity of a fellow soldier who was killed during the Korean War due to Don’s own battlefield carelessness. Yet the adoption of a false identity was the only way for an orphaned child of a drunk and a prostitute to escape the claws of the Depression-era life that held him until he shipped out for Korea. The lie at the center of his life unravels his first family and prevents him from developing true bonds with his children, Sally and Bobby.

The only one who truly understands and loves Don is, ironically, the widow of the man whose identity he stole, Anna Draper. Don has set her up in a home in the idyllic southern California of the early 1960s, and it is only when he visits her, in their platonic love, that he goes by his real name and can be his true self, Dick Whitman. And when Anna dies, Don is left truly alone in the world.

In less-skilled hands, Don’s story would be simple melodrama, but both series creator Matthew Weiner and actor Jon Hamm breathe despairing life into Don. By bringing together two such lost souls in Don and Betty, Mad Men delivers an unsparing portrait of our modern existential crisis.

Unlike the renewed family man Pete or the dying but certain Betty, Don seems fated to continue his wanderings, unable to grasp the simple yet profound truths that give meaning to life.

As the story arc comes to its close, Weiner and the writers reveal, perhaps unwittingly, the conservative ethos underlying the series. Don’s second marriage, to the winsome, honest, and ambitious Megan, collapses through his jealousy and (again) infidelity. He then believes he has fallen in love with Diane, a waitress who has run away from her family and now him. In chasing after her, Don finds her former husband, living with a new family in a nondescript, middle-class suburb in the Midwest. Diane’s former husband is portrayed as a prickly, repressed, provincial man, all due to his openly expressed and deeply-held religious beliefs. Yet he immediately discerns Don’s lame ruse to find Diane and drives him from the house. Don flees, discovering that this anonymous, unremarkable, unaccomplished Midwesterner is far more real and stable than he, the entirely false Manhattanite. Whereas Don’s interior is nothing but a jumble of untamed lusts, corruption, and lies, this God-fearing man possesses not only a solid core but the insight into human nature that Don so tragically lacks.

That lesson is reinforced in the series finale, when Pete Campbell, Don’s younger colleague, makes a traditional, life-affirming decision. Pete was introduced in the series’ first episode as a wealthy, callow youth willing to do anything to climb the corporate ladder. He follows Don’s path into infidelity and a broken marriage, even moving to California to live a carefree life. Yet Pete matures over time in a way that Don seems desperate to do but cannot. Pete ultimately reconciles with his estranged wife and flees from Manhattan, where his family has lived for generations, to Kansas City, bringing wife and daughter in tow. Pete has learned that he is incomplete without his wife and that both California and New York City are irredeemable, filled with temptation and immorality. When Pete and his family board their private jet (he is the jet company’s new president) for their new life in the Midwest, what could have come across as a brief, hackneyed scene instead exudes optimism that Pete will honor his second chance.

In very different ways, Betty Draper and Pete Campbell have matured and found fulfilment, one through tragedy, the other through rediscovering the permanent things. Other characters, too, grow during the series, like Joan, the sexpot secretary-turned-businesswoman, and Peggy, who starts out as a mousy secretary and finally breaks the advertising world’s glass ceiling.

Don, however, remains a lost soul. It is perhaps no surprise that he finds himself, at the very end of his journey through Mad Men, at the famed Esalen Institute, in California’s Big Sur. Esalen represents the culmination of America’s journey through the 1960s. From the man in the gray flannel suit, Don has become an avatar of the new consciousness, seemingly making his traumatic emotional breakthrough.

The enigmatic final scene of Don, the very last in the whole series, was as controversial as the first. As he sits above the sun-washed cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean, blissfully listening with closed eyes to the chime of the morning meditation bell, Don’s face breaks into a wide, satisfied grin. Has he at last found inner peace and the stability that has so long eluded him? Or, has Draper figured out a way to salvage the wreckage of his career and return to the top of the advertising mountain? The immediate transition from the grinning Don to the iconic 1973 Coca-Cola commercial, “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing,” all but demands the latter interpretation. Yet I had become so invested in, if repelled by his character, that I wanted to believe that Don, too, had found happiness, and that the Coke ad was a brilliant means of playing on the viewing audience’s nostalgia for a seemingly less cynical time when such corny, new age optimism still was fresh. Regardless of whether he has repaired his emotional wounds or simply ensured corporate immortality, the fact remains that we leave Don Draper as we found him at the beginning of the 1960s—alone.

A decade after that last scene, after a similar period of social and political upheaval, an audience in 2025 is likely more attuned than Mad Men’s original viewers to the knowledge that even if Don believes he has found a new, truly worthwhile path, Esalen and all the counter-cultural movements of the 1960s were illusory Edens, and that those who succumbed to their embrace would move on, always dissatisfied and unfulfilled. Unlike the renewed family man Pete or the dying but certain Betty, Don seems fated to continue his wanderings, unable to grasp the simple yet profound truths that give meaning to life and which demand both discipline and sacrifice to something greater than oneself. 

One may have hope that Americans have learned this hard lesson. False utopias, radicalized mob violence, and the denial of nature and reality all have darkened our national horizon in recent years. A turning away, back to something more grounded and tested, seems to have started. The morality of Mad Men illuminates this laudable trend and may even help strengthen its fragile roots.