Overview

Mad Men is a TV drama show that few do not know about. This highly rated show aired on AMC between 2007 and 2015. It is based on a fictional advertising agency in New York, and the timespan is the 1960s and part of the 1970s. The show has won numerous awards and is considered to be one of the best TV shows to make it into the streaming market in recent years.

Mad Men was created by Matthew Wiener, while the production company is Lionsgate Television. We have plenty more information to share with you in this review, from the cast list to the trailer and intriguing production details.

Premise

Mad Men is known for its setting as being the advertising agency Sterling Cooper. Looking this place up online will be fruitless, as it is a fictional organisation. Sterling Cooper is based in Madison Avenue, in Manhattan, New York. The show focuses on a range of people who are living in 1960s New York, and the acclaimed storylines take place with a truly historical backdrop.

Mad Men was a slang phrase that was used in reference to advertising executives, most of whom were in fact based in the Madison Avenue location during this time period. That said, critics have suggested that this phrase was not as widely used as the show implies.

Much of the show is based on the main character, Don Draper, who is an executive at Sterling Cooper. However, most of the ensemble cast enjoy their own separate storylines, which serve as spin-offs to the main element of the show. Indeed, many argue that Draper (played by John Hamm) isn’t the sole focus of the show.

Mad Men has received much praise for depicting the changing societal moods of the time, as America underwent a lot of upheaval throughout the 1960s.

Cast and characters

While Don Draper (John Hamm) is the main character, Mad Men had a large cast with many other characters of significant importance. The show can be thanked for launching Hamm’s career as well as that of Elizabeth Moss and Christina Hendricks, to name but a few. Here is the main cast list.

• Don Draper – John Hamm
• Peggy Olson – Elizabeth Moss
• Pete Campbell – Vincent Kartheiser
• Betty Francis – January Jones
• Joan Harris – Christina Hendricks
• Roger Sterling – John Slattery
• Ken Cosgrove – Aarton Stanton
• Harold Crane – Rich Sommer
• Sal Romano – Bryan Batt
• Bert Cooper – Robert Morse
• Sally Beth Draper – Kiernan Shipka
• Rachel Katz – Maggie Siff

This is only a sample of the large cast who featured in Mad Men over the course of its seven seasons and numerous episodes.

Filming locations

Fans may expect that most of the filming for Mad Men took place in New York, but the reality is that a lot took place in Los Angeles, California. In fact, most of it occured in the home of the movie and television industries.Notably, many other TV shows that are set in other cities (including New York), were actually also filmed in their entirety in Los Angeles – for example, Friends.

The main sets for the Sterling Cooper offices and other regular locations in Mad Men were located in Los Angeles. Many of the other on-location and external shots scenes were also filmed in the Los Angeles area.

That said, the pilot for Mad Men was genuinely shot in New York City before the show moved to LA for the rest of its time.

Trailer

There are a number of different trailers for Mad Men that are available to view online. Each season has its own trailer, and the most popular of these on Youtube is the promo trailer for season one. This has over 2 million views, and fans are treated to an overview of each of the characters as a general introduction alongside classic backdrop music.

Production

The idea of Mad Men was first conceived by Mathew Weiner quite a while ago – to be precise, in 2000, seven years before the first season of the show. His idea came to him while he was working as a staff writer for Becker. He originally wrote the first draft of the pilot and this would eventually shape the script of the pilot of Mad Men. The script for Mad Men helped Wiener get a job as a writer on the HBO hit The Sopranos after producer David Chase read it.

The show was offered to both HBO and Showtime. However, both networks  decided not to move forward with the project. Fortunately, AMC decided to go with the show as its first original series.

While this was AMC’s first series, they did not hold back on production values and finances. Each episode of the first season would go on to cost over $2million and the set design had very high standards.

Episodes and reception

Mad Men is one of the most critically acclaimed series of all time. It has won a whole host of television awards, including 16 Emmys and 5 Golden Globes. The awards won were under both individual categories for actors and for the show as a whole.

Mad Men was the first cable show to win the Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series, which it managed to land four times in total – every year for the first 4 seasons.

The show also had great ratings and it features on a number of critics’ lists as one of the best TV shows of all time. It was also the most highly rated show on AMC when it was airing.