Mad Men

The writing is extremely weak, the plotting haphazard and often preposterous, the characterizations shallow and often incoherent; its attitude toward the past is glib and its self-positioning in the present is unattractively smug; the direction is unimaginative.
Daniel Mendelsohn, The Mad Men Account, The New York Review of Books, Feb.24, 2011

Mad Men is an unpleasant little entry in the genre of Now We Know Better.
Mark Grief, London Review of Books, 23 October 2008

I largely agree with these comments (even if they sound like John Simon film reviews) but I still like and enjoy the show.  Mendelsohn thinks that the show may appeal to those too young to have lived through it (it takes place mostly in the sixties) who are interested in what their parents lives were like.  I lived through that period myself and find it quite accurate in its portrayal of the things and attitudes of that period, though I think "realism" is a fallacy when applied to any art.  Certainly the show is not like a nineteenth century novel (though many of the characters are Dickensian in their resistance to change) but it is somewhat like the eighteenth century novels of Smollett and others in its episodic and comic qualities.

My take on the show is that Matthew Weiner, its creator and writer, is not trying to say that today we are superior in so many ways but rather we are very much the same:  some people may smoke and drink less but attitudes toward women, gay men and lesbians, and people of color have not changed as much as we think they have:  there are still many Don Drapers in the world and many women such as Peggy Olson and Joan Harris who are trying to find their way in the business world using whatever combination of sex and accomplishment they can find that works.

The show is something of a soap opera indeed, but so are the films of Vincente Minnelli and Douglas Sirk.  Over a period of seven years Mad Men has consistently delighted and surprised one, as Draper's children have started to grow up and question things, just as their parents did and their parents before them.  The attitudes in Mad Men are centered in the advertising world, where the desire and ability to flimflam the public continues, sometimes more sophisticated than previously, but by no means always.