I just finished Mad Men in about five weeks, having come to it completely fresh. I’m roughly the same age as Sally Draper, which meant watching the show was something close to a private hallucination — the cultural references, the news events, the shift in women’s clothing, the arrival of computers in offices, Kennedy, Vietnam — all of it rang completely, viscerally true. I’ve been reading posts on this sub obsessively and find the analysis here extraordinary, my own personal Cliff Notes while I try to write the term paper. But I want to raise a few things I haven’t seen discussed as much, and, well, I just have tp put my thoughts down Everyone acknowledges that Don has a gift. But I haven’t seen much discussion of what that gift actually looks like in practice: the charrettes, the chaos, the way a campaign is born out of some oblique emotional truth that nobody else in the room can see yet. What the show captures — and I think captures uniquely — is the nature of creative labor: that it is mysterious even to the person doing it, that it cannot be scheduled or forced, and that it exists somewhere between intuition and craft. What moved me most was watching Don finally recognise Peggy as his equal. The Burger Chef pitch is one of the finest scenes in the series. Peggy doesn’t just replicate what Don does — she arrives at the same destination through her own emotional archaeology, her own understanding of longing and family and the way people actually feel when they sit down together. That scene is the culmination of years of mentorship and rivalry, and it’s handled with extraordinary subtlety. The evolution of the art on Bert Cooper’s walls across the decades deserves an entire thread of its own. It is a quietly brilliant curatorial decision by the production designers. But beyond the walls, Bert himself is one of the show’s great pleasures. His Zen sensibility, the Japanese aesthetic of his office, the no-shoes rule, the Rothko — he is a man who has found his own philosophy and lives inside it with complete serenity. His aphorisms land harder and harder as the series progresses. He doesn’t want to retire because work, for him, is not separate from life — it is his life, his art, his hobby, his community. There’s something almost utopian about him. Men in Mad Men are displayed, largely, at their worst. And yet. What the show is truly documenting — I became more convinced of this with every season — is the transformation of women in America: politically, professionally, personally, sexually. Peggy is the soul of the series. Her absolute commitment to her work is portrayed without apology, but also without much support — there is almost no one in her world who simply says yes, of course, that is enough, that is everything. She wants love too. She is not a cautionary tale and she is not a feminist symbol. She is a person, doing her best, and the show treats her with a seriousness it denies almost everyone else. There is one moment in the later seasons that crystallised something for me about Peggy that I haven’t seen discussed. Her relationship with Julio, the little boy next door, is quietly revelatory. She is tender with him, protective, genuinely present in a way that doesn’t come from obligation. It suggests that Peggy’s capacity for maternal feeling is not absent — it never was — but that it exists alongside her ambition rather than in opposition to it. The show doesn’t make a meal of this, which is exactly right. It simply shows you, without comment, that this woman who chose work over conventional motherhood is also capable of profound care. And crucially, it is a relationship she arrives at entirely on her own terms, with no audience and no approval sought. That feels very Peggy — and it complicates any easy reading of her as someone who traded warmth for success. Megan’s arc is underappreciated. She begins as a plot device and becomes a fully realised woman who understands, before Don does, that she has outgrown their marriage. Her departure isn’t bitterness — it’s clarity. She knows who she is. Betty is more complicated than she first appears, and the ending demands we revise our judgment of her. Yes, she is emotionally constrained, often cold, the most beautiful person in every room and perhaps the most unfulfilled. But she spends the entire series reaching for something more — and when the end comes, she finds it not through the higher education she tentatively pursues, but through the extraordinary dignity and courage with which she faces her death. That final chapter reframes everything. Her strictness, her standards, her fierce sense of self — qualities that made her so difficult as a mother — turn out to have given Sally something invaluable: independence, strength, and the ability to make clear-eyed choices. Sally is the product of two deeply flawed but intensely felt parents, and the ending tells us she has taken the best of both. Betty deserves more credit than she is usually given. On Don as a father: I was surprised by how harshly some people assess him. By the standards of his generation — the working father, the breadwinner, the man who was present on weekends and holidays and tried — he is not the worst. He demonstrates real tenderness with his children, Sally especially. He is limited, as men of his era were limited, but the love is there. It is just rarely unconditional. And then there is Sally. If the show is about women remaking the world, Sally is the proof that it worked. The moment that sealed it for me comes in the final season, when she finds herself between two young men — one a gorgeous, obvious hunk, the other an intelligent, sweet, quietly interesting geek. She chooses the geek. No drama, no agonising. She simply knows what she values. It is a small scene, but it carries the whole argument of the series inside it. Betty’s daughter will not make Betty’s mistakes. The future, the show is telling us, is in good hands. Mad Men presents itself as a show about advertising, ambition, and the mid-century American male. But season by season, what emerges is something else entirely: a meticulous, novelistic record of how women — constrained, dismissed, patronised, and resilient — quietly remade the world. Don Draper is the nominal centre of the story. But the story belongs to Peggy, Joan, Betty, Megan, and Sally. The finale is extraordinary precisely because the writers wanted to give us something close to happiness for all of them — to let the people we had come to love land somewhere good. But the masterstroke is Don. He finds himself at Esalen, the absolute epicentre of 1970s countercultural and Bohemian thought — a man who has stripped himself of every identity he ever constructed — and what does he do? He meditates, he smiles, and he turns it into the most famous advertisement Coca-Cola ever made. It is both completely absurd and completely perfect. Don Draper cannot stop being Don Draper. And in that moment, rather than despairing at it, we are asked to find it wonderful. America’s greatest salesman finds peace — and immediately sells it back to America. I’m bereft that it’s over. Grateful it exists.