Dick Whitman

They live out JFK-era America’s tawdriest dreams, almost as if it’s a professional code — to sell these dreams to America, they have to experience them from the inside, with all their inherent betrayal and manipulation.

Eric Konigsberg, “A Fine Madness,” Rolling Stone, September 16, 2010.

There is no change without acknowledgment. Maybe even Don is ready to admit that the “old” Don Draper, which was Dick Whitman’s conception of a sort of ideal man, kind of fucking sucks. Since that life phase is over anyway, why not let go of it completely so that a better more zen Don Draper might emerge?

Molly Lambert, “In Which I Don’t Know What This Room Is For,” This Recording, August 23, 2010.

While ad dollars placed against “Mad Men” may be small, AMC’s use of the program can help it win more revenue from other sources. Since “Mad Men” arrived, the amount AMC gets paid by cable and satellite operators per subscriber has increased to 24 cents from 22 cents, according to SNL Kagan. Before the show debuted, that fee had declined to 21 cents in 2006 from 22 cents in 2005. The channel is available in more than 95 million homes.

Brian Steinberg, “Why ‘Mad Men’ Has So Little to Do With Advertising,” Advertising Age, August 2, 2010

I’ve always felt that these characters were influenced by the movies they saw. But it isn’t so much the language that’s the same as what’s important and what’s not.

Matthew Weiner, “Mad Men Creator Matthew Weiner on the New Season,” by Mary Kaye Schilling, New York, July 20, 2010

I don’t like to think that he’s off his game. I do think that whatever fantasy people had for him about the single Don and how much fun it’s going to be, they realize that, like this phantom limb, this man has lost all his coordinates and really, having fought all this time to be the guy in the suit at the corporation with all the money and the wife and the kids and the house in Westchester, that that’s all gone, and he may not know exactly who he’s supposed to be. He certainly isn’t going to go back to being Dick Whitman. So who is he, actually?

Matthew Weiner, “Interview: ‘Mad Men’ creator Matthew Weiner talks season four,” by Alan Sepinwall, HitFix, July 25, 2010.

I think that one of the dangers of post-modernism is where do we go from here? I think that at least in regards to reality TV, there are moments of great truth in shows like “American Idol” and “Intervention.” There are these moments of unfiltered pathos, which people have been responding to since Greek times. It’s really forced scripted dramas to up their game. I don’t know if one necessarily causes the other, but the fact that they’re happening simultaneously is related.

Natasha Vargas-Cooper, “The Exchange: Natasha Vargas-Cooper on ‘Mad Men’,” by Meredith Blake, The New Yorker, July 23, 2010

Somehow “Mad Men” captures this ultra-mediated, postmodern moment, underscoring the disconnect between the American dream and reality by distilling our deep-seated frustrations as a nation into painfully palpable vignettes. Even as the former denizens of Sterling Cooper unearth a groundswell of discontent beneath the skin-deep promises of adulthood, they keep struggling to concoct chirpy advertising messages that provide a creepily fantastical backdrop to this modern tragedy.

Heather Havrilesky, “‘Mad Men’: Stillbirth of the American Dream,” Salon, July 17, 2010

What makes the show powerful is not nostalgia for an America that few want to bring back — where women were most valued as sex objects or subservient housewives, where blacks were, at best, second-class citizens, and where the hedonistic guzzling of gas and gin went unquestioned. Rather, it’s our identification with an America that, for all its serious differences with our own, shares our growing anxiety about the prospect of cataclysmic change. “Mad Men” is about the dawn of a new era, and we, too, are at such a dawn. And we are uncertain and worried about what comes next.

Frank Rich, “‘Mad Men’ Crashes Woodstock’s Birthday,” The New York Times, August 16, 2009

It’s not just that everyone has a secret; each character feels so alone in guarding it.

Alessandra Stanley, “‘Mad Men’ Strains to Stay as Button-Down as Ever,” The New York Times, August 14, 2009