In a way, this series is all about control. Pete wants to control all the accounts, but can’t control his marriage or his parents. Peggy wants control of creative, her body, and her terms, but she can’t control her family and mother. Name a character, and I’ll tell you what they’re controlling and what they cannot control, and how that lack of control is driving them “mad”.
Hmmm. “Mad men.” You don’t suppose the entire subtext of this show is looking at a point in history when the Caucasian, WASP male started to lose control of everything, do you? If you think about it, when Mad Men debuted, it was Don, Bert, and Sterling running a highly successful ad agency on their own terms. Now? Not so much. Likewise, culturally, in 1963, it was a Happy Days kinda world. This is before Martin Luther King Jr., before school integration, before the riots, before Woodstock, and before bra-burning, Mary Tyler Moore, and Carol Burnette.
