I can't help but view this series (or at least the first episode) as an examination of the cultural shift from the modern to the post modern. The constant pseudo-anachronism (when Don denies the existence of the photocopying, the reference to Dick Nixon, and the description of typewriters as high-technology) exposes the dichotomy between the present and the soon to be.

There is a constant sense of things being out of place: the shrimp cocktail at a meeting with a Jewish client, the heavily German accented researcher making not just her but research foreign, and lastly the closeted "Italian" Salvatore in the strip club.

Moreover Don Draper's character is a study in changing mores - he's in love with his mistress Midge who owns her own business and sleeps with who she wants, but he spits venom at Rachel Menken the Jewish department store heiress who wants to be involved in her father's business. He won't sleep with his secretary defining himself as her boss not her boyfriend, but he commits adultery on his wife who he keeps cloister in the country with his two children.

And all of this fits inside the greater setting of an ad agency where people are paid to present the truth in tidy packaging that presents not the truth, but "the truth tm."

High hopes for the series, off to a really wonderful start.