I'm 78 years old. I can't stand this series. Do the math. I'm the same age as these New Frontier fuck-ups. I never thought I would see such tedious Cold War lives revisited. The sets and props are accurately cringe-worthy, I admit, but are pointlessly highlighted. Most of the men would be military veterans and most of the women would be busy having babies. A few years later divorce sweeps through them like a Los Angeles brush fire, scattering them and their children to the winds of the New Morality. The Rolling Stones are going to set their pants on fire.

For us relative young'ns, I suppose that's the point of the show: a hyper-stylized, but never idealized, unsentimental depiction of the great American cultural schism.

Have to agree with Hellzapoppin'. As a 60's kid (born in 1960), it always was a mystery why my parents' friend divorced and moved away in such droves. Madmen helps explain that the political and cultural mayhem in the late 60's (which I remember well) was due to the cultural tension in the early 60's (which I was too young to remember). If you watch films from the early 60's, there is not much of a sense of huge changes happening or coming (with the exception of race relations). To me, this show is like getting a chance to watch a depiction of my parents' friends real lives, not the fake ones that were broadcast on television and in the movies (and in conversations with kids like me).

Guess I am in the middle- I was a teen at the beginning of the sixties, a wife and mother by the end of the sixties, and I love this show. I love looking at the clothes, hairstyles, and interior design of my childhood and young adult days, but the story lines regarding the lack of equal rights for women, minorities, and gay people reminds me in many ways, things are better now. They say hindsight is always 20-20, and this series allows you see how the phony and hypocritical mores of that time created the discontentment and disillusionment of the era that followed. Even though the people in this series are just at the edge of the earthquake, they are starting to feel the tremors, and that is what makes it so fascinating. I don't agree with dirtybird. I feel I am in a really great book club reading the likes of Updike and Cheever and discussing it chapter by chapter- Not something I would call a waste of time any more than any other analytical observation of times and people.

Guess it was buddypal who thought it was a waste of time. Disagree heartily!

I disagree as well. I was fourteen in 1963, just about to start high school in August of that year. Last episode's eclipse helped me pinpoint exactly what I was doing. I was at the family cottage in Maine with my mother, brother and sister while my father was home alone in upstate New York. Sometimes this series hits so close to home it gives me goose bumps.

It sounds like buddypal does not have fond memories of the early '60s. That isn't the case for me, so maybe that's the difference. I enjoy revisiting those years. Most of the people I knew, including my parents who were in their early 40s in 1963, either welcomed or adapted to the changes that were to come. I suspect that there will also be Mad Men characters who embrace the changes and maybe even dig the Rolling Stones (who didn't set my pants on fire when I saw them in 1965....that honor would got to Jimi Hendrix two years later).

I'm high school '65 and college '69, so I was one of the kids to whom the changes came naturally. What I love about the show is watching the disorientation of characters who would have been my elders.

One of my partners, 10 years older than I am, tells a story of fraternity life at the end of the 1950s. On Saturday night, the guys would come back to the house and compare notes (and lies) about how far they had gotten with their dates. One night, a guy comes in and says "I think I just got laid." Given the amount of wrestling around involved and the state of women't underclothing at the time, he honestly didn't know -- and 40 years later he still wasn't sure.

The explosion people on this thread are talking about is when those guys and those somewhat older, who would have been 30 to 40 year old and married at the end of the 60s, looked around at what people my age were doing and said to themselves, "where was all that when I was 21?" Some of them just shook their heads; some decided to start carrying on like undergraduates themselves.