The Depiction of the Civil Rights Movement
on Mad Men
Rod Carveth
Capturing an Era
In his review of Mad Men, Time magazine editor James Poniewozik
describes how showrunner Matt Weiner went to great lengths in making
sure that the series was historically accurate, down to the smallest details.
Typewritten pages were actually typewritten, not produced by a computer.
Homes were shown with items from other eras because people keep family
heirlooms and don’t buy new furniture every year. Weiner also made sure
the fruit in fruit bowls was small, as fruit is much larger in the twenty-first
century (Poniewozik). Even though Weiner was dedicated to capturing
the look of the era the series covers, Mad Men fails to deal with the insti-
tutionalized apartheid in the industry at the time and does little better
in developing fully realized black characters. Perhaps this is because Mad
Men is less a show about the advertising industry in the early-mid 1960s,
and more a show about Don Draper and the middle- to upper-class white
Americans living and working around Manhattan with whom he interacts.
In the 1960s, the people living in Don’s world would best reflect Ralph
R. Carveth (B )
School of Global Journalism and Communication, Morgan State University,
Baltimore, MD, USA
e-mail: Rod.Carveth@morgan.edu
© The Author(s) 2019
K. McNally et al. (eds.), The Legacy of Mad Men,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31091-2_5
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