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Mad Men’s Legacy in the Quality Television Tradition

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The Legacy of Mad Men

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Abstract

Mad Men (AMC, 2007–2015) captured and expressed the zeitgeist in the late 2000s and early 2010s. In this preface, Edgerton describes and analyses how the series evolved from being that little program that nobody watched on an also-ran basic cable channel to the most celebrated scripted drama of its era. He contends that Mad Men is widely recognized in the popular, professional, and scholarly communities as a transformational series in the history and development of US television. Edgerton pays special attention to Mad Men’s industrial, aesthetic, and cultural legacy within the quality television tradition of the past half-century as well as its continuing influence and impact on subsequent programming today.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Communication, Butler University, Indianapolis, IN, USA

    Gary R. Edgerton

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  1. Gary R. Edgerton
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computing and Digital Media, London Metropolitan University, London, UK

    Karen McNally

  2. Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, TN, USA

    Jane Marcellus

  3. School of Art, University of Derby, Derby, UK

    Teresa Forde

  4. School of Arts and Media, University of Salford, Manchester, UK

    Kirsty Fairclough

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Edgerton, G.R. (2019). Mad Men’s Legacy in the Quality Television Tradition. In: McNally, K., Marcellus, J., Forde, T., Fairclough, K. (eds) The Legacy of Mad Men. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31091-2_2

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