Mad Men

The Madison Avenue advertising world of the 1960s is the engine here, but Matthew Weiner uses it as a pressure chamber: the decade's upheavals in race, gender, and class filtered through a single agency's conference rooms, bedrooms, and client pitches. Jon Hamm plays Don Draper, a creative director whose professional command sits on top of something deliberately obscured; Elisabeth Moss's Peggy Olson traces a different arc, moving through the same institution from a different position. The series runs its drama through period texture rather than commentary, letting the era's assumptions surface in ordinary transactions — who sits where, who speaks first, what goes unsaid.