Serialization in Popular Culture

Abstract

In “Learning to Live with Television in Mad Men, ” Horace Newcomb argued that Mad Men serializes “society in the process of transformation” at a time when “institutions were more open to question” (102). As he goes on to explain, Mad Men serializes the 1960s, and American society just as the process of transformation was becoming more evident, “some tendencies more profoundly signifi cant, and [. . .] even some technologies push[ing] more strongly into the process, into the emerging ‘new’ ” (ibid.). Certainly, all of this is true of the world of Mad Men, a show that has relentlessly tackled the extraordinary cluster of issues and technologies that coalesced into the major paradigm shift that took shape over the course of the 1960s and 1970s. While giving us back a stylized and fi ctionalized version of this moment in history, the show has managed to do the things that serialized entertainment must do to keep devoted audiences downloading the show, tuning in, or buying the DVDs over fi ve seasons, in a market bristling with countless fi erce competitors for viewers’ attention.