Mad Men Carousel ― The Complete Critical Companion

Mad Men spun inventive storytelling, rich characterization, and symbol-laden gamesmanship into an entrancing puzzle. Its drama follows the life of Donald Draper, a brilliant but deeply damaged Madison Avenue adman. Its story spans March 1960 through November 1970, refracting the lives of Don's home and work families, as well as American history, through his broken soul.

What did it all mean?

Mad Men Carousel will keep viewers company as they try to answer that question for themselves.This book collects all of TV and movie critic Matt Zoller Seitz's celebrated Mad Men recaps for the first time, including never-before-published essays on the show's first three seasons. Seitz's writing digs deep into the show's themes, performances, and filmmaking, examining complex and sometimes confounding aspects of the series. All seven seasons and ninety-two episodes are covered.

Each episode review also includes brief explanations of locations, events, consumer products, and scientific advancements that are important to the characters, such as P.J. Clarke's restaurant and the old Penn Station; the inventions of the birth control pill, the Xerox machine, and the Apollo Lunar Module; the release of the Beatles' Revolver and the Beach Boys'Pet Sounds; and all the wars, protests, assassinations, and murders that cast a bloody pall over a chaotic decade.

Mad Men Carousel is named after an iconic moment from the show's first-season finale, “The Wheel,” wherein Don delivers an unforgettable pitch for a new slide projector that's centered on the idea of nostalgia: “the pain from an old wound.” This book will soothe the most ardent Mad Men fan's nostalgia for the show. New fans, who will want to binge-watch their way through one of the most popular TV shows in recent memory, will findan episode-by-episode guide to accompany their viewing experience. Longtime fans ofMad Men or of Seitz's writing will discover an engaging, thoughtful, and entertaining companion to one of the most multilayered and mercurial TV shows of all time.

It's the perfect gift for Mad Men fans and obsessives.

Matt Zoller Seitz is the TV critic for New York Magazine, the editor-in-chief of RogerEbert.com, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism, and the author of theNew York Times bestsellers The Wes Anderson Collection (Abrams, 2013) andThe Wes Anderson Collection: The Grand Budapest Hotel (Abrams, 2015), as well as the forthcomingThe Oliver Stone Experience (Abrams, 2016). He is the founder and original editor ofThe House Next Door, now a part of Slant Magazine, and the publisher ofPress Play, a blog of film and TV criticism and video essays.

A Brooklyn-based writer and filmmaker, Seitz has written, narrated, edited, or produced more than a hundred hours’ worth of video essays about cinema history and style for The Museum of the Moving Image and The L Magazine, among other outlets. His five-part 2009 video essay, “Wes Anderson: The Substance of Style,” was later spun off intoThe Wes Anderson Collection, and his 2008 video essay series “Oliver Stone: The Official History” is the partial basis forThe Oliver Stone Experience.

Megan Abbott is the EdgarR-winning author of the novels Queenpin, The Song Is You, Die a Little, Bury Me Deep, The End of Everything,Dare Me, and her latest, The Fever, which was chosen as one of the Best Books of the Summer by theNew York Times, People magazine, and Entertainment Weekly, and one of the Best Books of the Year by Amazon, National Public Radio, theBoston Globe, and the Los Angeles Times.

Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Salon, the Guardian, theWall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, the Believer, and theLos Angeles Review of Books. Abbott is also the author of a nonfiction book,The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir, and the editor ofA Hell of a Woman, an anthology of female crime fiction. She has been nominated for many awards, including three EdgarR Awards, the Hammett Prize, the Shirley Jackson Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Folio Prize. She lives in New York City.