Television style/stylish television: Mad Men, television and the fashioning of the self

Abstract

Mad Men utilises television, quotes, and contemplates and negotiates its role to the extent that the show is also about television, mediating it as diegetic and non-diegetic, within and without, deliberately returning to the medium’s early days in memory and celebration of itself and its origin while making full use of the various media platforms that it has at its disposal today to promote itself and construct itself as nostalgic object of desire. Part of a television experience that fetishizes the materiality of authentic objects the show constructs a mise-en-abyme of longing and nostalgia that positions the television set at its very centre. This article will trace the role of television in AMC’s Mad Men (2007-15). It will examine the medium’s developing role in modern life and the way it is used to integrate the show’s narrative within a wider sense of history. Moreover, it will contemplate the construction of the medium both within the diegetic reality of the show and as framing it, as authentic period prop, and as fetishized nostalgia object which is itself again framed and distributed by television.