When The Sopranos signed off, Mad Men stepped up in 2007 to carry the banner of prestige television, blending layered storytelling, magnetic but deeply flawed characters and flawless 1960s style. Built around a Madison Avenue advertising agency, the series watched an America standing at the edge of enormous social upheaval, and it did so through the eyes of the very people determined to keep things exactly as they were. At a moment when our culture keeps romanticizing an imagined past where women stayed in their lane and white, straight men supposedly always had the answers, the charming, messy, hard-drinking and badly broken Don Draper feels far less like a relic than he did almost twenty years ago. Good shows, it turns out, never lose their ability to speak to the present. With that in mind, here are ten more novelistic, richly drawn series about complicated people caught in times of change.
Mrs. America (2020)
Created by Dahvi Waller, a writer, producer and Emmy winner who came up on Mad Men, Mrs. America recreates the 1970s battle over the Equal Rights Amendment with the same lavish period detail. That fight was, all at once, a high and a low watermark in the struggle for equality and self-determination. Cate Blanchett plays conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, who spearheaded the campaign against an amendment that had once enjoyed wide support, recasting the ERA as a danger by tying it to radical and pro-choice feminists, gay people, supporters of desegregation and other groups the era loved to vilify. Schlafly stood at the leading edge of a sweeping conservative cultural turn whose effects are still with us, which makes this a useful time to study the people who managed to make plain equality sound like a threat. The strong supporting cast features Rose Byrne, Uzo Aduba and Elizabeth Banks. Mrs. America streams on Hulu.
Halt and Catch Fire (2014-2017)
This one slipped past most viewers across its four seasons, and it only grows stronger as it moves along. It offers a heavily fictionalized look at the birth of the personal computer in the 1980s and the early, messy spread of the internet in the '90s. Lee Pace stars as Joe MacMillan, the antihero at the center, who walks away from IBM in 1983 to sign on with the fictional Cardiff Electric. He is charismatic, manipulative and not especially skilled with the technology itself, yet he dreams of creating the next great breakthrough, beginning by reverse-engineering the IBM PC. The series turns up on plenty of critics' best-of lists and opens with a genuinely killer title sequence. The decade may differ from Mad Men, but the spectacle of men and women pushing a little too hard in business lands the same way. Halt and Catch Fire streams on Prime Video.
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (2017-2023)
One of Prime's earliest and most talked-about originals, Mrs. Maisel is a comedy-drama from Amy Sherman-Palladino, the mind behind Gilmore Girls, centered on Midge Maisel (Rachel Brosnahan), a New York housewife in the late 1950s who stumbles onto a gift for stand-up comedy. Drawing on the real careers of comics such as Totie Fields and Joan Rivers, it is warm and genuinely funny, carried by sharp performances and crackling dialogue, and it pulls off the rare trick of being a show about comedy that actually makes you laugh. The mood is lighter than Mad Men, but the era and the period styling line up neatly, and so do the arcs of the two shows' leading women. Like Midge, Mad Men's Peggy reaches for far more than the world tells her she should expect. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel streams on Prime Video.
The Hour
Boasting a superb cast and impeccable period detail, The Hour follows the launch of a fictional BBC current affairs program, run in large part by women, that debuts right in the thick of the 1956 Suez Crisis. That timing is its own kind of trouble, since the government has little appetite for seeing its own blunders reported, the sort of censorship that, of course, could never happen today. Producer Bel Rowley (Romola Garai) picks war correspondent Lix Storm (the wonderful Anna Chancellor) as her foreign correspondent and pairs her with the less seasoned anchor Hector Madden (Dominic West), while the scrappy reporter Freddie Lyon (Ben Whishaw) is desperate to be let in. Across two seasons there are spies, murder and no shortage of the day's headlines, but the richest material plays out inside the office, where internal politics and personal rivalries collide with real-world events. The Hour streams on Tubi.
Masters of Sex (2013-2016)
Spanning nearly fifteen years of history, from the mid-1950s into the late '60s, this is the often heavily fictionalized account of sex-research pioneers William Masters (Michael Sheen) and Virginia Johnson (Lizzy Caplan), who is hired as a secretary but swiftly proves she is capable of far more than taking notes and fetching coffee. Stylistically it echoes Mad Men, and it surprises by being far less salacious than its title implies, treating sexuality instead with an earnestness so sincere it occasionally tips into sentimentality. That hardly matters: there is no shortage of shows packed with sex, and very few that handle the subject with this much compassion. Masters of Sex is available to buy on Prime Video and Apple TV.
The Queen's Gambit (2020)
An unexpected cultural sensation in the early days of the pandemic, The Queen's Gambit earns its place here largely on the strength of its flawless 1960s atmosphere, though that is not the whole story. The coming-of-age drama stars Anna Taylor-Joy as chess prodigy Elizabeth Harmon, battling to become a champion on the world stage in an era that routinely dismissed her gifts, all while wrestling with her own emotional wounds and dependency. Without stretching the comparison too far, Elizabeth, much like Don Draper, claws her way toward the top of her field, making moral compromises as she fights a fierce dependence on alcohol. How anyone made it through the 1960s is hard to fathom, though that decade would probably ask the same of ours. The Queen's Gambit streams on Netflix.
The Sopranos (1999-2007)
Mad Men's clearest predecessor in the prestige-TV lineage, The Sopranos shares little of its setting, yet the two are bound by tonal kinship, much of which traces back to writer-producer Matthew Weiner, who won Emmys for both. The Sopranos works as brilliantly as it does because the mob functions as a stand-in for nearly any American job, full of empty promises and real danger, demanding an unending series of moral compromises just to climb. Tony, like Don Draper, lives in a world where his authority as a boss, and as a man with deeply traditional notions of what that entails, feels ever more under threat. The Sopranos streams on HBO Max.
Succession (2018-2023)
This darkly comic saga follows the Roy family, owners of the media empire Waystar RoyCo, and the backstabbing chaos that erupts when patriarch Logan (Brian Cox) suffers a stroke and his children begin circling the spoils of his eventual death. As one of the flag-bearers of modern prestige television, right up to its 2023 finale, Succession carried forward the tradition of layered storytelling and intricate characters both lifted up and ground down by their circumstances. Both series are studies in broken people, so thoroughly shaped by their surroundings that it only occasionally dawns on them, almost always too late, that they could have chosen to be better. Succession streams on HBO Max.
Good Girls Revolt (2015-2016)
A fictionalized take on Lynn Povich's nonfiction book of the same title, Good Girls Revolt unfolds in the offices of a Newsweek-style magazine in 1969 and borrows plainly from Mad Men in its study of the social, political and cultural codes of America's 1960s middle class. Genevieve Angelson, Anna Camp and Erin Darke play three "researchers," a junior role that, when filled by women, demanded at least as much education and skill as the jobs of the male reporters who freely used their work and writing without a thought of crediting them. They also earned, at best, roughly a third of what the men took home. As the show goes on, and the title rather gives this away, the women reach their limit and start moving toward legal action to defend their rights. Povich herself was one of the plaintiffs in the landmark lawsuit that inspired the story. Good Girls Revolt streams on Prime Video.
Industry
Pulling everything right up to the present and crossing the Atlantic to London, Industry plays like a spiritual heir to Mad Men, with investment banking serving the modern era much the way advertising served the 1960s. Setting the two shows side by side opens a window onto the business worlds of then and now: the strivers of Industry are noticeably less uniformly white, straight and male than their forebears, even if a great deal has stayed exactly the same. As it opens, the fresh graduates at the prestigious investment bank Pierpoint & Co. are handed their orders: there are many of them and only a handful of permanent positions, so they will have to prove their worth if they want to remain. Picture a younger, sleeker, British Glengarry Glen Ross. Industry streams on HBO Max.
