But even if the portrayal were as “dead-on” as The Times assures us it is, that portrayal is hardly neutral. In describing a scene in which sexist badinage is exchanged at an account meeting, McLean correctly points out that “the series is critical of this limited view and is not afraid to spell [its criticism] out.” That stance—which amounts to a defiant indictment of sexism and racism, sins about which a rough moral consensus would now seem to have formed—militates against viewers’ inhabiting the alien world the show has so carefully constructed, because it’s constantly pressing them to condemn that world.

And that stance is responsible for the rare (and therefore especially grating) heavy-handed and patronizing touches in an otherwise nuanced drama. Must the only regular black characters be a noble and cool elevator operator, a noble and understanding housekeeper, and a perceptive and politicized supermarket clerk? Must said elevator operator, who goes unnoticed by the less sensitive characters, sagely say when discussing Marilyn Monroe’s death, “Some people just hide in plain sight”? Get it—he’s talking about himself. He’s invisible. Even worse, that stance evokes and encourages the condescension of posterity; just as insecure college students feel they must join the knowing hisses of the callow campus audience when a character in an old movie makes an un-PC comment, so Mad Men directs its audience to indulge in a most unlovely—because wholly unearned—smugness. As artistically mistaken as this stance is, it nonetheless helps account for the show’s success. We all like to congratulate ourselves, and as a group, Mad Men’s audience is probably particularly prone to the temptation.

Any period drama will have its share of slips, and most of Mad Men’s are inconsequential. (“The military-industrial complex,” coined by Eisenhower in his 1961 farewell address, finds itself on the lips of account manager Ken Cosgrove in 1960; if the pompous dilettante copywriter Paul Kinsey was a Freedom Rider—itself an implausible plot element, intended to signal that the times, they are a-changin’—he would have been going south to desegregate interstate transportation, not register black voters, as the show has it.) But other slips demonstrate an unsure grasp of the show’s setting and characters—and of the class differences that complicate the rather blunt stance the series takes. A supplement to the first season’s DVDs makes explicit what attentive viewers already understood: Mad Men deliberately shocks its audience by presenting as reasonable and commonplace behavior we now find appalling. This gambit, a signature feature of the show, can force the audience to viscerally experience the foreignness of the past, and when so used it can be a brilliant dramatic ploy—but only if the action portrayed is as de rigueur as the show suggests. At a child’s birthday party, for instance, a man hits a boy who has spilled a drink, and no one reacts, not even the boy’s father. The Draper family, in another case, drives away from the scene of a family picnic, nonchalantly leaving their trash on the ground where they were sitting. Yes, corporal punishment was more common then than now, and Iron Eyes Cody wouldn’t be tearing up on TV screens for another nine years. But Dr. Spock’s permissive parenting notions exercised a near-hegemonic sway over child-rearing practices in the bedroom communities of the Northeast’s professional class, and however one chose to correct one’s own children and whatever the state of America’s roadsides, the actions portrayed were simply not the done thing. Nice people—the educated and affluent—didn’t hit other people’s kids, and they didn’t, especially in front of their children, walk away from a pile of trash they had created.