Mad Men was an obsessively designed TV series, made by a group of obsessive people for a group of obsessive fans. Now—nearly two years after it ended—it has an obsessively detailed book to match.

Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men—published by Taschen, which has launched similarly opulent collections celebrating the works of Stanley Kubrick, Ingmar Bergman, and Walt Disney—is actually a box set containing two books. A larger book—simply titled Mad Men, and stretching for more than 800 pages—condenses the show’s seven seasons into a series of key images and script pages, offering a gorgeous and elegant summary of the entire Mad Men narrative. The smaller book, titled The Interviews, offers a treasure trove of insights from many of the people whose collective efforts made Mad Men such a success: executive producer Scott Hornbacher, costume designer Janie Bryant, star Jon Hamm, and series creator Matthew Weiner.

It’s a tribute to Mad Men that this almost comically lavish volume does not seem excessive. The latter book is the one most will gravitate towards, hungry for any morsels that will deepen their understanding of the series (and there are plenty to chew on). But it's just as satisfying to pour a drink, settle into a chair, and leisurely page through the larger series retrospective, which felt to me like flipping through a photo album full of old faces I’ve missed seeing every week.

If the Taschen book drives anything home, it’s this: Mad Men was a towering achievement in television—and despite its cultural footprint (which always dwarfed its viewership), no show has filled the hole it left when it went off the air in 2015. And it’s not like other networks didn’t try to create the next Mad Men. Those with a long memory for failed TV shows will be able to rattle off these wannabes like they can rattle off the alphabet. There’s ABC’s Pan Am, most notable today for introducing America to an up-and-comer named Margot Robbie; NBC’s The Playboy Club, which literally cast an actress who had previously played a Playboy Bunny on Mad Men; the BBC’s under-appreciated The Hour, which chronicled the same era from the perspective of a British news program; Starz’s Magic City, which unsuccessfully attempted to wed the Mad Men period and aesthetic to a mafia drama; and, most recently, Amazon’s Good Girls Revolt, which chronicled the unsung female researchers whose work was cribbed by male reporters in the 1960s.

But while there’s a significant range in the quality of those would-be Mad Mens (from "pretty good" to "terrible"), none of them has gotten within spitting distance of what actually distinguishes Mad Men. The stylish period trappings were essential to the story Mad Men was telling, because the series is painstakingly rooted in popular archetypes (and actual events) that existed in American culture from the late 1950s to the late 1960s. But the clothes, booze, and obsessive period detail wouldn’t have meant anything without the greater and more universal story Mad Men was telling—a deep, philosophical, and quietly eccentric story about a bunch of flawed human beings. Over the past few years, I’ve noted some of that Mad Men magic in Rectify, which shares Mad Men’s slow-burn emphasis on character development, and Bojack Horseman, which follows another troubled protagonist hopelessly locked into a painful, perpetual cycle of self-growth and self-sabotage. But in breadth and depth, nothing else has equaled what Mad Men accomplished over those seven seasons—and, frankly, what it often accomplished in a single season.