On some level, relatability is essential to good storytelling. We need to understand what characters feel in order to care about what happens to them, and that is far more potent if we can see ourselves in their plight. But so many of the best shows of television are only relatable in the abstract. We may feel the wounded pride at the heart of Breaking Bad, the masculine insecurity that fuels the characters in True Detective and anybody who has ever been in an emotionally abusive relationship is certain to empathise with a lot of what goes on in Hannibal, but the circumstances of those shows are so far removed from the lives of most of us and the parts we relate to are ultimately minor threads in the grand scheme of things.

A lot of things made Mad Men special, but chief among them was just how uncomfortably familiar the characters always were. Don Draper lived in a constant futile desperation to make his life more like the advertisements he peddled, a hunt for an artificial happiness that he helped convince the world existed. The reason this hit home so hard is because so many of us yearn for something more, something that we can’t even properly define, and maybe that is the simple happy endings that we see in television, film and even advertising. In a movie, Don’s impulsive proposal to Megan would have been the happy ending to a sad story; champagne and smiles all round. In real life, and in a TV show that excelled at emulating the vagaries and frustrations of real life, that was not the case. Don wanted to tie everything up with a neat bow, but unlike the happy ending of a movie he still had to get up the next day and live with the choice he had made, a choice that became more clearly foolish the longer he stayed in a marriage with a woman who was very different to what she seemed to represent to him.

The thing about real life is that even when we get everything we want, those things may not be what we want years down the line. We can strive for perfection but that elusive aim always shifts as we grow and change as people and so on some level the pursuit of happiness is akin to being a greyhound chasing a fake rabbit that’s engineered to always be just ahead of us. And that, more than the smart suits, the booze and the charisma, is what made us take so strongly to Don Draper. He may have seemed like everything we want to be, but the tragedy is that he is actually everything we really are. Melancholic, selfish, perpetually unsatisfied and obsessed with his own past; both escaping it and reliving it. Like the best characters he holds a mirror up to us, but unlike most he holds a mirror to the parts of ourselves that we are not so inclined to share with the rest of the world. That is what made Don so special.

Now imagine that character, that beautifully, elegantly written character, is an anthropomorphic horse.