Mad Men

Or I could demonstrate the influence the show has had on modern-day consumer habits: how designer Michael Kors' fall 2008 show, among others, took inspiration from the show's style, heralding the return of the waist (though it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see how much more flattering an hourglass silhouette is than a shapeless bag of a dress), and how women have been inspired to reach for their matte lipsticks again.

I could also tell you about the show's success on the awards circuit. The Golden Globes last January and the Emmys this past Sunday agreed that "Mad Men" is the best drama on TV.

Or I could, as lead character Don Draper (the fabulous Jon Hamm) - the creative director for Sterling Cooper advertising agency - certainly would, abandon surveys and research reports and try to figure out the deeper appeal of "Mad Men."

"In Greek, nostalgia literally means ‘the pain from an old wound,' " Draper tells us in the finale of the first season. He "ache[s] to go" to the past he has created for his client Kodak, a joyous past of Technicolor photographs of his beautiful Grace Kelly-type wife Betty and his adoring children. It's a past, he soon realizes, that he cannot reach and that never even existed as perfectly as he likes to think it did.

Likewise, this show, which at first seems to appeal directly to the nostalgic impulse, brings us to the realization that the men and women of the bright-and-shiny early 1960s were fraught with the same problems as people are today. We care about Don, his ambitious secretary Peggy and closeted artist Salvatore precisely because we can see ourselves in them, however different their clothes may be. The nostalgic construction of the past is just that: a falsehood built up so that comfort can be sought in sun-faded images.

Weiner first developed the "Mad Men" concept in 1999, but much of it seems to mirror life in 2008. Season one featured the 1960 presidential race between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy; the duo of defense-minded stalwart and the young, eloquent upstart couldn't be more like the two men currently engaged in a tight race for the White House. The much-maligned and misunderstood Peggy, who in a recent episode defied neat categorization as a "Jackie" (Kennedy) or a "Marilyn" (Monroe), finds modern-day sisters in nearly every woman in the election: Hillary Rodham Clinton, Sarah Palin and Michelle Obama '85. Only Jill Biden and Cindy McCain, both clearly Jackies, are spared the juggle between femininity, family and power. History isn't a wheel, as Draper wishes it could be, but a spiral, simultaneously evolving and folding back unto itself.

"Mad Men" appeals by relating the present to a once-idealized past: 1962 and 2008 are closer than they appear.