Natalia Naman Temesgen: Saying goodbye to 'Mad Men'

Today marks the end of an era. Matthew Weiner's AMC show "Mad Men" will air its final episode tonight, after which those of us who have been watching for nearly a decade will have to jump from 1970 to 2015 and move on. (Or watch it all over again online.)

The show begins in New York City, March 1960. It leads us through the winding world of "mad men," a term for "Madison Avenue" men in the advertising business coined by the advertising industry itself. We follow Don Draper, who at that time is a successful, rising ad man with a couple of young kids and a beautiful wife, as well as an insatiable appetite for liquor, cigarettes and extramarital affairs. As of this point in the series, he's been divorced twice and seems to finally be slowing down.

Besides following Don and those in his orbit, viewers have also been heavily steeped in the style, culture, music and idiosyncrasies of the 1960s.

There were dark sides to this era. Misogyny and sexism was the norm -- not just at work, but at home as well. Corporate businessmen drowned their stresses in substances and with very few exceptions they quickly learned to become functioning alcoholics.

Diversity was of no import. Don's colleagues were all white men. His secretaries were all white women. Almost all black actors featured on the show have played low earning service workers: elevator operators, nannies, maids and busboys, with the exception of a short-featured black activist that served as more of a vehicle by which to reveal the racism of many of the main characters than anything else. By the show's end, two black women had become secretaries at Don's agency. They both ended up taking jobs elsewhere, though, as if to suggest that the ad world was not earnestly tolerant but merely trying to keep up with the changing times.

I didn't grow up in the '60s. My parents did, sort of. They would have been Don's kids' age. My grandparents were adults then. What about the show has proved so interesting after all of these years to someone who was born in the 1980s?

My husband has a theory. He has a hard time watching the show. It's slow paced and he feels that. A couple of weeks ago, he watched with me and complained, "Isn't the nostalgia thing worn out by now?"

But it's not nostalgia that draws me in. It's the deconstruction of nostalgia. It's looking at images of men and women you've seen in old photos and history books and heard from their own lips were "the good old days," but then realizing that things were just as complicated, dishonest, discouraging and tough then as they are today. "Mad Men" offers viewers the chance to observe some of the unattractive truths about an era that nostalgia has deemed flawless, without stripping it of those elements that did make it beautiful and worth remembering at all.

-- Natalia Naman Temesgen is an independent correspondent. Contact her at nntemsgen@gmail.com

This story was originally published May 16, 2015 at 11:21 PM with the headline "Natalia Naman Temesgen: Saying goodbye to 'Mad Men'."