I got my set of Mad Men Season One DVDs (in the clever Zippo lighter-like box) the other day, and, in anticipation of the start of Season Two on July 27th, immediately plunged into a review of the opening dozen episodes of what is now clearly the best show on television. What’s most interesting about this series is that even though each episode emphasizes different characters having different experiences and feeling different emotions, the plot of every episode is essentially the same: Boy, we sure were different back then! And that’s the fun: watching these smoking, drinking, philandering, cynical, sophisticated, destructive, trapped, but ultimately certain men and women come to the realization that there is something wrong with their lives. The payoff for the viewer, of course, is the safety and superiority we enjoy, knowing that we have largely solved so many of these conflicts about prejudice and sex roles and so on. Lucky for Matthew Weiner and company, the really terrifying question posed by the show never really floats into the foreground: what things are we so very confident about–the stability of America? The viability of our planet?–that a TV show produced 50 years from now but set in our time will find similarly tragic and risible?