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First, HBO introduced the idea that the best television didn't come from the networks with The Sopranos. FX confirmed the notion with The Shield. Sci Fi showed evidence that genre programming could be just as brilliant as other cable offerings with Battlestar Galactica. Then, along came AMC with a little show called Mad Men.

Over the past few years, Mad Men has become a huge cultural phenomenon, yet one few have seen. It's won tons of awards and acclaim, been parodied on The Simpsons and Saturday Night Live, and has turned lead John Hamm into a TV A-lister. The ratings have been pretty anemic, but much like other cable networks, AMC's standards aren't too high and the prestige the show offers makes it a worthwhile investment. In fact, the third season premiere showed quite a bump in viewers over previous airings, so it may be getting to the point where the word-of-mouth is starting to catch up with it, a development which is great news, as it can lead to other brilliant programming on cable and elsewhere.

Now I know I've talked about where shows of supposed verisimilitude fit into the concept of mythology programming, and Mad Men is an interesting case. The show takes place at a New York advertising firm in the '60s. The thing is, a bit of a mythology already exists in our culture about the '60s. We tend to think of rock and roll, free love, drugs, Woodstock, huge political upheaval, and cultural revolution.

Mad Men is interesting as it shows us the societal turmoil from the point of view of the status quo, the stodgy old '50s relics who cling to their traditional philosophies as the world evolves around them. The story of the hippies has been done to death, and Mad Men shows us how the rest of the world came to cope with the inevitable fall of their empire.

Now I wasn't yet walking the earth during the '60s and Mad Men came as a huge surprise to me. I was really only familiar with the decade through the eyes of the free-lovers. And growing up in the wake of that tumult, I had always seen the era as inevitable societal progression. Who would really question the idealism that sprung up? It was time for the old guard to hand the reigns over to the enlightened youth. The rest of the world had to get in line and evolve with the rest of society.

So, to see the resistance for the first time is enlightening. Of course we millennial viewers chuckle at the offhand sexism, the smoking/drinking workdays, the non-casual Fridays. There's a fluff to its presentation that invites our condescension. Then, as we relax into our smug superiority, show-runner Matthew Weiner and crew flip it on us. They show us the terror people experience when they see their way of life dying around them. We see the disillusionment that sets in as they can no longer deny that the world is moving on and they'd better jump back aboard or get left behind.

It's an experience we all face at some point in our lives. I know many of my Generation X friends who resist Facebook, iPhones, The Black Eyed Peas, and other things those crazy kids like these days, all the while bemoaning U2 becoming classic rock and Back to the Future airing on such stations as AMC. It's a tragic show, Mad Men. We see how all of the glorified cultural revolutions of the '60s affected the rest of the people, and we come to realize that our own vaunted ways will some day become dinosaurs as well.