The enduring brilliance of Mad Men

If you were one of the many millions who watched Top Gun: Maverick this year, it may have been a pleasant surprise to see Jon Hamm in the (admittedly thankless) role of Vice Admiral Simpson, who has to look stern and angry at the various transgressions committed by Tom Cruise’s protagonist.

Hamm has been cornering the market in these sorts of roles thanks to his appearance of square-jawed rectitude. He is a natural fit for FBI agents, police detectives, and, indeed, vice admirals. But it was a different kind of vice altogether that he followed in his best-known and most beloved role, that of the dynamically charismatic – yet entirely fraudulent – Don Draper, advertising executive extraordinaire in Matthew Weiner’s cult series Mad Men, which was first broadcast 15 years ago.

The show made stars out of Hamm, Elizabeth Moss (as Draper’s secretary-turned-copywriter Peggy Olson), Christina Hendricks (as the all-too-self-aware male fantasy figure Joan) and, in a more low-key way, Jared Harris, who found himself in the role of a lifetime as the doomed English financial controller Lane Pryce.