George Packer in the New Yorker has written his take on the appeal of everyone’s favorite advertising soap opera, Mad Men. The attraction, Packer says, is in looking at our own society, not that long ago, with a completely different moral code. Things forbidden then, e.g. homosexuality and out-of-wedlock pregnancy, we are open about now, while they get to smoke inside, drink to excess and sleep with their secretaries.

Middle class American men were, in Packer’s words, little kings. And in Mad Men we get to watch these little kings at the end of their reign.

Trends