Lucky Strikes and a Three Martini Lunch: Thinking about Television’s Mad Men

Lucky Strikes and a Three Martini Lunch: Thinking About Television's Mad Men explores the attributes of the AMC series that allow it to be such a popular and vital contribution to contemporary cultural discourse. Set in the 1960s in New York, the Emmy and Peabody-winning series Mad Men follows the competitive, seductive, and oftentimes ruthless lives of the men and women of Madison Avenue's advertising agencies. Many alluring and captivating qualities constitute the Mad Men experience: the way it evokes nostalgia, even from those who did not live in the era being portrayed; its interrogations into identities, and how these interrogations of the past illuminate viewers' concepts of the present; the compelling (and often heartbreaking) relationships between characters who are trying to make their way in an ever changing and increasingly complex world; the titillation of the characters' discovery of the powers of mass mediated communication and its abilities to allow learning, information sharing, manipulation, and connection; and, of course, the striking differences in sex roles and sexuality in the workplace that simultaneously celebrates and challenges views of gendered progress in contemporary times. Twenty-six authors - most coming from academic posts but others from practitioner, administrator, or cultural critic positions - come together to explore these themes through eighteen engaging and thoughtful essays and an illuminating introduction, each unique to this collection and exploring a particular aspect of the series through a different academic lens.

Danielle M. Stern is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Christopher Newport University. She teaches courses in media and cultural studies, as well as critical and communication theory and research. Dr. Stern’s work has been published in The Communication Review, Text and Performance Quarterly, and Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal.Jimmie Manning is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Northern Illinois University. He teaches courses in relationships, gender and sexuality, and qualitative research. He co-edited Case Studies of Communication about Sex (Cambridge Scholars Publishing), and has co-authored a collection on qualitative research in relationships (SAGE, forthcoming).Jennifer C. Dunn is an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Communication at Dominican University. Her research and teaching focuses on rhetorical and media criticism, gender and media representation, and popular culture. Her work has been published in Communication Studies, Feminist Media Studies, and International Communication Gazette, among other journals and collections.