In a 10.16 N.Y. Times editorial observer piece called “Mad Men and the Thrill of Other People’s Misery in Sour Times,” Adam Cohen observes that AMC’s Mad Men is offering beleaguered Americans heaping helpings of other people’s misery…to a generation beaten down by skyrocketing unemployment, plunging retirement savings and mounting home foreclosures, Mad Men offers the schadenfreude-filled message that their predecessors were equally unhappy — and that the bleakness meter in American life has always been set on high.”
