In March 2012, Newsweek magazine published an issue that mimicked the style of the 1960s. Even the advertisements borrowed the aesthetic of a decade now fifty years in the past. The reason for this retrofitting was the imminence of the fifth season of a television series which, while never commanding large audiences and having been absent from America's screens for nearly a year and a half, had nevertheless had a disproportionate effect.

Mad Men, set in the 1960s, accurately reflects more than the style of that period. This was a time when women, in particular, were required to play a subordinate role, as they had, indeed, in Newsweek itself until 1970 when a class action suit was brought against it claiming gender discrimination. The first episode of the new season (in fact, a double episode) included a scene taken directly from a New York Times article of 1965 that described the way in which civil rights demonstrators were abused by those in the crystal towers of Madison Avenue, where quite a different version of America was being manufactured by advertising agencies. Mad Men's achievement, indeed, was to capture the shifting values of Americans through its dramatising of those working in such an agency dedicated to selling a version of the country often at odds with the private no less than the public world.