A rare original dramatic offering from cable's American Movie Channel, the weekly series Mad Men was the story of a major advertising agency operating from New York's Madison Avenue in 1960. The most successful ad executive at the Sterling Cooper agency was handsome, indefatigable Don Draper (Jon Hamm), who was not only expert at "playing the game" while servicing accounts ranging from cigarette manufacturers to political candidates, but was also an accomplished ladies' man. It was crucial for Draper to always be at the top of his professional form -- there were scores of hungry young executives who were eager to topple him from his perch and become Sterling Cooper's new top dog. The series evoked the manners and mores of the early '60s with pinpoint accuracy: the advertising business, like practically every other business, was completely male-dominated, with an overabundance of WASPs, a minimum of Jews, and virtually no other minority anywhere in sight; women were second-class citizens and sex objects, expected to be both subservient and "available"; honesty and integrity were merely words in the dictionary; and everybody drank and smoked to excess (indeed, so many cigarettes were lit up in the course of each episode that a number of TV critics were turned off by the show, undoubtedly preferring that historical fact be subordinated to contemporary political correctness).

Leading Role: Jon Hamm, Elisabeth Moss, Vincent Kartheiser, January Jones, Christina Hendricks, Bryan Batt, Michael Gladis, Aaron Staton, Rich Sommer, John Slattery

Director: Matthew Weiner