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I loved the Mad Men finale when I saw it in 2015. I remember asking this grizzled boomer what he thought of it, and he said he was angry that Don wasn’t ‘arrested and executed for desertion’. And I scoffed at that at the time (haha, silly old guy) but he was kind of right. Don never facing any real consequences for years of dysfunctional and self-destructive behavior is the central flaw of the show. It’s still objectively good TV, but you have to see through that. But I think a lot of poorly socialized Gen Z males (a lot of Gen Z was primarily socialized through media and that’s part of why some of them are so detached from reality) really internalized that message, the message that dysfunctional behavior was in fact glamorous like Don and you can get away with it indefinitely. But you really can’t. And the popular media archetype of highly competent professional with highly dysfunctional personal life doesn’t really exist in real life. There are edge cases, sure. But a lot of young people assume it’s true (even common) because they see it on TV so often. Most highly competent people are really pretty boring.

Crime_Penguin ↗