'Undeveloped property': Mad Men, crisis, and real estate.

Mad Men is perhaps the preeminent example of nostalgia television of the last 20 years. And yet its version of the Sixties is relatively uninterested in what Fredric Jameson has characterised as that decade's 'shared feeling that everything is possible'. Instead, its primary concern is the feeling o...

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Publicado en:Rethinking History Vol. 29; no. 4; pp. 639 - 657
Autor principal: Shearer, Martha
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Taylor & Francis Ltd Dec2025
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Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
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        atl: 'Undeveloped property': Mad Men, crisis, and real estate.
      aug:
        au: Shearer, Martha
        affil: School of English, Drama and Film, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
      su:
        Mad Men (TV program)
        Jameson, Fredric, 1934-
        Real property
        Financial crises
        Television characters
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        subj:
          Mad Men (TV program)
          Jameson, Fredric, 1934-
          Real property
          Financial crises
          Television characters
      keyword:
        financial crisis
        Mad Men
        real estate
        space
        Television
        temporality
      ab: Mad Men is perhaps the preeminent example of nostalgia television of the last 20 years. And yet its version of the Sixties is relatively uninterested in what Fredric Jameson has characterised as that decade's 'shared feeling that everything is possible'. Instead, its primary concern is the feeling of being unmoored in history, encapsulated in the falling man of its title sequence, but also in its formal shifts between delay, deferral and slowness and the shock of historical and narrative events. As a number of scholars have observed, that slowness calls attention instead to the image and to space, and especially to production design. In this essay, I argue that the show increasingly calls attention to that space as real estate, with seasons punctuated with domestic and commercial real estate sales and acquisitions, real estate transactions as major plot points, and the introduction of real estate agent and property developer characters in its final season. I suggest that real estate, in both aesthetic and narrative terms, is critical to the show's ambivalence about the future, caught between optimism regarding the expansion of global capitalism and knowledge of crises that follow, both in the 1970s and in 2008.
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