I'm pretty meh about it but there's one aspect of it that's absolutely brilliant. It is supposed to show life in the 60s of a white male labor aristocrat from his perspective. So people of color only barely intersect with his life and when they do, it's usually in brief moments on the periphery. Realistic for the era. Don is largely ambivalent about race (as he is most things). That doesn't make him good, it's just that black folks don't really enter his field of vision. It feels appropriate for someone like him in that time and place.

And then you have everyone else - mostly other white male labor aristocrats. They range from being openly racist to just sorta low key racist. I'm struck by the scene where they do show some blacks folks protesting outside the office building. Two young guys (not characters in the show but they work in the same building as our cast) throw balloons with ink on them. And the scene ends.

The civil rights movement - despite how massive it was to most of society at that time - itself barely registers in this show. Because that's how rich white folks in NYC would have experienced it. Something they see on the TV but not something that really mattered to them in any real way.

The way race was portrayed in Mad Men got some people upset. I think they felt black people were being ignored. Which is true, but that's also how rich enough white folks in a place like NYC lived in the 1960s. They were able to live in a blissful little white bubble where they rarely had to interact with anyone who wasn't white. And the show does intersperse enough people of color to remind you that this world you are seeing isn't the reality for most of America.

I think this approach is so much better than nearly all portrayals of mid-century America. Where most white Americans don't have a racist bone in their body (despite the fact that basically every white person in that era who wasn't leftist was pretty damn racist on some level). Or if they are racist, it's only at the beginning of the movie and once they befriend a black person for 5 minutes they immediately become anti-racist. It absolutely white washes the pervasive racism that was in White America at that time. At least Mad Men doesn't run from this reality.

Seriously, watch closely how the show portrays race and I think you'll see what I'm getting at.