Gender And Nostalgia In Period Drama: The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Mad Men

Abstract

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (2017-2023) and Mad Men (2007-2015) share a common genre, location, and era. Both are period dramas, set in New York City, as the waning 1950s transition into the 1960s. Additionally, both television serials address changing cultural conditions, especially surrounding gender. Yet, when analyzed through the prism of nostalgia, the two programs deviate in significant ways. This essay uses Grainge’s (2000) distinction between nostalgia as mood and nostalgia as aesthetic style, applying it to the two television serials.  It also incorporates concepts of nostalgia as critique (Cook, 2005), as well as imagined nostalgia as the longing “for a past that has never been” (Niemeyer, 2014: 10). Following these criteria, the more somber Mad Men aligns with classic nostalgia as mood, expressing loss and longing for a vanished era, even as it also critiques that past. In contrast, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s upbeat, playful emotional approach corresponds more closely with nostalgia as aesthetic style, leaving it open to charges of a contrived, less historically serious form of storytelling. Instead, “Gender and Nostalgia in Period Drama” argues that the program creates a strategic perspective on the era by calling attention to the ways specific groups – such as would-be, female, stand-up satirists – were implausible configurations. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel engages its selected categories of nostalgia to emphasize, for certain contemporary viewers, a place they cannot return to and a past they cannot long for save through the fictional intervention of corrective historicity.