Mad Men Carousel: The Complete Critical Companion

A richly layered tribute to one of television’s most stylish and psychologically complex dramas.

Mad Men Carousel is the definitive episode-by-episode guide to all seven seasons of AMC’s Mad Men, written by renowned critic Matt Zoller Seitz.

This immersive companion collects Seitz’s celebrated recaps—originally published on New York magazine’s Vulture blog—along with never-before-published essays on the show’s early seasons.

With sharp insight and cultural depth, Seitz explores the show’s themes, characters, and cinematic craft, unpacking the emotional and historical resonance behind Don Draper’s world. Each episode entry includes contextual notes on period-specific references—from the invention of the birth control pill to the release of Pet Sounds—offering readers a deeper understanding of the 1960s backdrop that shaped the series.

Named after the iconic “carousel” pitch in the show’s first-season finale, this book is both a nostalgic keepsake and a critical lens on one of the most influential series of the 21st century.

Whether you’re a longtime fan or a first-time viewer, Mad Men Carousel is the perfect companion for your journey through Madison Avenue’s golden age.

Includes black-and-white illustrations by Max Dalton and foreword by Megan Abbott

Also available from Matt Zoller Seitz:
The Oliver Stone Experience
The Wes Anderson Collection: Bad Dads
The Wes Anderson Collection: The Grand Budapest Hotel
The Wes Anderson Collection

Matt Zoller Seitz is the TV critic for New York Magazine, the editor in chief of RogerEbert.com, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism, and the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Wes Anderson Collection (Abrams, 2013) and The Wes Anderson Collection: The Grand Budapest Hotel (Abrams, 2015), as well as The Oliver Stone Experience (Abrams, 2016). He is the founder and original editor of The House Next Door, now a part of Slant Magazine, and the publisher of Press Play, a blog of film and TV criticism and video essays.

A Brooklyn-based writer and filmmaker, Seitz has written, narrated, edited, or produced more than a hundred hours’ worth of video essays about cinema history and style for The Museum of the Moving Image and The L Magazine, among other outlets. His five-part 2009 video essay, “Wes Anderson: The Substance of Style,” was later spun off into The Wes Anderson Collection, and his 2008 video essay series “Oliver Stone: The Official History” is the partial basis for The Oliver Stone Experience.

Megan Abbott is the Edgar®-winning author of the novels Queenpin, The Song Is You, Die a Little, Bury Me Deep, The End of Everything, Dare Me, and The Fever, which was chosen as one of the Best Books of the Summer by the New York Times, People magazine, and Entertainment Weekly, and one of the Best Books of the Year by Amazon, NPR, the Boston Globe, and the Los Angeles Times.

Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Salon, the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, the Believer, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Abbott is also the author of a nonfiction book, The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir, and the editor of A Hell of a Woman, an anthology of female crime fiction. She has been nominated for many awards, including three Edgar® Awards, the Hammett Prize, the Shirley Jackson Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Folio Prize. She lives in New York City.

Max Dalton is a graphic artist living in Buenos Aires, Argentina, by way of Barcelona, New York, and Paris. He has published a few books and illustrated some others, including The Wes Anderson Collection (Abrams, 2012) and The Wes Anderson Collection: The Grand Budapest Hotel (Abrams, 2014). Dalton started painting in 1977, and since 2008 he has been creating posters about music, movies, and pop culture.