All 7 Seasons Of Mad Men, Ranked

In December 2025, "Mad Men," which was created by Matthew Weiner and premiered on AMC in 2007, finally came to HBO Max, giving it a chance to find an even wider audience. To be fair, it's not like Weiner's show, which he crafted after cutting his teeth working on "The Sopranos," needed more notoriety; it's widely considered one of the most influential and best TV shows of the modern age and has been called one of the final entries in the "Golden Age" of television (specifically, the one that emerged in the 21st century). So for the uninitiated, if there are any — what is "Mad Men" about in the first place?

Set throughout the entire decade of the 1960s, "Mad Men" focuses on Manhattan advertising executive Don Draper, played beautifully by the relatively unknown Jon Hamm (who took home his first and only Emmy to date for the show's last season). Though Don initially has a beautiful wife at home in the New York suburbs — Betty Draper, played by January Jones — he hides lots of secrets, including numerous affairs and his real identity (more on that shortly). Alongside his colleagues at the firm that's initially named Sterling Cooper, Don works on accounts with Roger Sterling (John Slattery), secretary turned copywriter Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss), office manager Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks), scheming ad exec Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser) and others, all while trying to keep his personal and professional lives afloat.

So which seasons of "Mad Men" are the very best? First, it's important to note that every season of this series is really good. Still, some are more effective and impactful than others, so without further ado, here's every season of "Mad Men," ranked. 

Nothing's necessarily wrong with the second season of "Mad Men" if you compare it to, say, the second season of almost any other show. Still, it's a little slower and also includes some of the show's most irksome characters (namely Herman "Duck" Phillips, a new Sterling Cooper ad man played by Mark Moses). As Peggy returns to work after a life-changing incident in Season 1 and Sterling Cooper tries to snag some "younger" accounts to keep up with the constantly changing times, other characters experience changes too. 

Don and Betty's marriage, which is consistently somewhat troubled, hits a new snag when Don begins an affair with Bobbie Barrett (Melinda McGraw), the wife of comedian and actor Jimmy Barrett (Patrick Fischler) — whom Don meets working on a campaign for Utz potato chips — and Roger divorces his first wife, Mona (Talia Balsam), for his young secretary Jane Siegel (Peyton List). 

Joan, meanwhile, worries about being unmarried at 31 years old and gets engaged to a young surgical resident named Greg Harris (Sam Page) rather quickly, resulting in a truly gutting scene where he violates her (an event that changes Joan and her short-lived marriage forever). At work, Duck's attempt to bring American Airlines into the fold almost ends Sterling Cooper's reign entirely, but Don is distracted by the fact that Betty finds out about Bobbie and finally kicks him out of the house. Though Don and Betty reconcile at the end of the season when she reveals she's pregnant with their third child, Season 2 of "Mad Men" ultimately spins its wheels quite a bit and introduces a few of the show's all-time worst players — Duck is pretty annoying, but Jimmy and Bobbie are also absolutely insufferable and end up dragging this season down as a result.

Before we discuss how the seventh and final season of "Mad Men" ended up in this spot on the ranking, let's make one thing abundantly clear: the ending of "Mad Men" absolutely sticks the landing, and there was no other way for this show to close out its narrative. Season 7 of "Mad Men" is not, again, "bad" by any metric, but it suffers from one big thing: it splits up the main "gang," so to speak, and puts them all in either New York or Los Angeles. No matter how great a show might be, splitting up its major players almost always leads to diminishing returns, and having characters like Megan Draper (Jessica Paré) and Pete Campbell out west just makes the series feel somewhat less full and lively.

With Don flying back and forth to try to salvage his now-destroyed marriage with Megan, Pete striking out on his own after splitting from his longtime wife Trudy (Alison Brie), and a rehash of an earlier plotline where a rival firm wants to buy and dissolve Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, Season 7 is still incredibly good, but it's simply not one of the show's very best seasons. Still, that last episode, "Person to Person," remains one of the best series finales in TV history.

The biggest flaw of Season 6 of "Mad Men," without question, is that Peggy Olson no longer works at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce — putting her at odds with our favorite ad men even when her firm Cutler Gleason Chaough merges its creative team with Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. There's also another issue, and her name is Sylvia. Even though Linda Cardellini is a venerated and genuinely phenomenal actress who makes pretty much every project better with her mere presence, the character of Sylvia Rosen, a neighbor with whom Don has a torrid affair right under Megan's nose, is simply underwritten. 

Don's obsession with her quite literally comes out of nowhere — in the season premiere "The Doorway," his affair with Sylvia is revealed at the very end, denying the audience the start of this doomed romance — and even though it's pretty easy to believe that any red-blooded man would fall in love with Cardellini, it stands in stark contrasts to Don's other romances, which all get some kind of origin story.

Season 6 is also plagued by both the reappearance of Duck and the mere existence of Ted Chaough (Kevin Rahm), Peggy's new boss and lover; still, it makes for pretty solid television, especially thanks to some particularly great line readings by Vincent Kartheiser (like a scene where he falls down Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce's stairs before screaming at Don over a business decision). Plus the season finale, "In Care Of," where Don takes his children to see the brothel in which he was raised, is one of the show's most essential hours.

Not many shows have a perfect pilot, but "Mad Men" does. "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes," the show's inaugural episode, is a masterclass in storytelling, beginning with an unforgettable scene where Don, drinking alone in a New York City bar, chats with a cigarette vendor about preferring the Lucky Strike brand. As it happens, Lucky Strike is a vital account for the firm that, at this point in the series, is just called Sterling Cooper ... and as Don and the gang pitch a new campaign for the cigarettes to Lucky Strike executives, they're grappling with the fact that the United States Surgeon General has officially called cigarettes dangerous. Throughout the pilot, Don spends time with his artist girlfriend Midge Daniels (Rosemarie DeWitt), giving us a huge plot twist when he heads home to Betty and his kids in the episode's closing moments.

Obviously, we meet all of the show's major players in the pilot, but this season really belongs to Peggy Olson, the new girl at Sterling Cooper who ends up determined to move beyond her role as Don's secretary. She eventually writes copy for lipsticks and weight-loss machines, even though her affair with Pete Campbell results in an uenxpected pregnancy that's revealed as Season 1 comes to a close. This is also where we learn, definitively, that Don is actually named Dick Whitman; while he was serving in Korea, he stole the dogtags of his deceased superior — the real Don — and changed his identity, something that won't be revealed to the rest of the characters for some time (save for Pete, who tries to use this to blackmail Don and fails). Season 1 of "Mad Men" is really great, but because it's busy establishing the world, it doesn't reach the height of some of the other seasons.

After the doldrums of Season 2, Season 3 of "Mad Men" is when the show goes from pretty good to becoming one of the greats — thanks in large part to the way the show uses real history to accent its narrative. Chiefly, part of the season focuses on the assassination of then President John F. Kennedy, letting all the characters we know and love grapple with a constantly changing world. This is also the season where Betty, fed up with Don's constant lies and affairs, makes an even more shocking discovery — his real identity, Dick Whitman — and officially asks to end their marriage, quickly finding a new husband to support her in Henry Francis (Christopher Stanley). 

We also get a major new cast member, Lane Pryce, played by Jared Harris — a London-based executive of Puttnam, Powell, and Lowe, the company that Sterling Cooper has merged with — who ends up relocating to New York to oversee things after one of his colleagues gets his foot torn off by a lawnmower during some in-office festivities. (That episode, "Guy Walks Into an Advertising Agency," proves that "Mad Men" can actually be funny even in its weirdest and darkest moments.)

After Don's new "friend" and major client Conrad Hilton (Chelcie Ross) ends up screwing him over, Don, Roger, Bert, and Lane strike out on their own, enlisting Pete, Joan, and Peggy to join them in their new firm. In the outstanding Season 3 finale "Shut the Door. Have a Seat," they assemble like Avengers and strike out on their own — and frankly, watching them build their own ad agency from the ground up is as thrilling as anything you'll see in a Marvel movie.

After the stunning events of Season 4 (which we'll circle back to), we kick off Season 5 of "Mad Men" with one of the show's funniest and most iconic segments — Megan Draper's impromptu rendition of "Zou Bisou Bisou" during a dinner party that humiliates Don and drives all of the other men in the room borderline mad with jealousy. The dynamic between Don and his young second wife Megan is just fascinating in general, thanks in large part to the crackling chemistry between Jon Hamm and Jessica Paré. As she becomes a copywriter under Peggy's tutelage, Don begins falling behind at work, with Bert accusing him of being too lovestruck to function. 

Season 5 also introduces one of the show's best and funniest characters, Ben Feldman's oddball creative Michael Ginsberg — who, incidentally, comes up with several pitches that help Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce survive — and is home to some of the show's most gutting episodes, especially the Joan-centric "The Other Woman" (which sees her making a deal with the devil to secure the Porsche account, as well as a partnership for herself) and "Commissions and Fees," where Lane makes a horrible and tragic choice. 

That's saying nothing of a heartbreaking arc centered around Pete, where he begins an affair with a housewife named Beth Dawes ("Gilmore Girls" veteran Alexis Bledel), whose husband ultimately arranges for her to receive electroshock therapy, forcing her to forget Pete entirely. Season 5 of "Mad Men" is a near-perfect season of television — and it's ultimately only outmatched by its immediate precedessor.

Season 4 of "Mad Men" isn't just the best season of this award-winning series; it might actually be one of the best seasons of television in the entire history of the medium. When we reconnect with Don after his divorce from Betty, he's at one of his lowest points, drinking too much and hiring sex workers as he struggles with addiction and loneliness; to try and help himself, he takes his children to meet Anna Draper (Melinda Page Hamilton), the widow of the real Don Draper and Don's closest friend in the world, in California. It's a good thing he does, too, because in the best-ever "Mad Men" episode, "The Suitcase" — a two-hander where Don and Peggy try to come up with a winning pitch for Samsonite luggage — Don finds out that Anna has died from cancer. 

After that, Don tries to better himself, drinking less and pursuing an adult relationship with Cara Buono's consultant Faye Miller ... but because Don is a creature of habit, he impulsively marries his secretary Megan Calvet instead of seeing things through with Faye. (In the aftermath, Faye gets one of the show's great lines, telling Don that she hopes Megan knows he "only likes the beginning of things.") Season 4 would probably take the top spot for "The Suitcase" alone, but the rest of the season — including plotlines where Peggy singlehandedly brings Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce back from the edge of ruin with a new account and Joan finally kicks her horrible husband Greg, easily one of the worst characters on "Mad Men," to the curb — are pretty spectacular too.

If you or anyone you know needs help with addiction issues or may be the victim of sexual assault, contact the relevant resources below:

• Visit the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration website or contact SAMHSA's National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).

• Visit the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network website or contact RAINN's National Helpline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).