Mad Men is my favorite short story collection

In its finest moments, the AMC drama has found the perfect balance between serialized and episodic storytelling

Vignettes like those found in “Far Away Places,” make Mad Men’s hour of TV stand on its own.
(Image credit: (Frank Ockenfels 3/AMC))

Neil Gaiman — as prolific a writer of short stories as any contemporary author — once described the medium as a vessel for "tiny windows into other worlds and other minds and other dreams."

That's an equally apt way to describe a single episode of television, which offers a similarly brief window into somewhere else. TV is inherently episodic, but streaming has pushed many shows toward hyper-serialization. If you picked a random episode of a show like The Sopranos or The Wire or Breaking Bad and pushed play, you'd be lost, like starting a book or a movie in the middle — and undoubtedly missing much of what made those shows great in the first place.

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Scott Meslow

Scott Meslow is the entertainment editor for TheWeek.com. He has written about film and television at publications including The Atlantic, POLITICO Magazine, and Vulture.