The final episodes of Mad Men are set to air in the Spring of 2015 so if you start now, you’ll have plenty of time to catch up on the first 7½ seasons before the second beginning of the end begins. I can tell you right now that it will take up a lot of time, every episode is at least 40 minutes, but it will be well worth your while. The show tells the story of the employees at a successful ad agency on Madison Avenue in the ‘60s. Although sometimes immoral, with multiple affairs, drinking in the office and a whole episode dedicated to illicit drugs, the show works to depict a clear picture of what life was like during the 1960s. One thing that I really admire about Mad Men is the care that the creators take in making the show as accurate as possible. From the outfits the characters wear to the popular culture in the workplace chatter, everything is as close possible to what life was really like, making the series an entertaining and provocative U.S. History lesson. Series creator Matthew Weiner explained in a Rolling Stone interview that it was a conscious decision to make the current events of the time a big part of the show.

“The world has been altered by various events that have happened in that 10-year period that we've tried to show on this show, whether it's the missile crisis or the JFK assassination or the riots or the Texas shooting, in Austin. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy being shot within months of each other, and reading in the paper at the time about this huge move for gun control that could have been printed yesterday, and nothing happened. Here we are, our episode airs and Sandy Hook happens, like, the next day. Those kinds of things are kind of what I'm telling on the show, is that we live in a violent country. That cyclical nature of history, and how human life, being a person, doesn't change. That's been a lot of the story of the show.”

Weiner does a fantastic job of recreating these events in the show better than a textbook by adding realistic reactions from the characters. This gives a better connection for those viewers (like me) that weren’t around when all of this was happening. For example, I knew that we landed on the moon, but I had no idea that it was such a big deal that people hosted moon-landing parties to watch it with friends like it was the Super Bowl.

Like other popular AMC series like The Walking Dead and Breaking Bad, Mad Men follows suit with cringe-worthy twists, turns and cliffhangers that will catch you by surprise and keep you wanting more. However, you can feel a little bit better about binge-watching it to avoid other tasks by using the excuse that it is an educational show, a refreshing history lesson about life in 1960s.